Software Development

Discover 10 practical strategies to reduce latency and improve website speed for better user experience and sales.

Discover the vital aspects of maintaining your Ruby on Rails application to ensure security, performance, and scalability for your growing business.

Brighton Ruby 2024 was nothing short of amazing. It brought together passionate Ruby developers from around the world to share knowledge, network, and have fun.

Creating a Ruby on Rails app can be a challenging task, but it can be made easier by utilizing different gems. These gems consist of third-party code libraries that can significantly speed up the development process. While some of these gems are necessary for Rails,…

Managing your applications’ codebase can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be daunting.  At Bit Zesty, our hands-on experience in maintaining JavaScript, React Native, Ruby on Rails, and Python apps for our clients has led us to develop a set of effective strategies.  Below,…

In the modern world, where data is crucial for businesses and organisations, having efficient search and filtering capabilities is essential. Although traditional relational databases are effective in sorting through data, their limitations in handling large-scale search operations have led to the d

We are pleased to announce that Bit Zesty has decided to open-source our project called Vigilion, an easy-to-integrate cloud file scanning API service. Our real-time anti-malware security solution stops viruses from reaching your users and helps you meet IT Health Checks (ITHC) security requirements

Choosing the right application hosting platform is critical for any organisation that needs to host a web application. The choice of platform will directly impact your applications’ performance, reliability, and security. With so many options available, how can you be sure you’re making the best…

At Bit Zesty, we’re always looking for ways to improve the performance of our clients’ Ruby on Rails applications. Recently, we had the opportunity to help a client optimise their Rails app, and we managed to reduce their site load time by half for some…

The adoption of Connected Devices (or Internet of Things (IoT) technology) is growing rapidly, with some experts projecting that there will be 27 billion connected devices by 2025. The IoT is a network of devices that ‘talk’ to each other. These might be smartphones, smart…

We gathered some of our team together to discuss what it’s like to be a developer here at Bit Zesty.

We compare React Native and Flutter – two cross-platform development solutions.

We take a look at the five things you need to know about the latest version of Ruby on Rails, version 6.

While many busy companies may be tempted to prioritise other needs over upgrading software, there is a strong business case for updating your Ruby on Rails application to save costs in the long term. We’ve seen it ourselves. Sometimes when we help our clients upgrade…

Bit Zesty won the tender to develop a new QAVS website for DCMS. Find out how we launched it in just one month.

Whilst we were upgrading our web applications to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, we noticed that the javascript library we were using to enhance the behaviour of some select boxes was not fully accessible.

As we enter a new decade, our in-house agency experts look ahead to anticipate how the technology trends, shifts in user experience and design, and ways of working will define how digital services will develop and how organisations will change in the coming years.  Laura…

The rise of inclusive design is putting accessibility at the heart of new laws and legal precedents – and the most successful digital products and services.   Accessibility still seems to be one of the biggest buzzwords in the industry. Every industry conference and awards event…

When your development team has designed and built a new Ruby on Rails application, and it’s working as expected, it might seem like the project is completed. However, effective support and maintenance of a new digital product are just as vital as a perfect initial…

When it comes to the principles behind creating any of our digital products, the Bit Zesty team follows many of the practices set out by the UK Government’s Digital Service Standard – a set of eighteen criteria for ensuring that all government departments create streamlined,…

How developing with Agility can improve your digital projects Over the last decade Agile methodologies have transitioned from fringe usage into the mainstream, with many organisations and service providers recognising the technical advantages of developing with Agility. In this blog post, we will ex

Originally posted on the Government as a Platform blog. In my first post I spoke about the Trade Tariff which was the first service to migrate to the PaaS. During the migration we captured lessons learned so we could share them with our GDS colleagues and…

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools Working software over Comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation Responding to

There’s a whole host of software that we use in order to keep Bit Zesty running smoothly. Below is a list of the most important tools we use as a company, and why we think they’re so great. Slack Slack is a private chat service…

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…

Though the number of Ruby on Rails developers is rising, many may lack the level of experience that we require. Therefore, it is necessary to implement a strong hiring practice to identify the best candidate for a role, and ensure that new recruits are not…

When contacted by potential clients, we are often presented with diverse information, including links to example sites, prototypes, feature lists, and wireframes. Other clients come to us with just an idea. But how can you best identify the features and functionality you need when looking…

While we are not big fans of technical jargon here at Bit Zesty, in some cases it is more helpful to use the correct term rather than rolling out a long and convoluted description of the thing in question each time. We use a few…

Most of us know that documentation is a fundamental part of any software project, but we’ve also learned through experience that producing too much documentation of the wrong kind can be a waste of time. The aim of rapid development is to minimize waste and…

While building our company dashboard, which was mentioned in our previous blog post on SVG with Raphael, I came across a problem with the project management tool we use – Pivotal Tracker. The Pivotal Tracker API is only in XML, which means you can’t do…

I gave a talk at NoSQL EU on a few of the different types of NoSQL solutions we’ve used in the past, explaining why we’d chosen each one and how they had worked for us. It was a bit tough to do with a cold,…

I’m sure we’ve all heard the pros & cons of the NoSQL movement so these will not be covered here. I’ve been experimenting with a number of alternatives to RDBMS for a while such as CouchDB, TokyoCabinet, Redis and recently MongoDB. MongoDB (from “humongous”) is…

I am quite excited about the rising popularity of document stores. We have been using MongoDB and CouchDB for some time now, both for internal and client projects. Both databases are similar (although built on different technologies) as they are schema-free, scalable, and document-oriented. The…

It‘s amazing how many things can go wrong during the course of a web project if you don’t have a good team in control. Here, we focus on five problems which any project can encounter, and explore how – in our experience – they can…