Insights from our community of experts on a variety of topics including software development, project management, design, and hiring.
Although the fundamental principles of software development have remained the same for decades, technology is always changing with new ideas, libraries, and tools arising every day, making it that much more important to keep up-to-date.
Will learning to speak a new language make you a better developer? What if we told you it can reshape how your brain works, enhancing both your soft skills as well as your technical capabilities? Read about some of the benefits of language acquisition....
Whether you have an opportunity lined up or are merely considering a career change, you’ll need to know how to properly prepare for technical interviews. Not only are you competing against the test, but also the other applicants who are taking it, so it is essential to stand out and perform...
Knowing how much to charge can be a challenge for freelancers, especially if you are new to the industry. In this guide, we share how to work out an ideal rate that reflects your experience and skill level for new clients....
If you are looking to work as a remote freelancer through Scalable Path, completing your profile is the best way to get noticed and increase your chances of being matched with client projects. Here’s how to get started....
Chef has been popularized by big companies such as Facebook and Airbnb, but you don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company to benefit from it. In fact, you can easily start with just a few servers and use the free version of Chef....
We all know that it’s hard to find good people, but hiring talent is only one aspect of what it takes to form a successful team. The world of software development is populated by many passionate and knowledgeable individuals; however, such ability is not always accompanied by the strongest of interpersonal skills. Rockstar developers may have the ability to be productive when working individually on&...
The demand for freelance software developers is at an all-time high, making it especially difficult to find and hire the best people right now. Needless to say, getting the right people onto your team is a necessary challenge, and it all boils down to the effectiveness of your hiring strategy.
There are many types of documentation in the software world. Of these, technical documentation is one of the most frequently neglected....
Bringing a new remote developer onto your team can be a challenging experience for everyone involved. Getting accustomed to a change in team dynamics, a new work environment and company culture, and establishing clear communication and expectations take time, organization and a great onboarding process. Yet, companies often don’t have formal remote onboarding procedures defined, which results in many developers being poorly inducted into projects&...
Latin America has entered the global competition of technical talent in recent years and for good reason. With thriving tech industries, large talent pools and proximity to the US, the region offers many benefits for those looking to extend their software teams....
At Scalable Path we recommend following the Scrum methodology. Improving this process within the development team is something that is frequently thought about, but it’s also important to consider how a client, who often has the key role of the the Product Owner, can play their part more effectively within the team. One of the more important scrum roles is that of the Product Owner&...
One of the most important things to focus on before building a mobile application is what architecture you will use. Given the options available in 2021, how do you choose the right one for your Android project?...
Throughout my career working as a UI/UX designer, it has been a challenge to explain my profession to non-tech people. My reasoning for this is two-fold. For one, it can be difficult to explain because there is a common misconception that software is only made by engineers, and so, the role of a designer is relegated to digital marketing and aesthetics. The second reason is…
These days, developers that write all their own code are rare, and with good reason. Why reinvent the wheel when you can find well written, and well supported, third-party libraries that will help build products faster? Inserting other people’s code into your project does throw up some issues, including the need to effectively manage all of these various libraries. A role commonly filled by dependency managers….
Choosing between a SQL vs NoSQL database is now an important technological decision for app developers, and recognizing when to use one over the other is an important skill to have. Beyond that, the choice of which type of database to use can determine whether a project will run smoothly or experience technical difficulties as it grows. Understanding the technical principles behind the two classes of databases and what sets them apart will help inform our future decisions.
Knowing how to interview remote software engineers effectively is a critical step in choosing the right candidate to join your company. Hiring the wrong candidate can set your project back, eat into your bottom line, and frustrate your team. Here’s our step-by-step guide to conducting effective hiring interviews.
Companies are now prioritizing cost-efficiency and agility as their top business objectives to stay ahead of constantly evolving requirements and maintain a competitive edge. For many, staff augmentation services may be a solution to help meet these goals.
In 2021, Scalable Path made the decision to donate 10% of our profits to fight climate change. In this article, I’d like to share how and why we came to this decision in order to provoke others to think about doing something similar. Our decision to start donating was inspired in part by Sam Harris’ conversation with philosopher and ethicist William McAskill, about effective altruism…
One of the most important things you can do when approaching a data science project is really understand the dataset you’re working with as a first step. Without a proper data exploration process in place, it becomes much more challenging to identify critical issues or successfully carry out a deeper analysis of the dataset. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) in Data Science is a step in&...
Estimating is, by definition, a guess about the future. The fact is that the majority of software projects aren’t delivered on time, run over budget, and end up with fewer features than originally planned. Over the past 10 years, we’ve developed a methodology...
In a rapidly growing freelance industry, a job description is still the best way to find the right candidate. It’s how you write them that has changed. Here’s how to create a job description that gets noticed by...
Aside from being a top 25 US-based Unicorn, what do Instacart, Doordash, Airbnb, and SpaceX all have in common? They use Python. Far-reaching versatility has been a long-time factor in the language’s popularity, but what really what makes Python such a valuable development tool? Read more about Python and why it continues to trend upwards, taking place as the most popular programming language of the year.
The best developers don’t just write solid code but have important intangible traits that set them apart from the...
Here are the guiding principles behind Agile’s ideology that help teams become more flexible, speed up the development process, and bring products to market faster....
Java has been kicking it for over 20 years in the world of web development, but what is its current popularity status amidst the rise of dynamic languages? Full-stack developer Nicolae tackles this question by explaining how Java is architecturally inclined toward scalability and isn’t going away anytime soon.
There is a divide among the front-end community right now when it comes to Tailwind CSS. From people madly in love with it claiming that “it fixes CSS” to those who discard it as “just abstracted inline styles”, It would seem that no month can go by on Tech Twitter without a flame war about Tailwind. This article goes beyond the arguments of the framework itself and unpacks the deeper conversations at the heart of the debate.
Kotlin is hot right now, but is all the hype justified? We asked mobile expert Abdu Adilovic to see how it measured up against the ever-popular Java. Here are some of the issues he finds with Java and how Kotlin offers solutions to all of them.
.NET has become the framework of choice for millions of developers around the world, equipping them to create solid applications for any platform, and Microsoft has done an impressive job making top-notch tools to support them.
The data preprocessing phase is the most challenging and time-consuming part of data science, but it’s also one of the most important parts. If you fail to clean and prepare the data, it could compromise the model. When dealing with real-world data, Data Scientists will always need to apply some preprocessing techniques in order to make the data more usable. These techniques will facilitate its use in machine learning (ML) algorithms, reduce the complexity to prevent overfitting, and result in a better model.
Applications are being built, shipped and updated at an increasingly fast pace. This trend has generated interest in solutions that will help facilitate this complex process. The result is a flood of new methodologies and tools into the DevOps space. In this article, I will focus on one of these tools: Docker. More specifically, Docker on Windows, along with a sample application in ASP.NET. The AWS…
Back in the early 2000s, the applications built with .NET were aimed exclusively for Windows desktop and the framework itself was strictly developed and maintained in a closed source format. However, with the introduction of .NET Core, Microsoft made a complete shift and revolutionized software development.
As JavaScript projects become more complex, new tools and practices arise to improve code quality and workflows. In addition to unit testing, static type checkers such as TypeScript and Flow are becoming the norm among professional development teams. Regardless of project size, the benefits of making code more comprehensible while also catching errors during the development phase have proved invaluable. As a result, the question…
In an era where everyone is looking at performance, accessibility, and developer experience, there’s a new contender in the JavaScript ecosystem that promises to deliver all of these through a radical new approach to building apps: Svelte....
We’ve all been there: you clone a repository, run your project and… nothing happens. Well, nothing but a series of errors; from missing files to compiler warnings. You seek some advice and ask your co-worker: “I just cloned the repo, but nothing seems to work and the readme file is blank. Do you know what’s going on?”. That’s when you hear it. The most...
Scrum is perfect for small, remote teams working on complex software products. But its rapid rise in popularity has meant that Agile Project Management with Scrum it is often not fully understood, even by those who have been exposed to it. In this series, I hope to clear up some of the confusion around terminology, while providing a clear framework on how we implement Scrum…...
Any aspiring product owner looking to build a great software product could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed. A quick Google search turns up a lot of conflicting, dated examples for a product requirements document. People used to follow Waterfall model and define everything their software would do at the outset (think bloated Use Cases and UML diagrams). We don’t want to waste precious time trying&...
Launching new products and services is a risky endeavor. It’s hard to know whether your idea will take off. Deciding on what features to add is challenging as well since you lack user feedback. Whether you’ve secured funding or are simply investing your own time, it’s stressful thinking about when — and if — your efforts will eventually pay off. The fact that...
Imagine you’re scrolling down a very long screen (this is a common situation with Privacy Policies). As you scroll down the ‘Accept’ button scrolls off the screen. This is a short but helpful Android Tutorial for fixing this UX problem. I will show you how to place the button in an alternative position: the bottom of the screen. When the original button reappears, the button at the bottom…...
We focus on processes to effectively and efficiently develop digital products. One of our processes is using Agile Development, which includes using Agile Points to assign a common definition to the effort required to complete tasks. In this post, we’ll focus on the modified Fibonacci Sequence – 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc – as an exponential complexity scale (good discussion on…...
The freelance economy continues to outgrow even the most optimistic estimates. The latest research states that, within the next decade, freelancers could actually be the largest group in the US workforce! Currently, the 57 million freelancers contribute $1.4 trillion to the economy. A jump of 30% since 2016. If we extrapolate this to a global workforce, there are millions of people willing to work within distributed teams…...
Jira, Asana and Basecamp have become popular task managers because of their versatility. But when your business belongs to a specific industry with specific needs, a catch-all solution is rarely optimal. Here are 4 vital questions that will help you find the best fit project management tool for your software development team – whether you are work with a start up or a large corporation….
Selecting the correct technology stack can make or break a project. Sometimes, the desire to use the next ‘hot’ technology leads stakeholders (both technical and non-technical) to make unwise decisions in this department. Twitter is a high profile example of this phenomenon. In 2010, the social giant shipped a new Single Page Application (SPA) architecture that pushed all the UI rendering and logic to client-side JavaScript….
Have you heard about GraphQL? Facebook open-sourced it in 2015 and I believe it is a much better way to establish contracts between a client and a server than REST. If, like me, you are always searching for the easiest way to develop and maintain code, this GraphQL Tutorial is for you. In this article we will: Give a brief introduction to GraphQL Show the…
Imagine you’re on a call, discussing the latest app designs when you notice that not everyone is working from the latest design file you sent. Their version has different color buttons and the wrong copy. “Wait a minute, let me resend it” you say, and open your ‘Mocks’ folder. In it, you’re greeted by a long list of elaborately named files where, after previewing...
Applications are being built, shipped and updated at an increasingly fast pace. It’s a trend that has generated interest in solutions to facilitate this complex process. The result has been a flood of new methodologies and tools into the DevOps space. In this article, I will focus on two of these tools: Docker and Docker Compose. More specifically, using them on Linux to build an API…
Blockchain technology has been in the news a lot this past year, with the tech press eager to explain how it’s the ‘real innovation’ behind Bitcoin. This revelation won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the money, though. The litmus test for any upcoming technology is to look at the private equity flowing into it, and VC investment has been...
I first started working with iOS fresh out of university. Working with an unfamiliar platform and programming language was challenging. What really made me nervous, was the designs coming from the creative team. I know a great design can breathe new life into a website, but unique high concept designs often require the creation of iOS custom views in UIKit. As a new developer (that…
As business logic increasingly moves to the front-end, more and more technologies are moving with the trend. In this article, we’ll explore how microservice architecture – typically associated with backend development – is now available for front-end developers. I’ll explain the theory of micro frontends through a real-world example. This way, I can easily flag the advantages and common issues faced by you guys: the…
Clocking in at over 20 years old, JavaScript is one of the elder statesmen of the programming world. It’s also, according to developer community HackerRank, 2018’s most popular programming language. This longevity, driven by continued demand for web apps, has put the spotlight on JavaScript’s inherent limitations. JavaScript has been adding more features to remedy its growing pains. They recently added new ways to import…
A good idea can become a spoiled mess if you use the wrong approach to realize it. Software development is no exception, and broadening your knowledge of Agile processes not only helps keep a project from spoiling but also serves as a powerful tool for your organization. Enter Kanban, the visual, tactile way to coordinate a workflow and reduce waste while maximizing efficiency. Using simple…...
Over the years, software teams have had to learn how to evolve with their changing industry, not only with emerging architectures, technologies, and frameworks, but with newer approaches to development altogether, like Continuous Deployment. In this agile movement that we find ourselves in, the ultimate goal is to minimize the time between the moment we take on a task and the time we release it…...
A few years ago, the concept of Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) was born. This new development allowed the web to do things that were previously limited to native apps, like working offline, sending push notifications, or being installed to the home screen. These advances have simplified the process of cross-platform development while still allowing for the production of robust apps. In this article, I’ll explain…
Project managers have always had a complicated relationship with testing. In the early days, it was considered a necessary evil that slowed the release process – but saved money in the long term. Technology has moved on since those days so, in the age of mobile development, is testing (and in particular unit testing) still the universal panacea it once was? It’s not just managers&...
Every new developer learns the following core principles of software engineering early in their career: DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) This acronym encourages developers to avoid code duplication and focus on configurable and reusable components. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) Always aim for simplicity in your design by avoiding over-engineered solutions. YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It) Focus on your current requirements, don’t try to...
Remember how basic the Facebook status update used to be? Now, that same space contains an array of sophisticated text styling options that let users fully express what’s on their minds. This evolution has been driven by rich-text editors like Quill, which allow visitors to fully customize their content: from embedding photos and videos to adding emoticons. In this article, I’ll share a step by step…
As artificial intelligence, or AI, increasingly becomes a part of our everyday lives, the need for understanding the systems behind this technology as well as their failings, becomes equally important. It’s simply not acceptable to write AI off as a foolproof black box that outputs sage advice. In reality, AI can be as flawed as its creators, leading to negative outcomes in the real world&...
Mobile applications have traditionally been written in native languages. Lately, however, hybrid cross-platform frameworks have been gaining market share. The recent swell of React Native’s popularity has raised the question: should developers use React Native or native for mobile app development?...
Working remotely is on the rise not just because it’s more cost-effective, but because of its clear benefits to productivity and increased access to talent. The leap from in-house to a remote workforce can be unnerving for many, but embracing a few key ideas can smooth the transition.
