In this post from our Byte Sized series, we will explore the subtle art of Prompt Engineering that has been gaining a lot of prominence in the realm of AI. The common analogy to describe Prompt Engineering is like teaching a child through asking questions. How effective your Large Language Model’s response is depends on the […]
This article explores JavaScript Autoboxing and is part of our Byte Sized series. Let’s start by looking at this simple code snippet We know that a string in JavaScript is a primitive type (that is, it has no methods or properties), but here is looks like that the variable myString is an object with a […]
A manageable technical or code debt is a good thing as it speeds development. There are also instances when the speed to market for a critical feature, bug fix, or other short-term priorities trump the analysis of medium to long-term impact.
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Legacy software applications do pose a growing problem for many companies. Applications should be able to last for decades, but in practice, they are only modern for three years and can then be considered legacy for the rest of their lifespan. This while the application often support a business-critical processes. Definition: A legacy system is outdated […]
Mantrax was engaged to modernize mission-critical applications and infrastructure for a business management company in the financial services industry.
The client had a monolithic application built using a PHP framework that was abandoned years ago. It was not maintained by anyone and the developer who built this system had abandoned them to seek a full-time opportunity elsewhere.
To make things worse, they were running off a decades old database technology that was not supported and was very poorly designed.
With such legacy systems, there is a lot of resistance to change. It was natural for our client to feel anxious about making drastic changes to existing systems. There was a fear of a scenario where the legacy application modernization won’t go smoothly and their business processes would come to a screeching halt.
These types of applications could abruptly stop working if any of the system administrators updated the operating system or even applied a patch without understanding the consequences. Even worse, this software system did not receive any security updates for years and was vulnerable to various cyber-attacks.
One ideal approach would have been to go through a complete redesign of the application including re-architecting the database. However, given the tremendous amount of stress our client was enduring, and budget considerations, we took the “good solution today” approach.
Our clients’ requests ranged from optimizing existing dashboards to launching a company-wide analytics culture.
Our clients required company-wide performance improvements involving delivery timelines and budget achievements. In particular, efficiencies were needed regarding company-wide information dissemination and manual report generation.
After gathering information from stakeholders who were responsible for reporting and analytics, we discovered that the underlying issues were typical of the following:
As a result, the broader user base was not always finding these reports very useful, or there was an impediment toward making insightful decisions.
Our clients’ requests ranged from optimizing existing dashboards to launching a company-wide analytics culture.
Our clients required company-wide performance improvements involving delivery timelines and budget achievements. In particular, efficiencies were needed regarding company-wide information dissemination and manual report generation.
After gathering information from stakeholders who were responsible for reporting and analytics, we discovered that the underlying issues were typical of the following:
As a result, the broader user base was not always finding these reports very useful, or there was an impediment toward making insightful decisions.
Love it or hate it, JavaScript is everywhere As software consultants, we work with multiple programming languages at a time, JavaScript being one of our main languages. We often find it hard to remember the API details for the language we are working with. Here is a list of JavaScript (ES6) array methods that developers […]
