Vail Systems - Feb 2021
Tags: vail, remote, blog
Published: 2021-03-07 02:53:54


_Cross posted on [my website](https://mitchinson.dev/vail-feb-2021)_

What I've been doing at [Vail Systems](https://www.vailsys.com/) for the month of February.

## What I've worked on

- Custom theming: Account specific client theming in Material UI
- Custom terminology in AWS Translate
- Using Kibana to create dashboards with KQL to analyze API performance.
- Using Nock with Cucumber to programmatically mock external calls
- Started learning about the advantages of Snowpack and ESModules

## What I've Learned (Technical)

#### Mocking external API calls

Nock is a great library, but I'm looking forward to
[MSW](https://github.com/mswjs/msw) growing. I'd be curious how they handle node API mocking + recording. I don't think Nock is as full of a replacement of VCR for ruby.

## What I've Learned (Personal)

#### Break down problems into a confined example

We had an issue using decorators with nestjs modules, and in order to ask for help, I made a smaller reproducible example of the issue. This ended up being a sort of "rubber duck", and helped me arrive at the solution myself. I'd like to continue approaching problems with this style.

#### Company Technology Channels

Being distributed, it's hard to have conversations about specific software and tooling when I'm not sure who to talk to. I'd like to help implement specific channels dedicated to specific tools. a "cypress" channel and a "rust" channel, anything anyone can think of. This way devs can pick and choose what to be a part of, and share knowledge across teams. I suggested this and will be following up to see if there's anything I can do to help.

## What I'd like to improve (Technical)

#### sorry-cypress

I want to investigate using `sorry-cypress` for better metrics + parallelization in our k8s setup. The developer experience of cypress is fantastic, but our build time is reaching an average of 30 minutes 😔

#### Stop reading + start trying

Often I'm reading about new tools / figuring out how something could work, but not as often do I add the dependency to a throwaway branch and experiment. I'd feel a lot more confident breaking down new technical challenges if I had previously experimented more.

## What I'd like to improve (Personal)

#### Write as you learn

I hoped to put up two smaller blog posts about some TS examples I found interesting and wanted to share, but I can't remember half of what I wanted to note down now that it's been a few weeks. Going forward I'd like to a small technical post as I'm finishing it up.

#### Pace yourself (Pomodoro)

I find myself working intensely for hours, and feeling burnt out toward the end of the day. I'd like to work on restricting myself to blocks of time so that I still have the energy to take on new things at the end of the day.

## Resources found / Articles I liked:

- [https://www.snowpack.dev/tutorials/react](https://www.snowpack.dev/tutorials/react)
- [https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1368277175598735366?s=20](https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1368277175598735366?s=20)

## Posts of Mine

#### Accessing private values of a class within a method decorator

https://repl.it/@bmitchinson/decorator#index.ts