Think fast
Thoughts and ideas on how to build tools, automate workflows and speed-up the workplace.
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
On-Prem vs Cloud Hosting in 2024
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 At least, there are a lot of outdated or just downright wrong assumptions that pervade the conversation here.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
Relational vs Non-Relational Databases | What's the Difference?
Getting your data model right is the first step in any successful development or transformation project. Today, we’re exploring everything you need to know about relational vs non-relational databases. This has become a tougher decision in the past decade or so. Until relatively recently, the relational model was pretty much the dominant way of storing data. Today, it’s still by far the most ubiquitous option - but other approaches have also entered the mainstream.
Ronan McQuillan
Apr 21, 2023
Experimenting with RPA & Low-Code for CRUD Development
We’ve been having a little in-house debate about combining RPA tools and low-code development - that we decided to put to the test. Basically, we ran an experiment to see if we can answer two questions: Can we get an RPA tool to build low-code apps? Would anyone ever actually want to do that? See, at their core, low-code and RPA are both meant to save you time - but the tradeoff is that you sacrifice some of the flexibility that you’d get with doing things the old-fashioned way - either performing a task manually or coding an equivalent solution from scratch.
Ronan McQuillan
Mar 20, 2023
Custom App Development | Ultimate Guide
Custom app development is a huge undertaking - even for very simple solutions. It’s also one of the biggest investments your company is likely to make. When it comes to creating bespoke solutions for your team, it pays to get things right. The trouble is that there are so many distinct considerations to keep in mind. All sorts of technical, operational, and even creative decisions impact the ultimate success of your custom development project.
Ronan McQuillan
Mar 3, 2023
App UI Design | Ultimate Guide
Building applications is all about making users’ lives easier, smoother, and more efficient. Your app UI design is a critical part of this. As we’ll see, UIs impact everything from the basic usability of your tools to the concrete business value they’ll ultimately provide. Still, we’ve all struggled with using poorly-designed applications. Today we’re going in-depth on what you need to know about building effective UI/UXs. We’ll cover everything from the core principles of design, to specific tools, techniques, and strategies you can use to build incredible UIs.
Ronan McQuillan
Jun 28, 2022
14 Effective Table UI Design Tips + 6 Shortcuts
The humble table is the core of almost any data-centric app interface. Table UI design is central to how your users find, view, and interact with all kinds of information. With such a fundamental role in your tools, the design of your tables and the screens that contain them can have an outsized impact on your overall user experiences. Today, we’re going to look at some of the top ways you can design your tables for maximum efficiency, usability, and effectiveness.
Ronan McQuillan
Jun 27, 2022
Enterprise App UI Design | In-Depth Guide
In enterprise environments, productivity and efficiency are everything. When you have thousands of users, even the most minor process improvements can hugely impact revenues. Of course, there are countless different ways you can streamline processes. Today, we’re diving deep into enterprise app UI design. More specifically, we’ll cover the unique challenges faced by enterprise design teams, the concrete strategies you can implement to overcome these, the tools at your disposal, and how low-code tools like Budibase are changing the way large organizations build custom apps.
Ronan McQuillan
Jun 27, 2022