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Life automation engineering In recent years I’ve spent more and more time trying to continuously optimize my daily routine. Fixing the pain points, and improving my productivity. At the end of the day, it’s all about freeing up more time and being able to focus more on what matters and what I like. As I was thinking about it, wrapping up 2022, I realized how aligned this life mindset is with my Automation engineering job’s principles. At the end of the day, my work is all about freeing up internal customers’ time so they can focus on where they provide the highest value (and of course by doing so, saving the company more money). ...

If you want to use the server starter directly without going through the tutorial, find the code on Github. Link to the next parts are at the bottom of this page. In Part I to III we built a generic server with the help of Koa.js, GraphQL, MongoDB and Docker. Let’s add some tests with Mocha to make sure we don’t introduce regressions when we add more code. Requirements: Understanding why testing is important (😉). ...

If you want to use the server starter directly without going through the tutorial, find the code on Github. Link to the next parts are at the bottom of this page. In Part I and II we didn’t write much code. Time to write some boilerplate code, and to make our first queries to the MongoDB database through the GraphQL API. There’s no easy way to proceed step by step with this chapter, but everything will make sense at the end. ...

If you want to use the server starter directly without going through the tutorial, find the code on Github. Link to the next parts are at the bottom of this page. In Part I we built a basic Koa.js server with Typescript and improved our workflows with some tooling. The next step would be to set up a database to store and retrieve data. We will use MongoDB, a NoSQL database. But we’d like to have a single and simple way to install it on each developer’s machine instead of relying on tedious manual configuration. We’d also like to make the installation process deterministic, with configuration stored in files instead of set by the OS itself (environment variables). ...

If you want to use the server starter directly without going through the tutorial, find the code on Github. Link to the next parts are at the bottom of this page. I recently needed to build a server for a side project. Building the foundation to provide generic features any server is expected to deliver ended up being a new side project by itself! Today there are many great tools to build a robust and versatile back-end, and plenty documentation available. However it is hard to find tutorials for building a generic back-end, with very little configuration needed to adapt it to any business application. It is also hard to find info about grouping all the different tools and frameworks needed together. This tutorial is nothing more than a summary of all the tribal knowledge spread out there. ...