Mean Time Between Loss of Sleep
“MTBLS”: I first encountered this phrase on a New Relic blog. It's a half-joking reference to a concept used by reliability engineers, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). I was intrigued though, and…
By Dylan Tack, Principal Engineer
January 26, 2018
Docker Containers & Clustering/Orchestration
The Big Picture
The aim of this blog post isn’t to get into the nitty gritty how to build and run a containerized app on your favorite cloud provider with a specific clustering technology. Rather,…
By Rich Staats, Senior Cloud Engineer
January 20, 2018
How to Integrate GitHub PRs with Bamboo CI
Bamboo / GitHub integration isn't perfect – perhaps because Atlassian wants to steer you towards Bitbucket (their GitHub competitor). Out of the box, there are several headaches. Below, I'll cover…
By Dylan Tack, Principal Engineer
January 18, 2018
Grokking Bamboo CI/CD, for beginners
We are heavy users of Bamboo for Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI / CD). It's extremely flexible, integrates well with Jira, and elastic build agents make the most of AWS EC2 (…
By Dylan Tack, Principal Engineer
January 18, 2018
My daily use of the Five Levels of Leadership
Over a year ago, I read John Maxwell’s “The Five Levels of Leadership”. Since then, I’ve grown increasingly reliant on it’s simple model. For those of you who are unfamiliar, it goes like this:…
By Tony Rost, Chief Technology Officer
January 16, 2018
Want to get your product to market faster? Hire a Scrum Ma…
In the practice of Agile Project Management, it has long been assumed that a Scrum Master (also referred to at Metal Toad as Agile Project Manager) is an integral member of any successful Scrum team…
By Ori Applebaum, Lead Project Manager
January 15, 2018
Spatial analysis with PostgreSQL and OpenStreetMap
I've always been a map geek, dating back to the 1980s when I would take a road atlas and some tracing paper and draw in my own road network. And one of my favorite games is to take an old map or…
By Keith Dechant, Software Architect
January 8, 2018
Resolution: Talk to Users in 2018
It’s the end of the year and you’re thinking:
“I did a pretty good job this year. I launched several new high-profile initiatives. Thousands more customers are using the application. I didn’t break…
By Lilie Fine, Senior Product Manager
December 27, 2017
The Four Quadrants of IoT Revenue Streams
The next decade will bring a society-changing transformation to smart, connected things in our personal, professional, and public lives. Everything about this change is big: the security risks are…
By Tony Rost, Chief Technology Officer
December 23, 2017
How wasted inventory shows up in software development
Inventory is the worst bank account you’ll ever own. Every item in your inventory is worth cash. At the Bank of Wasted Inventory, your cash has high storage costs; needs staff to track it; can’t be…
By Tony Rost, Chief Technology Officer
December 16, 2017
The 3 Paths for Digital Transformation
There's a lot of talk about digital transformation these days. I think undoubtably this movement - transforming as many processes from analog to digital - is going to be the heart of value for…
By Joaquin Lippincott, CEO
December 12, 2017
Turning Your UI Into a Well Organized Symphony With Conductor
User interfaces have evolved over time. However, the archetypal approach to creating great user interfaces on Android™ has not. The first party tools available to all Android developers for…
By James Simshaw, Senior Software Engineer
December 11, 2017
Sluggish Drupal 8 Adoption Lags Even D6
We're just past the second anniversary of 8.0.0. To see how D8 is doing compared to prior releases, we put together the chart above, based on Drupal's usage stats page.
For versions 5.x, 6.x, and 7.…
By Metal Toad ,
December 11, 2017
There are no estimates, only budgets
“How much does it cost to build my website?”
“How much does it cost to build my mobile app?”
“How much does it cost to build our IoT analytics portal?”
These are very reasonable questions, but there…
By Tony Rost, Chief Technology Officer
December 8, 2017
Data Warehousing With Snowflake
Metal Toad is a certified AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with expertise in DCX, IoT, mobile, and beyond. Learn more.
I recently had a chance to work on a data warehousing project for a client that…
By Rich Staats, Senior Cloud Engineer
December 6, 2017