Today’s fans are global - often based across the world from their favorite team, sports star, or artist; and they are also virtual - for example, 99% of NBA fans across the world will probably never set foot in an arena. These trends are driving a shift in not only fan behaviors, but also expectations. Fans engaging in live events virtually rely on applications to deliver rich realtime experiences with such low latency and reliability that it can almost replace the in-person experience.

A development environment is a crucial setup of tools, configurations, and processes that developers use to build, test, and deploy software. Whether it’s a local setup on a developer’s local machine or a remote cloud-based solution, a development environment’s primary goal is to provide a seamless space where code can be written, tested, and executed efficiently. It’s never been more important to have a streamlined setup of cloud and development environments.

In the first part of this series, we created a Django online shop with htmx. In this second part, we'll handle orders using Stripe.

Picture this: a customer reaches out with a seemingly simple request—convert a date field to a different format in their API responses. The catch? They only have read-only access to their database, which means no schema updates, no new columns, just pure data transformation. This intriguing challenge led us down the rabbit hole to rediscover one of DreamFactory's most powerful yet underutilized features: enhancing API calls with SQL functions.

System administrators, DBAs, and application developers all know about the need for data integration. That’s when you have to pull data from one database, application, or web service to another. Fortunately, this task is a lot less challenging than it used to be because APIs (application programming interfaces) are so popular today. APIs provide a standard way to share the data and services of one system with another, even if the two systems are otherwise incompatible.

When you build an app, you'll often find that certain tasks do not require user interaction and are better performed in the background. Elixir provides excellent primitives, such as Task.async, to offload these tasks from the main user pipeline. Additionally, libraries like Oban offer more control over background tasks when needed. There's also FLAME, which the core Phoenix team is developing to offer a scalable solution for offloading intensive tasks to remote machines.

According to Gartner, 87% of organizations are classified as having low business intelligence and analytics maturity, meaning they struggle to extract value from their data. This alarming statistic highlights a common struggle—turning raw data into actionable insights. Product teams often find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information they collect. Extracting meaningful patterns, deciphering user behavior, and predicting market trends from this sea of customer data can seem daunting.

Spring Boot is an open-source micro framework maintained by a company called Pivotal. It provides Java developers with a platform to get started with an auto configurable production-grade Spring application. With it, developers can get started quickly without losing time on preparing and configuring their Spring application. This post will guide you through understanding what the micro framework is and what it’s used for.

Large Language Models (LLM) are changing the way developers and QA engineers solve problems. They allow for quicker code generation, debugging, and automated testing, reducing development time by up to 40%. This shift has prompted 67% of senior IT leaders to focus on generative AI, with 33% planning to make it a top priority within the next 18 months. However, while LLM models offer immense potential, understanding how to get the most out of them while maintaining quality is important.