Expert insights

I’m used to thinking of ergonomics in terms of chairs, desks, physical plant, tennis rackets, etc., but this week our expert UX designer, Cami, blew my mind when she shared a “natural thumb extension” image that she uses to help design for mobile.

“What’s this?” I asked

Hiring and starting a new job - two sides of the same coin, yet with similar risks and rewards. Can a new employee onboard a new job with a minimum of wasted time, effort, and stress? Can the new employee grow in knowledge, confidence, and reputation in the process?

Working at Metal Toad is all about innovation. It’s why I was drawn to this place—a place that celebrates the unusual, gets excited about new ideas, and constantly seeks out the latest emerging tech.

When Metal Toad announced the theme of the winter Hackathon would be Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), those of us who have focused our careers on building websites faced a conundrum: how can we learn the principles of AR/VR in just two days without getting sidetracked by the need to learn mobile app development—with its own langu

Going into the latest hackathon, I knew there were several options for building a virtual reality (VR) app for Android devices. Google currently has two platforms for VR available: Cardboard and Daydream, not to be confused with the screensaver mode on Android phones.

Metal Toad’s winter 2018 hackathon was all about Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (VR and AR).

One of my favorite parts of working at Metal Toad is the spirit of generosity here. Everyone is always eager to help others—whether responding to a fellow Toad’s question in our Slack #help channel, offering clients an idea for optimizing their business, or volunteering in the community.

Imposter syndrome is kind of the worst. You know it when you ‘see’ it, or in this case, feel it. It’s that voice in your head that speaks in a very convincing, relentless way, telling you that you don’t know what you’re doing.

A few years ago, I had the good fortune to travel to London to visit some friends. But before I talk about my trip, there is something you must know about me.

What is siloing?

Software, like all things in life, decays, mutates, and grows old. Much like the barnacles that sprout across the belly of a ship, the slow creep of destructive rust on a tractor, the corrosion of metals in kinetic machinery, or the gradual degradation of your cells' ability to repair themselves — software gets old.

Prior to coming to Metal Toad, I worked as a .NET engineer at an Internet of Things (IoT) startup. My job was to stabilize and expand an existing cloud-based infrastructure that served as a central hub for IoT communications. This hub allowed a variety of entities to connect to the cloud for key operations:

Do you ever wish you had a certain tool, but you don’t have the budget for it, or it doesn’t even exist? I’m here to tell you: you can build it!

This is the second part of a two-part series exploring the use of the Angular 6 HttpClient to make API calls against a Django back-end using Django Rest Framework. In the first part, we learned how to authenticate against Django using the Django Rest Framework JWT package.

Devops has been picking up steam since around the year 2009.  ( It could be argued it was around in other forms longer but for argument's sake let's go with 2009) Today it is mainstream and there are whole conferences built around devops. But not everyone is doing the devops thing.