Blog

Scrum clearly provides many benefits for developers, but what about its advantages for the client and other stakeholders? This is a question I faced recently in a client meeting. To answer it, I first need to define Scrum itself. WHAT IS SCRUM? In layman’s terms,…

Since its release in 2004, Ruby on Rails has earned the devotion of some of the tech industry’s most talented programmers, becoming the go-to framework for advocates of clean and rapid web development thanks to its numerous technical strengths. However how will choosing Ruby on…

User Experience is a term that has been modelled and defined a thousand times, and many arguments have been started over its various nuances. UX, on some level, can be defined as the usefulness of a service, combined with its usability, combined with its aesthetic…

Some clients ask us why we choose to use Ruby on Rails to develop web applications instead of all the other web frameworks and languages. There are many reasons for our decision, but before I embark on a discussion of the advantages (and disadvantages) of…

We have developed several Software as a Service (SaaS) and Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) applications for clients in the past and are currently working on our own BPaaS project, so it feels like a good time to go into more detail about this…

When working on Ruby on Rails apps, slow auto-tests can be the bane of the developer’s life. For complex applications, the test suite can take up to ten seconds to load up the entire Rails stack. This may not sound much, but it soon adds…

We often see clients trying to deal with the combination of long feature lists and limited budgets. One way to overcome this issue is by building and releasing the application in stages. This method provides the additional advantage of allowing you to get user feedback…

In Ruby there are a number of ways you can access the value of a key within a hash. The most commonly used is the square brackets syntax hash[:key]. However, there is an alternative, which is to use Hash#fetch e.g. hash.fetch(:key). In this post, we’re…

Last Thursday, Matthew gave a talk to the students of Makers Academy about some of the lessons we learned building the Trade Tariff for HMRC & GDS. Makers Academy, a training institution based in London, runs a high-intensity web application development course, where the students…