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Have you ever seen a speaking piano? Pretty cool, right? At profiq, we sometimes take a break from serious business and explore some pretty obscure ideas. A musical instrument able to replicate human speech is one of them. Inspired by YouTube videos and by our friends from the House of Hungarian Music in Budapest, we decided to dive deeper into the science and technology behind speaking instruments. Our mission? To understand how everything works, go beyond just a single instrument, and create an entire “speaking orchestra”. Our methodology In order…

Surveys are a great way to collect opinions from a large number of people from different groups, subsequently using this information to design better products and services. Despite the proliferation of many advanced analysis tools it’s often difficult to understand the needs of your customers without the direct communication provided by surveys. Simple survey tools such as Google Forms work well in most situations. But as our colleagues at the Technical University of Ostrava have discovered, there are use cases that require more advanced features. Researchers at the university have…

In a previous article, we introduced Open Policy Agent (OPA), a simple open source tool that lets you decouple your organizational policies, including service authorization rules, from other parts of your software stack. We showed you many ways how OPA can be integrated into your service architecture, and also presented a few policy definition examples. In this article, we deep dive into the code of a simple microservice stack composed of applications written in different languages, and using OPA to verify different policies related to these applications. This scenario is…

Organizations operate in an ever-changing environment. These environmental changes for example include an introduction of a new law, technological progress, or even large-scale crises, such as the one we are experiencing right now. Organizations often need to react to these outside factors by updating their organizational policies. Many of these policies are implemented in software. Changes in policies can therefore lead to changes in code. These are often costly, time-consuming, and can make some services temporarily unavailable. Sound bad? Meet Open Policy Agent (OPA), an open-source policy engine that unifies…