Consulting Chronicles

Introduction We live in a world in which data is becoming a key business asset, playing an increasingly central role in the success of a growing number of companies. Data and the ability to transform data into business will become critical in all sectors in the coming years. A good mastery of data and its exploitation can be an important competitive advantage. This means that companies need to equip themselves with the technological and human resources to develop a skill set capable of leveraging data,…

[Or what I did learn from javascript 101, even though I am not a software engineer] When I was young(er), I’ve started my career in multinational corporations. One of the key things which struck me at that time was that, even though each of this company was quite hierarchical, every manager must, to evolve in their career, have made a compulsory training on the field. In other words, whether you are a finance or marketing director, you have to regularly play the role of a sales…

As I explained in the first part available here, I recently switched from Mobile development to WEB front end development. Last month has been full of learnings, let me describe them.

OCTO is a great place to work and even greater place to grow. As an Octo consultant I'm used to learning and improving on a regular basis. Sharing knowledge is a central value of OCTO's culture. I have been told to always try to find a better way and to push the boundaries of knowledge. As sharing is a core value, I could help by sharing this new career path I've choosen. After 5 years spent in the iOS development field, I had the strange feeling that I wasn't…

This is the story of a team. A bunch of 11 aspiring software craftsmen who decided to change things around and get their job done in a better way. The story takes place between the 30th and the 50th iteration of the development process of a software. This software is a website serving over 2 million regular users and providing legal information and services to 65 million French citizens. Chapter one: Start from what hurts and set a direction Leaky pipeline It is normal that…

TL;DR: TDD is like biking: – it's faster than walking – it's counterintuitive at first – once you know how, you never forget      

Gartner’s long-awaited  Top 10 strategic technological trends  for 20151 have just been released this month and, for the second consecutive year2, one our most cherished topics at OCTO is prominently featured. In Gartner terminology, what we call the Practices of the  Giants of the Web 3, 4 becomes Web-Scale IT , and is inspired by "large cloud services firms"5, 6. Here, we offer a brief overview of this trend for 2015.

In the first part of this article, we talked about new front-end architectures, which consist of JavaScript Web applications using APIs provided by a back-end server: The new Web application architectures and their impacts for enterprises – Part 1. We saw that they recently emerged thanks to the increasing performance of browsers and the rise of industrialization tools for JavaScript development. In this second part, we will focus on: reasons why you should adopt these new architectures; opportunities they provide; impacts for enterprises.

Web applications evolve. From static HTML sites first to AJAX applications more recently, through multiple dynamic technologies (PHP, ASP, Java, Ruby on Rails…), Web application architectures and their dedicated tools regularly experience major advancements and breakthroughs. For two years, we have seen a new wave of technologies coming, transforming the landscape of Web applications. Unlike RIA or AJAX before, there is no well defined name yet for this new trend. We will call it "MV* client-side architectures". Here is the main principle: the server no…

A benchmark comparing JavaEE and NodeJS made the buzz lately on the web. I was surprised by the results and decided to reproduce it to verify an intuition. Also, the article was followed by multiple comments that are themselves worthy to be commented. Which brings us to the current blog post. But what is a benchmark? A benchmark is meant to measure the performances a piece of software. An attempt to reproduce in laboratory what will happen in production. If you ask the domain experts, they…