It has been over a decade since iOS and Android were introduced. More and more developers are stepping into the engineering applications for these platforms. It is exciting to see the results right away on our smartphones.

Meanwhile, the operating systems keep growing and getting more features. When you compare the current state of Android and iOS to ten years ago, you barely find any similarities. However, if you had spotted the trends developed in mobile platforms back then, you could have prepared your apps to avoid big and unnecessary refactoring.

Let’s explore the mobile platform trends in 2021 and…

Every developer knows what is a database. This is a common concept to store some data. In some cases relatively small, but in other cases a massive amount. The more data gets into a database, the bigger impact can be on the performance. There are various practices available and are successfully already applied to improve the situation. The most popular among them are indexing and replication. They serve the needs very well.

However, those techniques don’t resolve all possible issues. For example, when databases are huge, having a replica might not be enough to improve access speed. The possible solution…

Android was introduced as an operating system in 2008. Since then, it has only continued to grow in popularity. As it is free and open source software, more and more vendors are using it for their devices. Android keeps dominating the market of mobile operating systems. Moreover, it is being used not only in smartphones but also in multimedia systems, retail systems, and other places.

What makes Android attractive for software developers is a low barrier to entry. You can start building apps on any computer — Windows, Linux, or Mac. The equipment required for testing is relatively cheap. A…

We software developers always want to grow professionally. First of all, this is our internal driver, our curiosity to explore new things. We learn new technologies not because somebody told us to but because we want to. And, to be completely honest, in such a fast-paced world, it is hard not to catch up with the latest updates. You can’t master something and simply stick to it forever; information technologies are improving every year, and therefore we also have to.

Yet not everyone is able to apply new learnings. Being in the industry for some time, I have discovered that…

Teaching was always my passion. I enjoy explaining technologies and approaches to students, junior developers, and everybody curious about it. Different technical conferences and meetups were the main places for me to practice explaining material.

Then pandemic came. All conferences either got canceled or became online events. Along with that, there is a boom in online learnings. The demand started to grow, everybody tries to use lockdown as a time to acquire new knowledge. If you ever thought about making your own video course, then it is your chance.

I released my first video course a few months ago and…

Graph databases are not a new concept. Graph theory was actively developed in the 1960s and since then the first attempts for building storage for graph structures have already appeared. The general idea is to persist the graph as a data structure and operate with it through the queries. It is like a mixture of graphs and databases, taking the best parts of both of them.

The main driver for graph databases was the expansion of social networks and the improvements of recommendation engines. …

These days it is hard to find a digital business that hasn’t moved to the cloud. Cloud computing is getting more and more new users, infrastructure is growing, more services are offered. There is a chance to find anything for your business needs. And Amazon Web Services remain the leader as a cloud computing platform.

Over time you might see that your bill is increasing. Cloud platforms are not cheap enough yet. Computational power with its awesomeness still is too precious. Software engineers have to carefully evaluate and calculate the expected load. Based on that, they need to select the…

We like reading success stories. New achievements, innovations, big sales, outstanding performance — all of this inspires us. Success stories demonstrate that nothing is impossible. If we look around, we will see that many things are the result of someone's victory. What is missing though is the way it was achieved.

Behind every result, there is a combination of different events: attempts, failures, rethinking. We don’t realize that. We don’t talk about failures; they can be uncomfortable and embarrassing. However, without the mistakes we made, we wouldn’t reach the goal. Failures are natural, and we need to accept that fact…