Scalable Path Blog Articles

ChatGPT has quickly become a go-to tool in the world of AI since its launch. And it’s easy to see why: ChatGPT can generate cohesive, grammatically correct written content based on prompts, translate text, write code, and perform countless useful tasks for marketers, developers, and data analysts. In the first five days after its launch, over a million users had already used ChatGPT to answer…

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. Learn best techniques to prepare and clean the data so you don’t compromise the ML model.

Discover how implementing a collaboration process improves the handoff between design and development teams.

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….

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

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.

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.

Entrepreneurs have long been familiar with the idea of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The idea, introduced by Eric Ries in his famous book The Lean Startup, provides a scientific approach to building a working product with the most important features to launch something in a market.  The idea is most commonly thought of in the context of an idea-stage startup, where founders can validate…

Since 2021, Scalable Path made the decision to donate 10% of our profits to climate change. And as of Spring 2022, we are officially a carbon-neutral company. You can read more about why we choose to donate to organizations like these and what we aim to achieve through strategic giving.

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.

Product Owners are one of the most important roles in a product team. The Product Owner represents the business, customers, and/or users, and guides the team toward building the right product (not just any product).   In order to be an effective Product Owner, you first and foremost must be willing to put in the time to do the job well. Beyond that, learning how to…

Learning how to use ChatGPT as a coding tool.

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&

Since its release, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Seemingly out of nowhere, we had a computational system so effective that it could generate human language and dialogue good enough to pass expert evaluation tests like the bar or medical exams.  One of the reasons ChatGPT became so popular is the simplicity of the user experience. It allows users to access the power of…

This blog post was inspired by an episode of the Jess Get Hired podcast, where Damien Filiatrault, CEO and Founder of Scalable Path, shares his valuable insights and experiences in the remote talent industry. Since founding Scalable Path in 2010, the company has amassed a freelance network of over 30,000 software developers in 178 countries. Podcast Technology is constantly evolving. Because of the growth of…

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

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?

Should you choose Flutter or React Native for your next project? Here’s how these frameworks compare for cross-platform development.

Clocking in at over 20 years old, JavaScript is one of the elder statesmen of the programming world. It’s also, according to the developer community HackerRank, 2023’s top five 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…

We focus on processes to effectively and efficiently develop digital products. One of our processes is using Agile Development, which includes using Agile Story 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…

Learn about the cost of hiring software developers from Latin America compared to other global markets.

React and Vue are two of the most popular frameworks. Learn which one will fit best in your project.

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&

Redux or Context API: which tool is better for React state management? In this article, we dig into how each tool manages data flow through React nested components.

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 Product Requirements Documents (PRD). That’s because people used to follow the Waterfall methodology and define everything their software would do at the outset (think bloated Use Cases and UML diagrams). We don’t want to waste…

Learning to use AI tools like ChatGPT has become increasingly important for developers to stay relevant and competitive. It’s clear that developers who master these tools and embrace innovation will stand apart from developers who lag behind and who choose to ignore them. We’ve dug into ChatGPT and found the best use cases and technical prompts so you can start to pair programming with ChatGPT and…

Recruiting is broken. I don’t say that to be dramatic – I truly believe it. Through traditional job boards, it’s just too easy for candidates to apply for positions they may not be suited for – or even have the qualifications to do. The resulting avalanche of applications and resumes makes it incredibly difficult to separate high-quality candidates from poorly suited ones, and hiring a&

ChatGPT, the AI language model from OpenAI, is transforming the job search and interview process for software developers and hiring managers.

Odaptos is an AI platform that helps companies better understand user experience through custom user journeys, natural language analysis and facial recognition. As an early-stage startup, Odaptos needed developers to help turn the founders’ vision into an MVP that could be tested and launched. Their goal was to build a high-quality MVP that would help secure investment and also garner attention from media. Here’s how Odaptos…

Web3 has the potential to completely transform our digital lives. Decentralized applications, non-fungible tokens, and other blockchain-based innovations have opened up new possibilities for online interactions and commerce. But for all of Web3’s potential in creating a more open and transparent internet, blockchain technology has sparked a heated debate, and for good reason: its environmental impact is massive. Bitcoin, the world’s leading cryptocurrency, consumes an…

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.

Learn 7 qualities that set the best programmers apart from the crowd and how to evaluate candidates for these skills.

Explore React’s new features, benefits for users & developers, implementation, and upcoming plans for the framework’s future.

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?

Have you ever experienced the frustration of cloning a repository and encountering a litany of errors, from missing files to compiler warnings? Working on a new project is already challenging enough, with new tools, code, and logic to learn, and adding a broken build on top of that only creates further complexity for newcomers. Thankfully, there are several solutions to address this issue, ranging from…

Preact is a lightweight alternative to React that’s quickly becoming a go-to choice for building high-performance web applications. But is it worth developing your app with Preact, or sticking with a more mature framework, like React? We dig into this question and consider the tradeoffs of each library in this article.

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 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 across…

In this guide, learn how to define your role, where to look, and how to attract and evaluate top candidates.

As more tech companies embrace remote and hybrid work options, new challenges emerge for managers who want to build culture and cohesion among remote software development teams. In this guide, we explore the foundational aspects that successfully drive remote teams.

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.

In part two of this tutorial series, we look at the key features of GraphQL and how to integrate it with PostGraphile to enhance the back-end of our full-stack application.

Learn how to build a GraphQL API in a Node.js back-end using TypeScript in part one of this full-stack app tutorial.

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…

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.

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…

Laravel is an open-source PHP web application framework that provides a structure and starting point for building both simple and complex web apps. Learn everything you need to know about the framework’s latest updates and upgrading your app to Laravel 9.

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.

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.

A smooth onboarding program can improve your freelancer’s performance and job satisfaction. Learn more in our

There are many types of documentation in the software world. Of these, technical documentation is one of the most frequently neglected.

In this series, we share the stories of developers from our talent network. Here, we interview software developer Luiz, highlight some of the projects he’s worked on, and insights for other developers looking to break into the U.S. software development market.

Learn how to execute a review strategy that encourages open dialogue, accurately measures performance, and aligns employees with your business goals.

After a year of closed beta, GitHub Copilot is now publicly available to developers and is gaining a lot of attention for its ability to enable developers to harness AI while writing code. So does GitHub Copilot speed up daily work? Are the AI suggestions valid? Is it worth the cost? We answer these questions and more in this full review of the tool.

Trying to decide between Web 2.0 and Web3 for your next project? In this article, we’ll break down how Web3 works, as well as its advantages and limitations, through a series of questions aimed to help you answer the question: should I consider Web3 for my next project?

Remote employee monitoring has become a popular practice in recent years. Here’s what employers looking to monitor performance should consider.

Vue has been gaining attention among the developer community lately for its powerful features. But will it become the most popular front-end framework in 2023?

In the final chapter of this 3-part tutorial series, we build the front-end and implement the user-facing features of our full-stack application.

Docker has become a darling of the DevOps community because it enables true independence between applications, environments, infrastructure, and developers. The tool, first released in 2013, was initially developed for Linux, but is now fully supported on macOS and Windows, as well as all major cloud service providers (including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud). In this article, I’ll focus on two of these tools: Docker…

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 for DevOps engineers. 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 site…

As projects become more complex for JavaScript developers, 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,…

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.

Node.js has been a popular choice for both startups and well-known giants such as NetFlix, Medium, GoDaddy and LinkedIn. Here’s so many continue to choose this tool for their back-end.

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.

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…

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.

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…

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. This…

A few years ago in the JavaScript ecosystem, 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…

Using our three-step interview process as a guide, learn how to make interviews smoother and more effective.

Improve the quality of candidates applying for your role with these tips on crafting a stand-out job description.

Test-Driven Development: should you try it? Michel Sabchuk shares why he loves this process, the benefits that TDD can provide and how to implement it on your next project.

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&

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

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…

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.

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.

Micro frontends first came to light in 2016 as front-end architecture similar to and loosely based on microservices. The architecture was developed in response to common issues with building a growing single-page application, like poor scalability, maintainability and developer experience. Since, they’ve continued to evolve, allowing teams to build robust, feature-rich applications with more flexibility, accessibility and speed. In this article, I’ll unpack the theory…

.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.

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.

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…

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

A LATAM developer’s guide to improve your English and grow your programming career.

Being a software developer can be stressful. Here’s how mindfulness can help you balance your routine and manage everyday stressors.

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.

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…