Playbook for a Smooth Launch

An astronaut holding a cartoonish fishing rod surrounded by cartoonish stars.

Recently, I was upgrading the core functionality of a Shopify app that we built for a client. The nature of this app required the majority of the changes to be tested in the production environment. While this wasn’t ideal, sometimes it’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Naturally, this introduced a certain amount of anxiety…

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Make Yourself Accessible: Legacy Rails Applications

This is the third in a three-part series on “what accessibility actually looks like when you’re implementing it in a Rails app.” Part One covered some of the moral, ethical and professional rationale for making a site that adequately serves as many people as possible. Part Two covered implementing accessibility checks in a brand-new application,…

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10 Signs Your Custom Software is in Trouble

Does this sound like your company? Customer Support call volume has increased because users are having trouble navigating your website or app. Marketing is frustrated be the inability to make changes to customer-facing applications quickly and easily. Sales is frustrated by crashing or poorly performing demos. If you’re receiving complaints from customers and departments across…

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10 Signs Your Packaged Software is Sabotaging Your Business And 5 Questions to Ask

The “build vs. buy” question is one that is challenging for many organizations, especially those who do not consider themselves software development firms. Given the increasing reliance of all businesses on being “smarter” and more efficient than its competitors, pretty much all companies today need to consider that there may be times where “building” something…

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Paying Down Technical Debt

What Is Technical Debt? Technical Debt, also known as design debt or code debt, is the conceptualization of the potential or definitive cost incurred from prioritizing a fast delivery over code quality. We often think about this in terms of a monetary value but cost in this case can also be represented by work hours,…

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Does Your Code Smell?

“In computer programming, a code smell is any characteristic in the code that potentially indicates a deeper problem … Code smells are usually not bugs; they are not technically incorrect and do not prevent the program from functioning. Instead, they indicate weaknesses in design that may slow down development or increase the risk of bugs…

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