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A well-designed API is both an important business driver and a must if you want to split your software product into smaller modules. Whether you decide to deploy your app as a set of microservices or separate the client-side rendered frontend from the backend, you need to think about how the individual components will interact with each other. Externally, a high-quality API can be a huge selling point. This is especially true in the B2B world; letting customers access your service programmatically can help them improve their products or create…

Having fun is the best way to learn.  Albert Einstein It all started two years ago when our colleague Petr brought his new Beta fish to the office. Before long, everyone knew how to care for the fish and the aquarium. Then, we bought a new tank, and a few months later, an even bigger one.  Fast-forward to Christmas 2020. Since our office closes for nearly two weeks, no one would be available to take care of the fish and the aquarium. So, we moved the fish to our older,…

Carl Jung once said, “The creative mind plays with the object it loves.” Like Jung, we believe play can fuel innovation, and sometimes, the wilder the idea, the better. ? You might be wondering why would we submerge a PC in liquid (in our case, mineral oil)? To that, we reply, “Why does anyone climb Mount Everest? Because they can.” So, we did! We created a Linux PC from upcycled computer parts, submerged it in mineral oil, lit it with LED light strips, and added a LEGO ship, because no aquarium…

At profiq, we are always interested in learning something new, and trying novel technologies. One of these technologies is Elixir—a functional programming language whose main strengths lie in fault tolerance and scalability through concurrency. This makes it a good candidate for backend development, especially when it comes to high-traffic web applications. We, for example, utilize Elixir’s properties in cooperation with Divvy to handle a large number of financial transactions. But, this, of course, is not its only use. As it turns out, Elixir can do a lot more. One of…

In an earlier article, we introduced you to Presto, an open-source, distributed SQL query engine. It lets you use SQL to query data from many types of storage solutions. This includes data sources that don’t support SQL natively; for example, a JSON file stored on AWS S3. What’s even more interesting, is that Presto lets you perform joins across multiple databases based on different technologies. In our view, Presto is a great tool for organizations that store their data in multiple data sources, and want to analyze this data without…

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…

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…