Think fast

What is a Process Application?

Process applications are kind of the unsung heroes of digital transformation. These tools are the backbone of countless efficient, streamlined internal business processes. Despite this, they’re rarely at the top of anyone’s list of priorities. The reality for on-the-ground IT teams is that bigger development projects and maintenance needs for existing solutions often take priority. So, even though they have such a huge role to play in optimizing internal workflows, projects to create new process applications often go unrealized.

Ronan McQuillan

Sep 19, 2023

SDKs vs APIs | What’s the Difference?

Understanding the respective roles, requirements, and use cases for APIs and SDKs is one of the most important facets of modern software development. See, nowadays a huge proportion of software isn’t actually built from scratch. Instead, reusable tools, assets, and resources play a greater role than ever in the way that businesses build tools. This serves the dual purposes of saving developers time - as well as ensuring interoperability and adherence to particular development approaches.

Ronan McQuillan

Aug 18, 2023

What are API Management Tools? + 7 Top Picks

Choosing the right API management tools is one of the most fundamental and far-reaching decisions for any IT team. In fact, APIs are totally central to all kinds of application development, process management, workflow automation, integration, support, and IT ops tasks. Most companies leverage a huge range of third-party APIs - as well as their own internal resources. Therefore, how we manage our API usage is going to have a significant impact on both the quality of our team’s output and the resource incursion related to achieving this.

Ronan McQuillan

Aug 18, 2023

WebSockets vs WebHooks

Understanding how and when to use WebSockets vs WebHooks is a crucial element of modern application development. If we don’t know how to choose the right tool for the task at hand, we risk creating ineffective or needlessly over-engineered solutions. Today, we’re covering everything you need to know. We’ll start by examining the basic principles of both data transfer tools and their underlying technologies. Then, we’ll check out how and when each is used, as well as the tradeoffs involved in choosing between them.

Ronan McQuillan

Jul 7, 2023

System Integration vs Software Development

When we’re adding new technical capabilities, the first challenge is figuring out what our most cost-effective option is. More often than not, this means weighing up system integration vs software development. Specifically, we need to make a decision based on what we’re trying to achieve, the technical resources we have available, and what our current tool stack is capable of. Custom builds aren’t cheap - so it makes sense to get the most out of our existing tools.

Ronan McQuillan

Jun 16, 2023

What is API Integration? In-Depth Guide

What is API integration is probably one of the most common questions in the world of web app development. In fact, this is central to how almost all modern software ecosystems work, so it’s vital that you know what you’re dealing with. See, businesses today deal with a greater number of tools, data sets, and services than ever before. Managing this fact requires a high degree of integration. That is, all of these different nodes in our tool stack need to be able to talk to each other in order to pass data or other instructions back and forth - otherwise we’d face a mountain of boring and expensive admin work.

Ronan McQuillan

Jun 2, 2023

Rule-Based vs Role-Based Access Control

How you control user access to your app has a huge impact on its performance, security, and usability. Today, we’re going to explore the differences between rule-based and role-based access control, the two predominant systems for modern applications. Despite their similar names, rule-based and role-based systems differ greatly, in terms of both technical implementation and business-level considerations. However, both offer high levels of security and usability. As such, the key decision points are often largely operational, relating to how the systems are maintained and administered.

Ronan McQuillan

May 23, 2023

On-Prem vs Cloud Hosting in 2025

On-prem vs cloud hosting is one of the most fundamental decisions for any IT team - both at the level of individual development projects and your wider IT ops. Getting this right will have an outsize impact on your profitability, performance, security, compliance, and much more. The trouble is - this is a widely misunderstood issue. At least, there are a lot of outdated or just downright wrong assumptions that pervade the conversation here.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 28, 2023