Behind the Scenes
Since the beginning of my internship at Lucid, I have had great experiences thanks to the great number of activities the company offers to all employees, including interns—we’ve been on hikes, a company retreat, and even a rodeo. One of my favorites, however, was Lucid’s hackathon. What is a Hackathon? Lucid’s…
This year at Lucid, we ran our first-ever Code Kerfuffle: an open coding competition consisting of two stages. The first stage was a traditional algorithmic competition administered over the Internet. Of the hundreds of people who entered the first round, 32 finalists were invited to an in-person final round where…
Lucid has hosted multiple programming competitions and is about to host our biggest one yet in March—Code Kerfuffle—with $50,000 in prizes. Here are some things I’ve learned from helping plan and run Lucid’s programming competitions. 1. Define your purpose The first thing to keep in mind when planning competitions is…
In this week’s post, we’d like to take a step back from our usual topics and provide a brief history lesson from one of our resident engineers-slash-aspiring-anthropologists. Original source. “Agile” development was a peculiar sport played by “software engineers,” a type of indentured servant who made their living by tapping…
Why JSON isn’t a Good Configuration Language Many projects use JSON for configuration files. Perhaps the most obvious example is the package.json file used by npm and yarn, but there are many others, including CloudFormation (originally JSON only, but now supports YAML as well) and composer (PHP). However, JSON is…
Last summer a team of engineers converted our front-end code from Closure-annotated JavaScript to TypeScript, you can read about it here. It has been a long journey to take that converted code that was smattered with anys and turn it into idiomatic and type-safe TypeScript. The strict compiler flags have…
Remember writing a detailed lab report or paper in school? We’ve all been there, and I doubt many of us really enjoyed it. Process and product development documentation can leave that same sour taste in your mouth if it’s just documentation for the sake of documentation. Documentation can take hours…
The perfect cross-platform solution. The Holy Grail. The El Dorado of app development. The dream that multiple languages have promised, but none have delivered. As we speak, there are likely a dozen cross-platform projects in the R&D phase—all with a couple years worth of funding and all being built with…