Breaking Apart a Legacy Java Monolith: An Insurance Regulatory Case Study

Lauren Fournier Bogner Case Study, Energy & Public Sectors, Insurance, Java, Modernization Leave a Comment

Client: A national insurance regulatory association Industry: Insurance and Government Regulatory Technology Services: Legacy Application Modernization, Software Architecture, Microservices Consulting, Custom Software Development Outcome: A near decade-long modernization partnership that rebuilt legacy C++ and Java securities systems on a test-first foundation, then carried that discipline into a build-system overhaul, migrating more than 200 mission-critical applications from Ant to Maven ahead …

Why Functional Programming

James Slaughter Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Python, React 1 Comment

React has gotten a little funny of late – a few years ago, it was normal to embrace the Object-Oriented paradigm, writing each component as a class and doing lots of this-binding.

Today, however, hooks and functional components have taken over React, and with it, a style of programming unusual for front-end frameworks is growing in popularity: Functional Programming.

This programming style has been in use for many years: Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, and OCaml are all established, though mainly out of the mainstream, languages with a rich history and broad application. Thinking ‘functions are first-class citizens’ sounds strange, especially to new JavaScript developers who have spent most of their time in Python or Java that come from an Object-Oriented perspective.

That’s why in this post, we will go over the basics of Functional Programming, how we compose functions, a handy implementation of a ‘pipe’ function that will compose functions, the process of currying and functions-as-return-value, and how we can use these concepts in React using Higher-Order Components.

Bridging the Gap: Azure App Insights to On-Prem Elastic Stack

Zach Gardner Articles, Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial 1 Comment

Recently, while working for a large healthcare client in New York, I ran into an interesting problem that had slim literature on how to solve it.

Our application is primarily on-prem, but it does leverage Azure for a few functions that are easier to solve in a cloud-native environment. We wanted to be able to monitor those functions using the same Elastic Stack that we use to monitor our on-prem application.

I was tasked with building a bridge between where our functionality logs to in Azure (App Insights), and getting that securely back into our Elasticsearch instance that powers our Elastic Stack.

This blog post will detail the solution I landed on. I hope it will be useful to others that need to solve a similar problem!

Chatbot with Rasa

Chatting with Rasa: An Intro to Chatbots

Braden Niswonger Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Machine Learning, Python, Tutorial Leave a Comment

It seems like a lot of websites these days are equipped with a Chatbot. It’s used for customer service, simple Q/A, and more.

As chatbots have grown in popularity, so have the number of different frameworks that can be used to implement them.

In this blog, we will explore one of these frameworks, Rasa. First, I’ll cover some of the basics of chatbots. Then, I’ll explain how to write a simple Chatbot using Rasa, and we’ll highlight some of its additional functionality as well.

Microservices in the Wild: Three Types & How to Implement

Dallas Monson Architecture, Articles, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Microservices 1 Comment

Microservices has become a catch-all term in the industry used to describe anything from architecture patterns to actual service implementations.

With such a broad spectrum, it can be daunting to know what it is, what it isn’t, and maybe more importantly, why we should care.

In this post, I’ll provide an overview of three kinds of Microservices that I have observed in client architectures: Domain, Integration, and Unit-of-Work. I’ll also discuss specific examples of their purposes and a method to implement each one.