I recently participated in an Office 365 hackathon where I worked alongside Christoph Körner to create an add-in for Microsoft Word that can convert a document to markdown format. The idea being that non-technical content creators can write content in an environment they’re familiar with and easily export it to a format suitable for GitHub, Bit Bucket, or to a blogging platform such as Ghost (side note: this blog is powered by Ghost, and this blog post was written with Microsoft Word and the plugin was used to convert it to markdown!).

It’s a concept I’ve seen mentioned or used in many server-side languages and examples, and the idea is a simple one: re-building the state of an object in memory through the events that we know have occurred. Despite it being an idea that is by no means new and one that seems quite popular in server side applications, it’s something that I’ve not really come across when the topic at hand is much more front-end oriented.

I was recently introduced to an excellent talk on unit testing (“TDD: Where did it all go wrong”- Ian Cooper) that made me re-think the way I’d been writing tests. I’m not going to repeat all of the main points of the talk ad verbatim, instead you should just go and watch it. ;) Seriously. The hour it takes to watch can easily be recouped in the more resilient tests that you’ll be writing.

I recently came across a library called Breeze, which (to sum up very briefly) is a client side JavaScript library that allows entity based data management; a kind of front-end ORM.