There are no estimates, only budgets
The challenge of estimating software projects is that software is a creative act: you can paint a line, or you can paint a Monet. Every person involved has a different opinion about the amount of creativity needed for every miniscule feature.
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.
December 6, 2017
Creating a Twitter ticker with a Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi is great if you want a dedicated device for a task that you can turn on, get it to do its thing and leave it alone. Recently, I wanted to set up a little LCD screen that would continuously print out the latest tweets from a particular account. With a few components and some Python libraries, it was easy to put together something that I could just plug in and leave running. Here's how you can did it too - if you just want the final code, get it here.
November 28, 2017
AWS Lambda and Infrastructure as Code
Metal Toad is a certified AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with expertise in DCX, IoT, mobile, and beyond. Learn more.
November 28, 2017
Building an Expandable IoT Data Pipeline - Part 2
Building an Expandable Data Pipeline - Part 2
November 27, 2017
Angular 5: Making API calls with the HttpClient service
Note to readers, May 18, 2018: the code in this post is built for Angular 5.x. The same techniques will work with Angular 6 as long as you use the rxjs-compat Node package. To see how to upgrade this code for full, native RxJS compatibility, see this post.
November 27, 2017
Building an Expandable IoT Data Pipeline - Part 1
Background and problem description
In late 2016 we were approached with an opportunity to build a data pipeline for one of our large clients. The client needed to obtain sensor data and media (images, video, etc) from custom IoT devices built by one of their vendors. The goal was to capture and analyze metric to improve efficiency of a business process.
November 27, 2017
Speed Kills: How Much does a Slow Web Site Cost?
In my last post, I wrote about the cost of tech debt, using a case study of skyrocketing hardware costs. Here's another, subtler effect of poor performance: impatient customers don't stick around when they experience slowdowns. However, choosing to prioritize speed can be hard to justify when the cost isn't quantified.
November 27, 2017
Drupal 8 Entity API cheat sheet
Wait, is it "$node->title" or "$node->title->value"? How do I write an EntityQuery again? Yeah, I can never remember, either.
For the developers out there, if you've already read the official Drupal 8 Entity API documentation and you want more examples, here's a handy cheat sheet:
The examples here contain some hard-coded IDs. These are all examples. In your real code, you should already have the node IDs, file IDs, etc. in a variable.
November 22, 2017
Be a Partner, not a Vendor
Years ago, I received a frustrating email from a disappointed client. I was confused – from an engineering perspective, this should have been a model project. It nailed the requirements on time, under budget, with great documentation, full unit test coverage, and even included some cutting-edge original research and upstream open-source contributions.
Here's the email (emphasis added, scare quotes original):
November 16, 2017