Blog post on Thinking in LoopBack (Best Practices)

[dhmlau]

Per our discussion yesterday, it would be useful to have a blog post on Best Practices Thinking in LoopBack See also: https://github.com/strongloop/loopback-next/issues/638

We want to publicize the fact that we do have a Best Practices sections in our documentation, so that LoopBack users know they should be looking for it.

The blog post should not be duplicating the content from the docs, because the post will stay frozen (and get outdated), but the docs will evolve to match the latest practices. We are thinking about a single blog post.

The goal is to raise the interest of our users and blog readers in the Best Practices section we wrote for them!

No docs changes should be necessary.

[bajtos]

Removing from MVP, it does not make much sense to preach best practices when the framework is not stable and feature-complete enough yet.

[bajtos]

During estimation, we were arguing what's the best time for publishing such blog post. @b-admike and myself are arguing for publishing it soon after MVP, so that people experimenting with our new version understand the way how we like them to build their apps. @virkt25 is arguing that it may be too early because the best practices may scare them away, and we should aim this blog post for Core GA release.

[dhmlau]

Just my 2 cents...

I agree that this is not MVP, i.e. this task not being tagged with MVP label. However, I tend to agree with @b-admike and @bajtos for having the blog post ~soon after MVP~ before GA. Our goal of MVP is to have a decent code base for application developers to start trying out LoopBack 4. It is true that we usually don't need best practices to "play around", but it might provide some guidelines / references to users what they can start considering in the early stage.

[dhmlau]

Remove from LoopBack 4 MVP release as this is marked as non-MVP.

[jannyHou]

@strongloop/sq-lb-apex @bajtos @hacksparrow @raymondfeng As we are approaching GA, I believe now it's a good time to revisit this issue. Are we going to publish a blog for "Best Practices" before GA?

My take would be a concise blog announces given all the new features we've been built, "Best Practice" is a guide about applying them in the suggested way and about how to create a LB4 app from scaffolding it to properly testing it. Pretty much the same as @dhmlau post in issue description.

thought?

[dhmlau]

Not sure how much is this blog still needed for GA, and what the content would be given that docs is in placed already.

[bajtos]

This is what the issue description says about the motivation to write the post:

We want to publicize the fact that we do have a Best Practices sections in our documentation, so that LoopBack users know they should be looking for it. (...) The goal is to raise the interest of our users and blog readers in the Best Practices section we wrote for them!

The post can be short and can build on the following ideas:

• LoopBack is a powerful and flexible framework. As a result, there are many ways how to accomplish the desired result when building an application or an extension.
• In LB 3.x, users were looking for our guidance to help them better understand what works and what does not.
• In LB 4.0, we started to document best practices early on.
• Automated testing one of the most important areas that we see being neglected, both in LoopBack applications out there and our documentation too.
• To fix that, we created two guides: "Best Practices" aiming at application developers and "Extending LoopBack" aiming at extension developers.
• We started by taking a high-level look at why to test and how to test well and summarized our opinions in "Defining your testing strategy"
• The page "Testing your application" contains a lot of hands-on advice on a wide range of areas, from project setup and data handling to examples of unit, integration and acceptance tests for various application artifacts like controllers and repositories.
• Developers wishing to extend LoopBack should read "Extending LoopBack", which not only provides examples showing how an extension can contribute different artifacts, but also offers advice on writing a robust test suite in "Testing your extension".

I don't have a strong opinion on whether this should be GA or post-GA. Considering that we don't have any posts scheduled for the next few weeks (IIRC), I think it would be good to publish this one just to keep our audience engaged.

[b-admike]

This is labelled as a stretch goal for our October Milestone. We should consider making it as part of our goals for November IMO (unless someone takes it up and finishes this month, which would be awesome).

[bajtos]

I should be able to write the post by the end of October.

[dhmlau]

Blog post PR has merged. Closing it as done.