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We recently hosted a Peer 2 Peer Tech Leader roundtable discussion in the Rocky Mountains. The group is composed of engineering leaders from a wide variety of software tech companies ranging from smaller 4-6 person engineering teams at startups to engineering leaders at FANG companies, and organizations in the government sector responsible for over 400 engineers. The primary goal for the roundtables is to provide a forum to network with peers, to share experiences, and to learn from each other. For each meeting a discussion topic is agreed upon -…

Lauded by customers as a “communication lifesaver” and “a game changer”, one of our clients, Colorado-based Serenity App Inc, is making a big impact in the senior care space with its cutting-edge platform, Serenity Engage. Serenity Engage streamlines and protects communication between the families of seniors in residential and hospice care and their often multiple care providers. We are excited to work closely with Rob Pinna, Serenity Engage’s VP of Engineering, and develop this product from its foundation. We've enjoyed building it using event-driven architecture, with React and Redux powering…

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…

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…

If you’ve ever shopped online, created a playlist with Spotify, or tried to learn a new language with Duolingo, or chatted on WhatsApp, you’ve interacted with a chatbot. In addition to being used by industries as wide ranging as news sites, retail, and real estate, chatbots have also become quite popular. According to a recent survey by Forbes, 62% of consumers in the U.S. like using chatbots.  Given the prevalence of chatbots and our love of technology, we decided to create a bot-based system, using natural language processing (NLP) to…

Overview Every web application is intended for humans. If interaction is expected, the application obviously needs to authenticate users, create accounts for them, and keep their credentials secure. This can be a complex task due to security and privacy concerns. While it is possible to create our own solution, it is much easier to use one of many ready-to-use solutions, that is if we have enough trust in it. Authentication vulnerability can bring our business down, so we should take our time to choose well. Also nowadays, people perceive IAM…

For more than a decade, the cloud, cloud computing, and cloud storage have been some of the hottest and enduring buzzwords in our industry. While most companies understand the benefits of moving their servers to the cloud and have made the leap, there are still many holdouts. The reason for this is simple; they do not trust cloud providers to protect their data. Fortunately, there is a safe and affordable solution—data encryption. Data encryption uses code to protect the confidentiality of data, making it unreadable by a computer or a…

  “Cyber crime is the greatest threat to every company in the world.”       Ginni Rometty - Chairman, President, and CEO, IBM The consequences of data breaches are devastating. In 2017, there were 1,579 data breaches in the U.S. alone, an increase of nearly 45% from 2016. And it’s expensive. The average cost of a data breach in 2018 is $3.86 million. Equally devastating is the enduring damage to a company’s reputation and future business opportunities. As we saw in September, data leaks can happen to any company—even…