The Future of Software Applications?

After building software products for the past 20 years, we have seen our fair share of software application development. Most of the time, we are brought in to solve a problem that requires a digital solution (web site or an app), and also one that requires an accessible interface that allows people to emotionally connect with the product. Most of these solutions are later released to the world as revenue-generating software products.

Using Lando for Drupal Development

Lando is for developers who want to quickly specify and painlessly spin up the services and tools needed to develop their projects. It's a free, open source, cross-platform, local development environment and DevOps tool built on Docker container technology and developed by Tandem.

Citizen Developers: The New Paradigm

The notion of "citizen developers" is emerging as one of the hot trends of this decade.  As we careen towards 2020, we look to the next two years to understand the technological trends that will be driving our industry and economy.

Artificial Intelligence Gains Critical Mass

Where is artificial intelligence technology headed?  Every article we read points in a different direction.  Will it be the job-killing juggernaut, devastating mid-level jobs?  Will it peter out like it did in the first wave of AI in the 90's and early 2000's?  Will it become sentient and shrug us off the planet l

Breakthrough Recognized as a Top Chicago Development Company by Clutch

Recently, Clutch announced their annual listing of the leading technology companies in the Chicago metro area. We are proud to announce that based in-depth client feedback, Breakthrough Technologies has been recognized as a leader in multiple research categories, including having one of the top software developers in Chicago.

What can you build with Loco?

We get asked this a lot. Because Loco is a new product, a lot of people have never used it before. Because Low-Code is a new software segment, many people don't know what these solutions can do for them. Today, we will attempt to break it down in a fairly straightforward set of examples.

Low-Code vs. No-Code. Let's Define our Terms

In the low-code application development platform space, some terms bounce around a lot. Let's take a minute in this article to pick apart these terms, just so we're all starting from the same place.

An Update on Meltdown/Spectre

You may have heard of the recently reported issues related to performance enhancing routines built into most modern computer processors. These two vulnerabilities identified by researchers have been dubbed Meltdown and Spectre.

These issues expose a means in nearly all modern processors for a would-be attacker to obtain data once thought to be immune from observation or hijacking. Hardware and software manufacturers have worked to provide protective counter measures to prevent these vulnerabilities from being exploited.

D8 - Custom Batch Processes

Sometimes we need to run operations that will take a long time. We need to make sure the request doesn’t time out and it would be nice to let the user see that progress is being made. Drupal uses batch processing to do things like rebuilding content access permissions. Let’s dig in and see how we can create a custom batch process of our own. This is a walkthrough on batch processing for Drupal 8. I'm using Drupal 8.4, but this should apply to Drupal 8.2 and up.

The first step is creating a new module. We’ll call ours example_batch.

Meet Breakthrough's New Chief Technology Officer!

Breakthrough has a new CTO! This Summer, Gus Koumarales accepted the position to step up and lead the Breakthrough team by guiding us in the next generation of technological advances that we will be navigating over the coming years. Gus has been a superior technology leader on a variety of projects, and has been instrumental in forming and shaping the development culture at Breakthrough over the past three years.

We sat down with Gus for some Q&A to understand what he sees as the future of technology at BT:

Building a ToDo List Application with Vue.js - Part 1

Introduction

In this series we will build a browser-based ToDo List application using Vue.js and Bulma. We will learn how to create a new Vue project, how to add dependencies to the project, how to use Vue's powerful reactitivy, and how to wrap everything around a responsive layout with Bulma.

This tutorial will start with some of the very basic Vue features, with the goal of progressively enhancing our app as we go along.