Colorkrew Blog

As the new year begins, I reflect on the last 8 months since my move to Japan; In that time, I have gotten to know my new colleagues better through a myriad of social activities held in Colorkrew’s office in the past year.

One of the most memorable events that I participated in was the Welcome Party, where we welcomed new members to the team through a host of food, drinks and fun activities. One Colorkrewer brought a portable Takoyaki grill and started a makeshift Takoyaki party; Another built a Japanese and English word guessing game, and we enjoyed a few rounds of friendly competition and laughter over the games. Through the event, I was able to catch my first real glimpse of Colorkrew’s informal work culture, where we are able to speak to anyone in the company regardless of their title or designation.

For many software engineers, endpoints for retrieving a list of entities are probably their favorite to implement–all they need to do is build an SQL statement that grabs all the available items, along with some other minor tasks. It’s all fun and games until the number of entities in the database becomes a bottleneck, where each GET request returns tens of thousands of items. You start to see server-side logs bombarded with error messages highlighted in red. Your dear users, previously satisfied with your application, begin to complain about the increasingly lackluster performance. Your product manager is on the brink of losing it and taking out their frustration on you. What?! You say you want to prevent all this from happening? Pagination is what you need! It can drastically improve your endpoints’ performance and save your servers from overload. Today, I will define pagination and introduce the most common pagination techniques.

Recently, I joined a new project at Colorkrew that uses Golang as its backend language. Almost everyone on the team, including myself, had no experience with Golang, so we had to start from zero. Learning Golang has been a rewarding experience so far. After all, it is one of the most in demand programming languages now. However, writing code in Golang is not all sunshine and roses. Unopinionated as I am, I still have my fair share of complaints, the biggest being the recommended way of error handling in Golang.

Many frontend engineers probably have experienced the head-scratching moment when their React components become so gigantic that they keep losing their train of thought when navigating through their frontend code. To salvage readability, one of the most common practices is to split up the humongous React components into smaller pieces. Traditionally, they would do this by chopping up the JSX elements. This method can effectively improve the readability of React components whose sole responsibility is to display data. However, on top of displaying data, some React components are also responsible for retrieving data from the backend. The more effective way to make such React components readable is to separate them into Containers and Views. In this article, I will demonstrate how to divide a React component into a Container and a View based on the principle of separation of concerns.

Throughout my life I been captivated by many forms of fictional media. But in my career as a visual designer in the technical field, nothing offers greater inspiration than science fiction.

To explain why it’s so important to me personally, it helps to establish a few things about my background…

It is almost impossible for a backend engineer to be oblivious to RESTful API in the 21st century, as it is one of the most popular API types. We can mostly attribute its popularity to its scalability, flexibility, and simplicity, all of which are highly sought-after qualities in modern APIs. If you also find these qualities desirable, you should consider building APIs following the RESTful principles. In this article, I will explain what counts as a RESTful API and demonstrate how to design one from scratch.

The days and weeks leading up to my first day at Colorkrew I was of course brimming with excitement, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. It would be my first time living outside of my home country in a place that I’d only ever been to once for a week long trip 4 years ago. A place where people spoke a language that I had been self studying for the past half year or so but still didn’t have a grasp on. A place halfway across the world from my family and friends who it’d be hard to talk to because of the difference in time zone. A place where I didn’t have any friends yet.

The first programming paradigm that most programmers in the 21st century learn is probably Object Oriented Programming (or OOP for short). Object Oriented Programming allows us to transform real-world entities into highly abstract models with descriptive properties and executable methods to simulate their behaviors in the real world. Despite its numerous advantages, such as readability, reusability, and maintainability, it also introduces immense complexity to state management. The difficulty in keeping track of the states of objects has led head-scratching exhausted programmers to churn out error-prone code and cause bugs that would take hours, or even days, to locate and fix. “Is there a way out of this undesirable situation,” you might ask. Here is the good news: a lesser-known yet widely-used programming paradigm called Functional Programming (or FP for short) can help turn the tide around and decrease the number of bugs we cause. In this article, I will explain what Functional Programming is and why it can help us avoid bugs.

Incorporating OAuth (short for Open Authorization) into an application might seem somewhat intimidating and disheartening for many entry-level software engineers. After all, they need to spend hours—or even days—implementing a complicated authentication process with the correct configuration, only to realize they have merely completed a tiny feature. Despite all the hard work it entails, OAuth is a safe and efficient way for users to grant websites and applications access to their personal information. Therefore, it is worth the effort to comprehend how OAuth works. In this article, I will break down all the steps involved in the OAuth process to help you kick-start your OAuth journey.

Hello, I’m Bryan and a little over three months ago I moved to Japan from Scotland to join Colorkrew’s design team!

When I was a child I played with Lego for hours. These simple bricks brought so much joy to this future designer.

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This messy pile has endless potential, with just a little imagination.

Dear Diary – An opportunity

In October 2022, I embarked on my journey to Japan as a Japanese Language School student with the aim of starting anew in my professional career and evaluating my comfort level for potentially living here for the next decade. At that time, my proficiency in Japanese was limited to JLPT N4 certification, barely allowing me to engage in conversations or read signboards. Nevertheless, I felt optimistic about my upcoming Japanese Language education. 

This Developer Camp holds a special place in my heart as it was my inaugural experience attending a developer camp. Set against the picturesque coastline of Enoshima, Japan, this camp combined technical presentations, team activities, and beachside brainstorming sessions.

Day 1: Arrival, Introductions, and Technical Insights:

We arrived at Ofuna station, did a quick grocery trip to stock up. then, we made our way to the accomodation located by the ocean in Enoshima. The first order of business was the introductory presentations. We had two sessions lined up. - 1st presentation allowed each participant to introduce themselves and share their background, fostering a sense of familiarity and camaraderie within the group. - 2nd presentation focused on technical topics, encouraging us to explore innovative ways to enhance our product or delve into any other relevant technical subject.

If you became a frontend engineer after 2015, chances are that you have used or at least heard about Promise. As I have covered in my previous blog, Promise can help us specify sequential relations between operations in asynchronous programming in a readable and maintainable manner. Promise object in JavaScript has methods, such as then and catch, that can help us organize the sequential execution of operations in a pattern called Promise Chaining. Clean and organized as Promise Chaining is, some people—especially those more accustomed to synchronous programming—find it unintuitive and confusing. Lucky for them, ECMAScript 2017 introduced a new feature that allows us to write asynchronous code as if it were synchronous. This new feature consists of two keywords: async and await. In this article, I will cover the fundamentals of async/await and how to transition from Promise Chaining to using async/await.

As I sit here reflecting on my first three months at Colorkrew, I am filled with excitement for what the future holds. I joined the Biz team in January 2023.

From day one, I was welcomed with open arms by my friendly coworkers and immediately felt a sense of belonging that was amplified by the fact that software that we developing is also the one we use in our everyday work. I knew I had made the right choice in joining this amazing team.