DEFINING THE PROBLEM One of our partners who manufactures agriculture equipment began to experience growing pains with a high-volume API platform. The platform had grown into a monolith that was making it increasingly difficult to tune performance and add new features. Source Allies was asked to provide guidance and technical...

“Decide as late as possible” On the surface this principle of Lean Software Development would seem to suggest that we, as engineers, should put off as many decisions as possible till the last moment. This seems counterintuitive, as creating a working piece of software requires a great deal of planning...

Vim in Ten Keys If you’re reading this, you’re curious about Vim. Maybe you’re a curious person. Maybe there’s some really annoying person on your team who will just not shut up about it, and you’re trying to placate them. Maybe you opened it by accident, can’t get out, and...

GraphQL: From Zero to Schema What is GraphQL? Why would I want to use it? At its core, GraphQL is a query language for an API, just as SQL is a query language for databases. What this means is that GraphQL is a specification that allows our clients to query...

Pro Tips for Onboarding a New Teammate Intro Last month’s blog post, Pro Tips for Joining a New Team, was from the perspective of the reader joining a team. But what if you’re a member of a team that is onboarding a new teammate? Look no further, we’ve got you...

DEFINING THE PROBLEM For farmers, planting seed can be a complex process entailing planning and forecasting. Many agriculture companies across the U.S. invest in technology with hopes of improving both the process and overall annual yield. Initiatives like this start with a comprehensive look at current processes and operations to...

The Community Taught Developer I do not have a formal education in Computer Science, nor did I attend a Coding Boot Camp. In fact, I took my first job as an application developer with the understanding that I had ZERO experience and we would be doing the “sink or swim”...

You’ll likely join a new team at some point in your career. For some, this can be an exciting opportunity. For others, joining a new team can bring nervousness and stress. During a lean-coffee style meeting at Source Allies, the small breakout group I joined wanted to get ideas and...

Seriously, I’m asking. I’m not writing this because I have the answer. I’m asking because I know there are qualities I appreciate in a teammate, but I’m only one person and my experience is different than yours. So, please, understand the asterisk applied to the title of this article. My...

What's the quickest and easiest way to deploy a serverless API to AWS? If you're an absolute expert in configuring and managing AWS API Gateway, then maybe it's by writing cloudformation templates and deploying your code. However, if you're like me and often want to spin up APIs quickly to...