How Software Development Influences Cloud Infrastructure Costs
Many companies believe that once they migrate to the cloud, their infrastructure costs will simply decrease. However, the bill that comes at the end of the month often says otherwise. The truth is that cloud infrastructure costs are largely determined by how you develop your software. For example, serverless software architectures are often more cost-effective, […]
Embracing Shift-Left Testing in Custom Software Development
Often, projects run over their proposed deadline or even go over budget. This is often attributed to a lack of appropriate project planning and management. However another main culprit that’s overlooked is that software testing is often done too late in the project’s development life cycle. The effect of this can be a project struggling […]
Empowering Users: Exploring Practical Business Logic with YAML
YAML, known for its simplicity and human readability, is a widely used data serialisation language often employed for configuration files. Given this function, the question arose: What if it could be used to define bespoke business domains and logic, giving end users the ability to describe domain entities and their relations in a way that’s […]
First time building an LMS: Offline first [updated February 2024]
Since the publication of our recent blog post, PowerSync unveiled a new, significantly more cost-effective pricing structure and introduced both a React Native Client SDK and a JavaScript web SDK, enriching their platform’s capabilities and compatibility. When building our first LMS we were often asked to solve two very interesting problems, namely the lack of […]
Role-based Access with Lambda Functions
Systems often have different tasks and actions that are performed by different users. Users and administrators are the simplest examples of this. It gets more complicated if there are multiple types of users with their own sets of actions or a hierarchy of administrators. A flexible way of dealing with this complexity is to include […]
First time building an LMS: SCORM
In recent years, learning has taken a leap from traditional classrooms to virtual platforms, and the learning management system (LMS) is at the heart of this transformation. If you’re unfamiliar with what an LMS is or how it’s revolutionising the education and training industries, this article is for you. We’ll dive deep into the core […]
Understanding the Consequences of Non-Incremental Software Releases in Quality Assurance
We’ve all been there: a major software release drops and suddenly you’re overwhelmed with bug reports and unhappy customers. It’s a common scene, a direct result of the fallacy that non-incremental releases are more efficient. What if I told you that after eight and a half years in the trenches, I’ve discovered that embracing incremental […]
Exploring Software Wonderland: A Tester’s Odyssey through Scenarios and Types
Just like Alice’s Wonderland, testing has many paths or, as we call it, “testing techniques” that you can use to get to your desired outcome i.e., ensuring that the quality of your system is top-notch. That sounds pretty simple, right? And it is, but there’s a bit more to it than just that. When it […]
My Unexpected Journey Into QA Testing with Polymorph
My heart was set on software development company, Polymorph, from the first day when I accidentally fell into doing quality assurance (QA) for them (long story). The short version is that my daughter was helping out with some QA work when I saw her testing, which looked like a lot of fun – especially compared […]
Flutter CI/CD with Codemagic Part 1: Automating test releases
The popular belief that automating test releases is a luxury reserved for large teams or complex projects is quite misleading. With Codemagic, app developers in South Africa can automate the most time-consuming app release steps, such as code signing, building and uploading new app versions, and setting changelogs. And after first-hand experience in how amazing […]
