An application programming interface, API for short, is the connector between 2 applications. For example, a user interface that needs user data will call an endpoint, like a special URL, with request parameters and receive the data back if the request is valid. Modern applications rely on APIs to send data back and forth to

The traveling salesman problem is a classic challenge of finding the shortest and most efficient route for a person to take given a list of destinations. This is one of many real-world optimization problems that companies encounter. How should they schedule product distribution, or promote product bundles, or define sales territories? The answers to these

Microservice architecture has become very common over the past few years because of the availability of containers and container orchestrators like Kubernetes. While containers are overall positive for scaling apps and making them more available, they’ve also introduced hurdles like persisting data and state, and container restarts or pod failures. Development teams put significant work

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence concerned with giving computers the ability to understand text and spoken words. “Understanding” includes intent, sentiment, and what’s important in the message. NLP powers things like voice-operated software, digital assistants, customer service chat bots, and many other academic, consumer and enterprise tools. The company Botpress

In software engineering, telemetry is the data that is collected about your applications. Unlike logging, which is used in the development of apps to pinpoint errors and code flows, telemetry data includes all operational data including logs, metrics, events, traces, usage, and other analytical data. Companies usually visualize this information to troubleshoot problems and understand

Cloud computing provides tools, storage, servers, and software products through the internet. Securing these resources is a constant process for companies deploying new code to their cloud environments. It’s easy to overlook security flaws because company applications are very complex and many people work together to develop them. Wyze Labs, for example, had millions of

Modern applications are increasingly built as large, distributed systems. A distributed system is a program where its components are located on different machines that communicate with one another to create a single cohesive app. Components may exist as multiple instances across “nodes,” the computers hosting them, which form clusters of nodes that span across geographic

Geospatial technology impacts every person who uses a smartphone, drives a car, or flies in airplanes. It refers to all of the technology used to acquire and interpret geographic information. In more advanced settings, geospatial technology is used for constructing dynamic maps, 3D visualizations, and scientific and governmental simulations.  The company Makepath specializes in geospatial

Large portions of software development budgets are dedicated for testing code. A new component may take weeks to thoroughly test, and even then mistakes happen. If you consider software defects as security issues then the concern goes well beyond an application temporarily crashing. Although even minor bugs can cost companies a lot of time to

Encryption algorithms provide the means to secure and transfer sensitive information by taking input and transforming it into an unreadable output. Usually a special key, or multiple keys, are needed to unscramble the information back to the original input. These algorithms power the security of everything from our cell phone lock screens to Fortune 500