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The MovingFast Podcast has interviewed some of the most knowledgeable people in technology since its beginning. We have had the privilege to discuss highly relevant topics such as machine learning, technical debt, and boosting dev velocity; we’ve also delved deeper with our guests to better understand cutting-edge tech. We’ve enjoyed the journey - have you joined us yet? Below, we’ve compiled a list of interesting MovingFast Tech podcasts that you might have missed. #1: Lasse Andresen – former Co-Founder and CTO of ForgeRock - ‘Tech Trends’ Among his many insights,…

It is not uncommon for companies to use multiple data stores based on different technologies. We can easily imagine an organization using relational databases for transactional data, a NoSQL database such as MongoDB for semi-structured data, and an S3 bucket for large datasets. When performing analytical tasks, we often need to combine data from all of these sources. Traditionally, this meant gathering everything in one place: a data warehouse or a data lake. This brings a lot of issues; movement of data takes time, and we also need to perform…

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…

Most of us understand velocity in terms of objects: how fast something can travel in a given direction. But what does this term mean when it comes to engineering teams - and why is understanding this so fundamental to building your team’s velocity? profiq is one of the founders and organizers for the Moving Fast Tech Podcast and Meetup series, and recently, we had the opportunity to sit down with Rob Pinna, VP of Product and Engineering at Serenity App, Inc., to discuss development velocity - and how to apply…

If you’ve visited our website, profiq.com, you’ve likely noticed a heading on our Your Team page that claims “Technology and a love of learning are in our DNA”. If you’ve wondered what that means in real life, this article is for you. It’s in our nature as a global software service provider to explore and quickly become proficient in new and emerging technologies, as well as consider potential applications, and even future improvements. With new technologies being created and improved rapidly, we always have to think ahead. This lets us…

What happens when you get 12 Colorado technology leaders at fast growing small to mid-sized software companies together on a Zoom Tech Leadership RoundTable to discuss,  ‘Are margaritas the key to developer velocity - if not, what is?’ That’s exactly what we did a few weeks ago, with the intent to bring tech leaders together to discuss their challenges and successful approaches to increasing velocity.  The structure we used was a Lean Coffee approach. We set up a Github repository of discussion topics in advance for input from the group.…

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…

For nearly two decades, volunteer distributed computing projects have helped advance scientific research and understanding of infections and hereditary diseases. Scientists need to understand how diseases work to formulate therapies to fight them. One key way to arrive at this understanding is to create models and run multitudes of molecular dynamics simulations.  These simulations are huge and resource-intensive. Even with the help of big cloud providers and onsite clusters, scientists still need computation resources to power these simulations. Using client-server systems like BOINC, volunteers run simulations called work units using…