Tech Blog Key Tech Insights

Newsletter

An SPA problem and a roundabout solution: K-Optional Newsletter

One of our clients runs a financial marketplace single-page application (SPA), hosted on static file-serving infra. Static SPAs dynamically construct page content in the browser after load. In contrast, server-rendered applications send all or most HTML within the initial page response.

Newsletter

Geocoding crowded workout classes: K-Optional Newsletter

In 2019, K-Optional Software partnered with a real estate analytics company in Asia. This firm had aggregated a nice dataset of property listings in their market, and hoped to build something similar to one of Zillow’s features: a map interface for browsing properties with filters for price, area, neighborhood etc.

Insight

Optimizing React Native (+ Expo)

React Native and Expo are a powerful duo. Instead of needing to write Java/Kotlin and/or Swift—not to mention not being able to create an iOS app without a Mac—it’s now easy to write and test native apps using a framework that’s familiar to many web developers. And while React Native is pretty easy to dive into for someone who’s worked with React before, performance can feel like more of a pain point when developing and testing mobile apps.

Guide

Firebase schedule functions for eLearning platforms

In this guide, we discuss the approach we used to implement “timed exams” on an eLearning platform we built. We needed to allow instructors to set an exam time limit, after which students’ exams were automatically submitted. The problem was surprisingly thorny.

Insight

Remix.run's fullstack paradigm

Remix has brought the full-stack philosophy back for the first time in ten years. We've discovered that you get an SPA + REST API experience from a single codebase. And it has answers for three great unsolved problems of web development; 1. Double form validation– we've been searching for a way to not validate form data on the client and server for at least 5 years, and this is the first comprehensive solution.

Guide

Automating Vuex boilerplate with Hygen

Vuex is a wonderful tool for managing state in Vue applications. Unfortunately, it requires a great deal of boilerplate code.

Guide

Deleting nested data in Firestore

Deleting nested data in Firestore is frustrating. It's somehow unsupported natively, and there doesn't seem to be an elegant way of doing it.

Guide

Rapid Prototyping - Parse and Vue

This guide is the first part in a series on rapid software development. In this tutorial, we create a Vue application that utilizes the Parse SDK. Specifically, we’ll focus on authorization / authentication and developing a sign in page that uses Parse’s login call.

Insight

Crawling Southwest Airlines Flights with Puppeteer

Crawling a website- that is, programmatically pulling data from a URL- has millions of applications. Sometimes you'll need to aggregate data to make decisions. Other times, you'll need to monitor information constantly. You also might be looking for cheap flights.

Guide

WaiverStevie - Seamless eSignature for devs

Collecting a physical signature is a clear-cut process: one party presents a document to the other who can then sign and return. The entire flow occurs in one simple exchange. Incorporating a physical signature into a large pipeline is still easy.

Guide

Rapid Prototyping - Ionic 4 and Wordpress

In this guide, we're going to prototype a mobile application using Ionic 4. We'll be showcasing a news app that reads content from a Wordpress website.

Guide

Launching a Serverless, Fastify App in Five Minutes

Unlike Express, Fastify ships with builtin error handling; that means there's no need to wrap every route in a try-catch block! Besides, it doesn't require external modules to work with JSON. Consider the following two blocks:

Insight

Serverless out of Control

Take full advantage of all the fruits of serverless. But always exercise a bit more caution. There’s no fallback if your code spirals out of control.

Tip

Spending next to nothing on the cloud

Hosting bills, even for small startups, can reach into the thousands of dollars per month.  That's in spite of robust cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. You no longer have to spend a lot- even with plenty of users. But most people often do.

Tip

A quirk with Stripe Customers

Learn about a potential issue with the Stripe payment system that can affect businesses relying on recurring payments. This article discusses a quirk in Stripe's handling of customer information and payment details, which may result in the removal of a customer's payment method without warning or explanation. Discover tips for mitigating the risk and minimizing revenue loss.