Blog

Some clients ask us why we choose to use Ruby on Rails to develop web applications instead of all the other web frameworks and languages. There are many reasons for our decision, but before I embark on a discussion of the advantages (and disadvantages) of…

We have developed several Software as a Service (SaaS) and Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) applications for clients in the past and are currently working on our own BPaaS project, so it feels like a good time to go into more detail about this…

When working on Ruby on Rails apps, slow auto-tests can be the bane of the developer’s life. For complex applications, the test suite can take up to ten seconds to load up the entire Rails stack. This may not sound much, but it soon adds…

We often see clients trying to deal with the combination of long feature lists and limited budgets. One way to overcome this issue is by building and releasing the application in stages. This method provides the additional advantage of allowing you to get user feedback…

In Ruby there are a number of ways you can access the value of a key within a hash. The most commonly used is the square brackets syntax hash[:key]. However, there is an alternative, which is to use Hash#fetch e.g. hash.fetch(:key). In this post, we’re…

Last Thursday, Matthew gave a talk to the students of Makers Academy about some of the lessons we learned building the Trade Tariff for HMRC & GDS. Makers Academy, a training institution based in London, runs a high-intensity web application development course, where the students…

When delivering an SaaS product, there are a wide range of costs you need to take into consideration. Aside from your initial outlay, if you want to achieve a gross profit of 80% (a figure that is typically recommended to base your SaaS business model…

In the last two posts we considered how to organize search results and what to do if there are no results. This post will look at what information is displayed in the individual search listing. How we display individual search result items has a significant…

This is a follow up blog from Good UX Practices for Organizing and Filtering Search Results, where we considered the optimal ways to organize results. But what happens when a search doesn’t return anything? There are a variety of reasons why a search might come…