Usability testing is a crucial step in designing any product or application. For our team developing Clear Path , designing the usability tests was a very important part of the process. Since our Jira app was a new application being developed from scratch, there is even more of a need to understand the user experience and improvements that can be made based on user feedback. Before conducting the tests, designing the usability test is equally important to ensure you are receiving the information that would help make your product better.

When first designing our usability test script, there was discussion about whether to use a usability test or user acceptance test (UAT). Although these types of tests are used interchangeably, they have differences that need to be considered. Being a new app, it was a question for our team on whether to do usability testing or user acceptance testing. So, what is the difference between these two types of tests?

How would a social media app know a user’s google authentication information? After all, google is a separate software and its data is stored separately from that of other applications. The answer is an Application Program Interface (API). APIs are a set of rules and protocols that allow different software programs to communicate and share data. APIs are critical to software and hardware development. In fact, the mouse and keyboard you are using to navigate this blog post are working correctly because of a well-defined API. It’s important for developers and users alike to understand how their various applications work together seamlessly.

You have two choices for building the user interface for your Forge app – the UI kit, and custom UI. The UI kit allows you to create a straightforward UI using a set of Atlassian-supplied components, put together using relatively simple code. Custom UI gives you more room to use Atlassian-supplied and third-party hooks, components and such, while also allowing you to employ more complex HTML, CSS, static resources (such as images) and source code, all of which can be hosted in Atlassian’s cloud with custom UI but not the UI kit. Both types of UI involve writing code in a React-like pattern, which makes sense in that various components available from Atlassian are based on React.

Forge is Atlassian’s next-generation framework for building apps that integrate with Confluence, Jira, or Jira Service Management. Forge provides Web UI elements, APIs and deployment environments that enable developers to create fully-featured apps within Atlassian’s cloud infrastructure through the use of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and other Web technologies. Forge apps can be distributed via the Atlassian Marketplace as software to which any Atlassian Cloud customer can subscribe.

Moser Consulting was recently tasked with reducing costs and ensuring more consistent SLA compliance in a company's Snowflake environment. While Snowflake differs from traditional and other cloud databases, it is still a SQL-based database, and many of the same tuning techniques apply. However, understanding Snowflake's architecture is crucial, as it offers unique cost-saving opportunities not found in traditional databases.

Recently, I stumbled upon a blog by Felipe Hoffa that detailed using Cloudflare R2 as the data storage location for external tables in Snowflake. I had a project that required less than 5 GB of storage per month, and I wanted to avoid paying for storage if possible. Therefore, I decided to experiment with Cloudflare's free tier as my data lake. The results were nothing short of impressive.

For the second year in a row, Snowflake has been named the Database of the Year by DB-Engines. Over the past couple of years, it has climbed the popularity rankings, currently sitting at #11. Snowflake is a cloud data platform designed for analytical, AI, and ML use cases. As a cloud-native solution, its architecture differs significantly from traditional databases like SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

Insights about the soft skills veterans bring to a tech environment and what tech offers veterans.

Talking tech can be confusing and difficult if you don’t have the vocabulary to do so. Here are some hot tech terms.

What does democratizing an IT department mean?

Answering the question, “What is a human-centered design process?” Human-centered design is a creative solution to a problem that focuses on the end-user.

For clients with Linux systems, please be aware that late on Tuesday, January 25th, 2022 (yesterday as of the date of this blog posting), the Linux Foundation and all the major Linux distro publishers (Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE, Debian, et al) publicly announced a vulnerability in the PolKit (formerly PolicyKit) service applicable to ALL current Linux systems they've dubbed PwnKit.

What comes up when you Google your name? Creating a personal brand is a powerful way to influence and develop your career.