Blog Insights

In a previous article we discussed some of the positive characteristics of microservices that we've found while implementing them in a production setting. Two of the primary benefits we discussed are the architectural agility and enforcement of api boundaries. While you may find those and many more benefits from using microservices, you will also find that the positives don't...

A recent topic grabbing the stage in the software community is the use of Microservice Architectures. Microservice architectures are often sold as a great way to enhance a project's agility over a standard, monolithic architecture. While this can certainly be the case, and there are indeed many benefits from using microservices, the...

Motivated by the introduction of Lambdas in Java 8, I wrote a couple of examples to see how difficult it would be to follow a functional programming paradigm in real production code. I will demonstrate using some features from Java 8 with a simple and fun example. The application basically gets the...

During my career, I've worked at various organizations that had different stances toward open source frameworks and tools. Some of these organizations absolutely did not want  anything open source near their code base. Others had a small set of "blessed" open source frameworks we were allowed to use. Some of...

Java is an object oriented (OO) language. It internally embraces the best practices commonly accepted in OO programming. During this article we will be addressing two of the key concepts of OOP, Encapsulation and Inheritance. So let’s get started. What is the core defining concept of any OO language? The creation...

Recently I started to use a more minimally-responsive CSS framework called Neat, since I was unhappy with the total offerings of so many others. This article will explain how to start using the basics of Neat in order to better understand how the framework works before using it in projects. Before...

I convinced a partner to upgrade the computers we were using for software development. Maybe this article will help you convince your manager to do the same! The cost for this improvement was $2,500 - $1,700 = $800. If you assume a developer has a $75,000 salary, it would take...

Now that you have already learned jQuery, let's unlearn it and get back to the basics. In this article, we will quickly go over the most common things that jQuery is currently used for and convert them to pure javascript. jQuery is a great tool and contains polyfills that are beneficial....

This is an interesting question. Let’s think of it this way: Does a carpenter only use one type of saw? Does a mechanic only have one type of wrench? No. In short the answer is, as craftsmen of code, we are only as good as the tools that we know...

In the everyday world, it's usually a good thing to have what you need ahead of time, even if there's a possibility of never using it: I'm going to school, better pack my books; I'm taking a flight this afternoon, better bring some earplugs; I'm going to a meeting, better...