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…
By Toby Craig, Software Architect
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.
Amazon Lambda, for those not familiar with it, is an event driven serverless…
By Rich Staats, Senior Cloud Engineer
November 28, 2017
Building an Expandable IoT Data Pipeline - Part 2
Building an Expandable Data Pipeline - Part 2
Over the past year I've been building a cloud-based data pipeline for a client focusing on IoT data aggregation. There have been many bumps and bruises…
By Alex Banks, Senior Developer
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…
By Keith Dechant, Software Architect
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 (…
By Joshua De Leon, Data & Analytics Architect
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…
By Dylan Tack, Principal Engineer
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…
By Keith Dechant, Software Architect
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,…
By Dylan Tack, Principal Engineer
November 16, 2017
The High Cost of Technical Debt: A Case Study
Technical Debt: we all have it. Yet, this phenomenon remains poorly understood by product managers. Unlike financial debt, the costs are often hidden and difficult to measure. But the most dangerous…
By Dylan Tack, Principal Engineer
November 14, 2017
Say no to NoSQL AKA NewSQL is the future!
Nosql image by John hoho (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
The rise of Big Data™
With the rise of Big Data™ and IoT we saw a large wave of NoSQL™ proponents. Everyone began to…
By Joshua De Leon, Data & Analytics Architect
November 13, 2017
Django 2.0 - Is your project ready?
Django 2.0 is in beta now. It's expected to be released in December 2017. The question remains, is the rest of the world going to be ready?
Django has been on the 1.x branch for many years now.…
By Keith Dechant, Software Architect
November 6, 2017
Servers...yay or nay?
...On Serverless Infrastructure
The what
Recently the term "serverless" has been thrown a lot in reference to provisioned, on demand functions invoked by a cloud provider, as a service. Obviously we…
By Alex Banks, Senior Developer
November 3, 2017
Sum Algebraic Data Types in Haskell and Swift
"Grove Park Traincare Depot and sidings" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by train_photos
Engineers at Metal Toad participate in a variety of continuing education such as the Hackathon, dedicated time for professional…
By Phil Tseng, Software Engineer
November 2, 2017
Momento Mori
In April of 2017 I put a widget on my phone that reminds me that I’m going to die. This is how it improved my life.
A long time ago I learned about the concept of Momento Mori. It’s a simple phrase…
By Matt Thogerson, Product Manager
October 31, 2017
Push the publish button already
The most important measure of progress in building blogging expertise is not word count, it’s how many timers you hit the publish button. Every post is either a rock or a gem dropped into the water;…
By Joaquin Lippincott, CEO
October 31, 2017