Thoughts

A space to share our perspective on everything from UX to DevOps to Mobile Apps. Browse our latest below.

All Article Topics

July 21, 2016
Promptworks Among 2016 Top Software Developers in Philly
We are honored to be recognized as one of the top software engineering firms in the Philadelphia area.
July 14, 2016
The Iron Triangle: One Project Constraint to Rule Them All
What you need to know about the Iron Triangle and why.
July 7, 2016
Writing Skills for Amazon Alexa
An introduction to pylexa, a Python library that makes it easy to develop Amazon Alexa Skills.
June 20, 2016
Automated Testing of Cybersource Transactions
Mike Toppa discusses using the Cybersourcery Testing ruby gem for testing transactions in complex API environments.
June 20, 2016
Load Testing with Locust
An introduction to load-testing a web application with Locust.
June 16, 2016
On Doing It Yourself
A short essay on the value of doing things the hard way.
May 26, 2016
Delegation with BasicObject
Using BasicObject to build proxy objects.
May 5, 2016
Configuring Complex Luigi Pipelines
Better ways of configuring complex Luigi pipelines.
March 16, 2016
Handling Environment Secrets in Docker on the AWS Container
A solution to encrypt and securely retrieve environment variables in Docker using AWS KMS, without writing to the container filesystem or EC2 instance.
December 28, 2015
When Software Becomes a Big Ball of Mud
Jason Garber, co founder of Promptworks discusses a common software development anti-pattern, the “big ball of mud—no architecture, no testing, and a big steaming pile of technical debt.”
December 18, 2015
Trust and Use of Insecure Software
In 1984, Ken Thompson wrote Reflections on Trusting Trust which provided a formal demonstration that absolute security of software is unachievable. Running any software at all involves an act of trust between people.