Source Allies, like many organizations, has several AWS environments. In addition to production we also have a dev and a qual environment. An application deployed to all three environments will be running three copies of its infrastucture. If that architecture includes RDS databases, EC2 instances, ECS tasks, or other compute...

One of the main advantages of choosing a micro-service architecture for the services that back a company’s web application is to allow multiple teams to independently own components of the system. These components can choose different tech stacks, architecture choices, and deploy features and updates on different schedules. When it...

Do you remember the first time a feature in an application surprised you? Have you ever thought, “Wow, that’s actually making my life easier?” I remember the first time I clicked on a phone number while browsing a website on a mobile phone and it opened the dialer. “All I...

Summary: Why should we bake accessibility into the digital products we build? It’s the right thing to do Provides a better user experience for EVERYBODY, disability or not Increases mobile usability Improves a site’s SEO ranking Protects our partners from litigation It’s the direction the world is headed Back in...

One of our partners, a large manufacturing company, identified a need to create a mobile application that would be utilized by their internal sales and support staff. They turned to Source Allies to build this mobile application for them not only to solve a pain point they were having but...

Recently Akrem and Erick presented Consulting 101, an annual presentation delivered at a Source Allies University event. We are publishing a three-part blog series that is a distillation of that presentation; Agile Crash Course, Team Dynamics, and Partner Dynamics. Part 3: Partner Dynamics When we work with our partners, our...

Recently Akrem and Erick presented Consulting 101, an annual presentation delivered at a Source Allies University event. We are publishing a three-part blog series that is a distillation of that presentation; Agile Crash Course, Team Dynamics, and Partner Dynamics. Part 2: Team Dynamics Successful teams are the ones that understand,...

Recently Akrem and Erick presented Consulting 101, an annual presentation delivered at a Source Allies University event. We are publishing a three-part blog series that is a distillation of that presentation; Agile Crash Course, Team Dynamics, and Partner Dynamics. Motivation Here at Source Allies, we want to set our teams...

Vim in Twelve More Keys This is part 2 in a series on vim. I recommend you read the first part here. Last time we covered how to get work done in vim. If you used the tips from last time, you’re probably already faster than you were with your...

A Fortune 500 financial services partner wanted to transform their future actuarial community, re-engineer and automate manual workflows, and modernize technology tools to gain a competitive position in the market. We began with a customer-focused approach. Because the end-users consisted of the actuarial community and resident data scientists, we first...