Learn more about the latest Media & Entertainment industry and AWS trends from the Metal Toad blog. If you prefer to browse by category, all of our posts are organized under the help section.
When to Refactor: A Case for Quality
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…
Matt Thogerson
October 8th, 2018
Three Lessons Learned from Working in IoT
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…
Kalina Wilson
October 2nd, 2018
Missing a Development Tool? Make Your Own!
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! And as I discovered, the build can give you more than that tool you want—it…
Robin Law
September 28th, 2018
Angular API Calls with Django, Part 2: Building the Micro-Blog App
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…
Keith Dechant
September 9th, 2018
Devopsing a Legacy World
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…
Nathan Wilkerson
September 7th, 2018
Evaluating and Choosing A/B Testing Services
One of the first documented A/B tests was run by Google nearly 18 years ago as a spearpoint test into the world of web performance optimization. The test ultimately glitched due to slow load times. (Nice to know that even…
Matt Thogerson
September 5th, 2018
"Hack the Plants" — Five Lessons Learned from an IoT Adventure
Do a search on “IoT projects” and you’ll turn up endless pages of fantastic Internet of Things ideas and examples. Roll-your-own home security system! Track your cat’s movement! Build your own droid! With so many resources…
Kalina Wilson
August 21st, 2018
Hackathon 2018: Four Guys in a Garage. On Laptops. In a Minivan.
This year’s hackathon was all about the Internet of Things (IoT)—pulling data from the real world and sending it to the cloud, then finding ways to analyze and manipulate that data for insights. I came to my team—The Merry…
Nathan Wilkerson
August 21st, 2018
Hackathon: Team Mood Meter
This year’s hackathon challenge was to explore the Internet of Things (IoT) using cloud technology. As a Scrum Master, I have a longstanding interest in supporting the emotional wellbeing of teams, because it’s an important…
Ori Applebaum
August 21st, 2018
Freedom to Fumble: Learnings From Hackathon 2018
I spend all my time at work dealing with software. So going into this year’s hackathon, I was excited to get hands-on (and in over my head) with hardware. Having never even touched a Raspberry Pi before, I was in for an…
Brad Kouchi
August 21st, 2018
Hackathon 2018: Kegerator 2—Revenge of the Flowmeter
If you’re going to spend two long days frying a Raspberry Pi and fiddling with (very) finicky electronics, is there any better way to do it than surrounded by beer? I'm sure some of you would answer with a resounding "Yes!" …
Morgan Senkal
August 1st, 2018
IoT and Employee Satisfaction
The very concept of automation leads to a moral and ethical dilemma regarding the workforce. People need to work to support their families, but there are tasks that could be done better, faster, and cheaper if automated.…
Sasha Friedman
July 27th, 2018