Archive - March 2017

How You Can Use Cassandra in the Big Data World

In simple terms, the goal of typical big data systems is to get some business benefit of information. Commonly, we need to collect the data, save it in a certain location, perform some analysis (up to data mining), and visualize results.

Though every business case is unique and there is still no silver bullet, some frameworks, tools and platforms are widely used as big data system building blocks. You may have heard frequently used words like Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, HBase and others.

This article covers the main features of Cassandra DB with respect to usage as an element of big data system infrastructure and our experience.

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Working in a Virtual Team

How successful is your business? How much of your business is done on the internet? Nowadays, every other businessman has a web application to offer their services online.  Was it created locally or by a virtual team? I believe, a group of highly-skilled developers  working across the road was hired to deliver the project. You must have paid quite a fortune for the time they dedicated to the product.
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Database: How To Make a Bad Thing Work Well

Our team uses software development and database best practice and it turned out that developers got used to some of it and stopped looking at it with a critical eye.

There is a widely known opinion that implementing a business logic on the DB side is a bad idea. In most cases it is true, and can be explained in many ways.

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Smart Version Control for Project Managers and Decision Makers

Today I’m going to tell you about Git version control (branching) model that we use widely in ISS Art to effectively manage code base of our projects. The experienced software development teams might know this model as major ideas were found long time ago and posted in the articles:

Here, I’m going to consolidate these ideas in the way that could be easily understood by software project managers, product owners and decision-makers to explain them the technical challenges that can arise due to certain harmful business decisions, and how they can impact development costs and schedule. Examples of harmful business decisions:

  • Task reprioritization after development start
  • Request to include one more feature in release during release testing
  • Too many hotfix requests

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