GDPR issue hasn't stopped being a subject of debate for many digital business yet. Although many European-based companies took actions to become compliant before 25th of May, a shred of doubts stays.
In order to help you rest easy, we drafted a Q&A list comprising the most burning questions you might have as a digital business. Although there's no universal checklist applying to all cases, some issues pop-up more often than others. And these answers will be relevant for the years to come, since GDPR is not going anywhere.
June 13, 2018 | JavaScript Development
Although nowadays we’re swamped with knowledge on more or less any topic we can imagine, it can still be hard sometimes to find reliable sources. In every industry, however, there is always a handful of individuals who really know their stuff and following their social media outlets, blogs, and their presence on other platforms is probably the best thing you can do for your career. In case you missed it, Karolina already drafted a similar list of Vue.js experts to watch in 2018. Now it’s time for Node.js.
June 8, 2018 | Development IoT
You know, truth be told, there’s more than a couple of IoT geeks on our team here at Monterail. In late 2015, we set up a Raspberry Pi-based smart office system at our Wrocław offices, a process that one of my co-workers described in detail in a separate blog post. Since nearly three years have passed since the installation of the system, and given that we’ve grown a lot during these two years, we’ve decided that it was time to introduce a couple of upgrades to the system and make our office even smarter.
This one particular deadline applied to every business based in the EU or working with personal data of EU citizens—and as May 25 is behind us, this means that the GDPR is now in force.
The new law has stirred a lot of discussions, revolving chiefly around big companies relying heavily on advertising like Facebook. The whole tech world has been looking at Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, and other big players that manage loads and loads of data in their day-to-day operations, to see what they’d do. The main question was: What’s in it for us and our businesses? Can we draw any conclusion from their stories and use them? Unfortunately, the answer, more often than not, was no.
May 22, 2018 | Development IoT
Amazon Alexa, the popular voice assistant helping with everyday tasks, has become a best friend to many households in the US and elsewhere. The list of available features for Alexa, released by both Amazon and third parties, keeps growing steadily, but according to reports from January of 2018, that the total number of skills (apps) working in the US only 25,784. More vendors are looking to integrate their product with the voice assistant—currently, you can link it to your Gmail account, your calendar, phone, or even home lighting.
May 17, 2018 | Development Ruby/Rails
Recently, I had a pleasure of attending the Wroclove.rb conference in Wrocław where one talk in particular caught my attention more than others. “Web Performance with Rails” by Stefan Wintermeyer was, in my opinion, the best prepared, one of the most indispensable, and definitely the most useful of all the talks but, most importantly for me, it was a wellspring of new knowledge for me and a source of inspiration that ultimately drove me to write this post.
Here at Monterail, we pay close attention to our clients and have always wanted to provide them with special treatment. Yet, we didn’t understand how to embrace the subject. If I were to explain how we used to think about this “special treatment” a few years back—well, we basically didn’t consider any form of automation. We wanted to be humane, not robotic. This is just how it was when we were a relatively small team and we felt that our approach makes us a unique partner. Makes us stand out.
May 10, 2018 | Development User Experience PWA
Have you heard about progressive Web apps? Of course you have. The whole Internet seems to be discussing them right now. And the subject got even hotter after Google I/O 18’ and a long-awaited confirmation that PWAs are coming to desktop for Chrome OS 67 in early June. Work is already under way for Windows and Mac.
You probably heard about this new EU-wide piece of legislation called General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Although much has been said on the subject, still many business owners struggle to wrap their heads around it. To make matters somewhat worse, the GDPR neither suggests a single, clear approach to data processing nor does it comprehensively explain how its ordinations will affect businesses of different shapes and sizes.
April 24, 2018 | Development Ruby/Rails
For a long time, I’ve been hearing a lot of criticism about the Rails way and some months ago my private experiences convinced me that I cannot find any use cases for that approach. It has developers build very fat models, controllers, and DRY is commonly understood as a method of extracting repeated one-liners to new methods.
