Insights for Software Development

Scaling software services is mostly an infrastructure-side venture. Load balancers and ops nodes and such... but does your actual software architecture prevent this from happening? It absolutely can. Let's explore some of the subtle yet critically important "gotchyas" that tend to come up from the software end, while trying to scale the service end...

Scaling is often assumed to be a horizontal game... that is, increasing the number of applications that handle the load. However, not all types of services scale horizontally, and vertical scaling (adding more computing to existing services) has its own set of trials... let's take a dive into the two types of scaling and what\when\where…

Decades ago (yea, I know…) there was an online discussion forum topic where someone asked a question along the lines of: if you had to define a (programming) skillset by categorizing them into four categories of Beginner, Intermediate, Expert, and Guru, what would you say the skills are required for each?  The community at the time…

Automations are great... who doesn't love not having to do it themselves? However, they also lock you in, sometimes hard. Let's explore how to go from manual to fully automated in a sane and pragmatic way.

Time is money and every hour counts toward your law firm’s profitability. Thanks to legal workflow automation, firms are finding innovative ways to streamline their processes and optimize efficiency. That means increased billable hours.  Want to learn more about automating your legal workflow and delving into the various software solutions available? Read on to learn…

While VBA is a bit of a holdover from an earlier area, it's not unlike COBOL in that there's a *lot* of critical VBA code running. While it's native XML processing capabilities are adequate, one thing that's been a struggle for many is how to deal with JSON. This article describes a method of dealing…