Blog

As 2024 winds down, we’re excited to share our Top 5 blogs of the year, hand-selected by our team for their relevancy, innovations, and practicality for software developers. These blogs cover a wide range of topics from how to write better code and leveraging AI, to developing custom voice models and improving elder care communication. Each post offers actionable tips, real-world case studies, and expert perspectives that are sure to inspire and empower developers, engineers, and tech enthusiasts alike.  At the top of our list is Hana Klingova’s practical and…

Effective communication is essential and life-saving in the elder care sector. It fosters vital collaboration amongst caregivers, healthcare providers, and families, ensuring everyone is on the same page to deliver the best possible results. Serenity Connect is an innovative platform designed specifically to facilitate communication among elder care providers, clients, and their families. Founded in 2019, Serenity Connect aims to revolutionize how aging service providers, older adults, and their loved ones interact through seamless, real-time, and HIPAA-compliant communication. The journey to developing this novel platform highlights the power of person-centered…

Code reviews are a huge part of our day-to-day job and over the years I realized it takes time to learn how to write them in a way that is helpful and also encouraging. As developers, we tend to be very direct when we communicate, but when it is not done face to face or when we work on a remote team and do not know each other well, very direct communication can make an impression of being rude or harsh. Also sometimes the feedback is just too vague or…

In recent years, the rise of synthetic voice technology has opened up new possibilities for a variety of voice-based applications. Whether it's creating personalized voice assistants, enhancing accessibility tools, or developing unique AI-driven experiences, the potential is vast. But how easy is it to create a custom voice AI model that runs locally on your computer, without relying on cloud services? Applio offers a powerful, open-source solution making training and using a custom voice model accessible to everyone—from developers to creative teams. Unlike cloud-based alternatives, Applio does not require an…

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the way we interact with technology. From enhancing productivity to enabling creative applications, their potential is vast. How challenging is it to run a powerful LLM directly on your PC or laptop? LM Studio is a user-friendly app that allows you to easily manage and run LLMs on your computer. It offers a streamlined interface, making it accessible even for those new to machine learning. In this video tutorial, Miloš Švaňa walks users through how to choose, download, and run an…

AI Developer Tools With the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) over the past few years, we’ve seen a surge in AI-powered developer tools. Since code is essentially text, it’s an ideal use case for LLMs. While there are many tools available to assist with software development, let’s focus on the most impactful ones: code completion and code manipulation tools. The most well-known tool in this space is GitHub Copilot, which gained immense popularity as one of the first to hit the market. However, there are now several new…

One of our Tech Research team’s most interesting recent projects is the development of an autonomous web explorer. This tool, built on OpenAI's GPT-4o model, extends the capabilities of traditional web scrapers by performing more complex interactions, such as clicking buttons and filling out forms. This means it can navigate through dynamic states on websites—like encountering a login form with an error message about an incorrect password—by understanding and interacting with the content in context. One of the primary uses of our automated web explorer is in the creation of…

Applications powered by large language models (LLMs) need to be more than merely functional—they need to be scalable, reliable, and capable of continuous improvement over time. To make this happen, you need tools that allow you to trace and fine-tune your app's performance to identify inefficiencies, diagnose issues, and improve response quality. This is where LangSmith comes into play: a tool built for developers working with LLMs who need insight into how their AI models behave in production environments. LangSmith can be a game changer for AI developers. LangSmith gives…

New frameworks and tools are constantly emerging, each promising to make our lives easier and our applications faster. But every so often, a framework comes along that doesn’t just promise incremental improvements—it redefines the game. Qwik is one such framework: built by performance nerds, for performance nerds.  Qwik introduces novel architecture that eliminates the need for the traditional UI hydration process, a step that often bogs down web apps with unnecessary overhead. Instead of rehydrating the entire UI on the client side, Qwik only activates the parts of the application…

If you want to improve your product by developing new AI features built on top of large language models (LLMs), you have many options to choose from. GPT models from Open AI are often considered the go-to solution for most use cases. But the competition in this space is heating up. Other proprietary solutions such as Gemini from Google or Claude from Anthropic are catching up in terms of quality, features, and pricing. There are also many high-quality open-weight models such as Llama-3.1 from Meta or the Mistral family from…