Start-up development

Localizing your product can involve many pitfalls, and there are two of them that developers face AFTER the content has been localized: translating the product updates, and offering support for international users of the localized versions.

In this article, we will demonstrate how these issues can be solved with just a few clicks.

Written by Alconost

We decided to take the «no-fixed-office» route from the very beginning of our company. For a boutique translation agency focused on the IT industry and working remotely with clients, this seemed like a natural fit. 15 years later, Alconost has over 700 employees spread across the globe, including translators, marketing professionals, PPC advertising experts, sales staff, editors, localization managers, and video production whizzes. And, still, we think an office isn’t the most effective way to operate. As one of the company’s co-founders, I can share just how we managed this.

Not having an office makes the most positive impact on business growth

Our clients are located throughout the world, and our managers often have to send emails outside of normal business hours. When you’re dealing with major time differences, problems could easily take days to resolve. But not for us. Our employees aren’t bound by the limits of the standard 8-hour workday, and we can count on them to respond to emails and queries promptly whenever possible. Getting a quick response is key — even if it’s just to hear “I’ll look into this and get back to you tomorrow.” It’s a win-win: the client feels better and we’re happy.

We like the officeless life not because it allows us to take our time. In fact, it’s the opposite, and we can clock our turnaround times in minutes, not hours. Half of the orders made via our online translation platform — Nitro — are delivered in less than 2 hours. And anyone who emails us with questions or inquiries about Nitro can count on a reply within an hour. This kind of response time simply isn’t possible with fixed office hours.

Written by Alconost

Every day we hear about new budding software programs. With the rapid advances in the software development industry, new players entering the market and have captured a large segment of the market. So, when you need to track business projects, handle the allocation of assets, and solve other IT challenges, you need help from the top software development companies. However, it doesn’t mean that you should select a software development company on the basis of how appealing it was once. Today, people prefer to check the full profile of a company first and then decide to get their service.

To ease your pressure down, listing here some of the internationally acclaimed software development companies from the development niche. This list has been curated on the basis of a variety of reliable resources like Clutch, GoodFirms, Google SERPs, user's feedback & reviews, different independent review firms including medium.com, themanifest.com, etc. Based on the collected data, I’ve assigned the total score for each of the 10 leaders, and here I represent a list of the top software development companies that are doing best in their domain.

List of the Top Software Development Companies

Managing your competition is an important skill that you need to have as a company. The management of competition can either be done by letting go of a market because it is too much to handle. You can also consider either selling yourself to a competition in a particular local market or acquiring them. Different companies adopted varied strategies according to the moment’s and the market’s demands.

Focus on Uber

Uber needs no introduction as a corporate or as a service provider. It has become synonymous with on-demand cab services and is slowly progressing towards providing many other services in the same fashion.

The phrase ‘Let's book an Uber’ has become common. In a decade, Uber has gained the status of a monopoly and has marked a prominent presence in more than 70 countries ever since its inception in 2009. However, it hasn't always been a bed of roses for Uber.

Uber has faced a lot of legal issues, some of them because of the legislature of the country, local drivers and passengers.

Developer Christophe Verdot shares his experiences of recently taking the online course ‘Mastering Web 3.0 with Waves’.



What is your background? What motivated you to take the course?

I’ve been a web developer for about 15 years, working mostly as a freelancer.

A strong and confident strategy in product management solves many challenges. Any product manager should strive to develop professional skills and abilities to build a strategy like great far-sighted commanders. The ability to plan well, determine priorities and evaluate them are the essential components for creating your effective strategy.

This brief guide will be useful if you are looking for ways to improve strategic planning skills and want to learn how to prioritize competently.

Uber, as we know, operates only in 650 cities and remains the best among all taxi apps. But have you ever imagined about other cities and their demand for taxi applications? If you did, you would have certainly come across a few regional apps like Ola, Didi Chuxing, Japan Taxi, etc. These apps are focused on fulfilling the demands of locals; and in that way, they have succeeded and generated revenue tremendously. If you search for the reason behind the success of these apps, it inevitably ends up in the kind of service it provides its customers. So, it all depends on how well you bestow your service (whether you focus regionally or globally).

What is prioritization about? Product managers will agree that it’s rather critical to choose the right features for development, filter the most important of them and skip less urgent ones. This is all about the art of prioritization.

If you are not sure about your prioritization skills and want to get more, this quick guide will assist to discover how to find the evaluation criteria for your product and how to select appropriate strategic growth metrics. You will also find out how to offer more value to customers and establish all internal processes inside your team with the help of prioritization methods.

This is the final part of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous part here). Now I’m going to talk about one more type of outages and the conclusions we made about them, how we modified the development process, what automation we introduced.

1. Transporting prototypes

The idea of the DO-RA project originated in March 2011 after a nuclear disaster on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. This gadget was conceived as a personal dosimeter/radiometer working with eponymous software (DO-RA.Soft) on mobile platforms (iOS, Android, WP) as well as on desktop platforms—Windows/Linux/MacOS.

At the end of 2017, a tourist from China brought in his backpack ten long-awaited prototypes from the DO-RA.Q test batch. They were manufactured in China based on our design documents and then transported from Shenzhen to Moscow. By the way, the development of design documents was assigned to the largest Design Centre in Eastern Europe—the PROMWAD company. The documents were clear and plain—prepared in IPC format and written in proper English—to enable the automated production of electronic devices in a foreign country.

This is the next article of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous parts here: part 1, part 2, part 3). In further parts, I’ll talk about the accidents and outages in detail.

1. Bad release: database overload

Let me begin with a specific example of this type of outage. We deployed an optimization: added USE INDEX in an SQL query; during testing as well as in production, it sped up short queries, but the long ones — slowed down. The long queries slowdown was only noticed in production. As a result, a lot of long parallel queries caused the database to be down for an hour. We thoroughly studied the way USE INDEX worked; we described it in the Do’s and Dont’s file and warned the engineers against the incorrect usage. We also analyzed the query and realized that it retrieves mostly historical data and, therefore, can be run on a separate replica for historical requests. Even if this replica goes down due to an overload, the business will keep running.

This is the next article of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous parts here and here). In further parts, I’ll talk about the accidents and outages in detail. But first let me highlight something I should’ve talked about in the first article but didn’t. I found out about it from my readers’ feedback. This article gives me a chance to fix this annoying shortcoming.

This is a second article out of a series «Citymobil — a manual for improving availability amid business growth for startups». You can read the first part here. Let’s continue to talk about the way we managed to improve the availability of Citymobil services. In the first article, we learned how to count the lost trips. Ok, we are counting them. What now? Now that we are equipped with an understandable tool to measure the lost trips, we can move to the most interesting part — how do we decrease losses? Without slowing down our current growth! Since it seemed to us that the lion’s share of technical problems causing the trips loss had something to do with the backend, we decided to turn our attention to the backend development process first. Jumping ahead of myself, I’m going to say that we were right — the backend became the main site of the battle for the lost trips.

In this first part of an article series «Citymobil — a manual for improving availability amid business growth for startups» I’m going to break down the way we managed to dramatically scale up the availability of Citymobil services. The article opens with the story about our business, our task, the reason for this task to increase the availability emerged and limitations. Citymobil is a rapid-growing taxi aggregator. In 2018, it increased by more than 15 times in terms of number of successfully completed trips. Some months showed 50% increase compared with the previous month.

The business grew like a weed in every direction (it still does): there was an increase in server load, team size and number of deployments. At the same time the new threats to service availability emerged. The company faced a task of the most importance — how to increase availability without compromising company growth. In this article, I’ll talk about the way we managed to solve this task in a relatively short time.

At Microsoft, we’re investing in helping our customers as they move to the cloud. We see an opportunity to help support companies in this changing environment by bringing our security, privacy, compliance and intellectual property assets and expertise to bear in order to help them be more successful. We’re excited to now take an additional step that expands innovation protections.

Today, we are pleased to announce the expansion of the Microsoft Azure IP Advantage program to include new benefits for Azure IoT innovators and startups. We first announced Azure IP Advantage in February 2017, to provide comprehensive protection against intellectual property (IP) risks for our cloud customers. A trend we saw at the time – and one that continues today – is a growing risk to cloud innovation from patent lawsuits. Last year, we joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) and the License on Transfer (LOT) Network to help address patent assertion risk for our customers and partners.

This article in our blog.

The Imagine Cup 2019 competition is well underway with our second Regional Final wrapping up in Amsterdam, the Netherlands this week. Team Finderr from the United Kingdom took home the first-place title and a spot in the World Championship for their app solution to find lost objects with a smartphone. Congratulations!

SXSW is a festival of culture and technology held every spring in Austin, Texas. It’s a global phenomenon, with hundreds of thousands attending the event every year and millions more following the media coverage. Even if you’ve never heard of it, you’ve certainly felt its influence on our culture.

But it wasn’t always that way.

In the late 1930s, two Stanford students, William Hewlett and David Packard, were inspired by their professor’s plea to turn the Bay Area into the national capital of high tech. Operating out of the cheapest property they could find — a garage in suburban Palo Alto, they built their first commercial product, the HP200A oscillator. Now a private museum and a California Historic Landmark, this place is a living monument, commemorating the birth of the Silicon Valley startup culture.

This event preceded the similar and widely publicized success stories of Microsoft and Apple by more than 30 years. But it nonetheless perfectly defines the startup culture as we know it today. How come?

Entrepreneurs are constantly looking for new tools and possibilities to develop their businesses and enrich their knowledge. One of the ways of doing this is visiting themed events — meeting colleagues in real life, exchanging experiences, and communicating with potential investors.

In fact, there are thousands of tech-focused events taking place annually. The important thing is to pick the best, most useful and easily accessible ones to optimize your time and expenses.

Techstars Startup Digest solves this problem by sending its subscribers an email newsletter with a curated list of relevant and reasonably priced events for entrepreneurs. Currently, Startup Digest consists of more than 700 curators, is approaching 700K subscriptions, and is available in more than 300 cities all around the world. Today, I’d like to share its history, how the founders came up with the idea, what it looked like in the initial stages, and what it’s going through right now.

I'd like to share my story about migration monolith application into microservices. Please, keep in mind that it was during 2012 — 2014. It is transcription of my presentation at dotnetconf(RU). I'm going to share a story about changing every part of the infrastructure.