Posts by "Roxana"

Employer

Making An Easy Job Of Hiring A CakePHP Developer

January 2, 2020 Comments Off Roxana read

Programming languages come and go, but one that has remained with us is PHP. In the world of developers, this is still one of the most popular programming languages. One of the reasons for this is the multiple frameworks that are all very distinct. The framework you use and the skills your candidate need will very much depend on the sphere of your project. An enterprise-level application might suggest you hire a developer well versed in Symfony. If you are looking to build an extremely scalable web app, you are better off hiring an experienced CakePHP developer.

This article is going to go over CakePHP, one of PHP’s most popular frameworks. We will also look at some of the advantages and disadvantages as well as what to look for in a developer.

A Quick Look At CakePHP

CakePHP is a free, open code framework for PHP programming. The inspiration came from Ruby on Rails and first came out in 2006. Today, there are around 200,000 websites that are using this particular framework. It requires less code that other PHP framework, which makes it faster and simpler, a huge bonus for developers. It is suitable for small and complex databases. Another thing that really helps is a strong community.

Here are some of the well-known projects that have used CakePHP:

Orangescrum- a flexible web app that allows for the organisation in project management
Zhen CRM- a self-hosted, full source code
Vamcart- a user-friendly shopping cart
QuickApps- an open-source CMS for more complex websites
Croogo- a multilingual CMS

The Popularity of PHP

Within the last 12 months, PHP has moved up 2 spots on the Tiobe ranking to number 7. PHP will continue to be a favorite because it’s so easy to use; it has powerful frameworks and the frequent release of frameworks. PHP is reborn with each framework and this allows the programming language to stay one step ahead of the others.

A Comparison of PHP Frameworks

PHP frameworks will have their similarities, however, each one has certain characteristics that one developer may prefer over another. Some may be faster, others better for novice developers, and there are many that will be good for smaller projects and others that are apt for complex tasks.

Below is a summary of some of the top PHP frameworks:

Laravel

Simple documents
New Tools with an IoC container
It’s not necessary to write HTML and PHP code in the same file
Development not as fast
Not as much in-built support

Zend

Used by many and is well tested
Trusted for its older framework
Excellent features
Doesn’t have the best documentation
Harder to learn

Yii

Incredibly quick
Plenty of extensions
Lots of documentation and a large community
Easy to learn and lightweight
Not a good solution for big apps

Cake

Highly productive as you can reuse code
Template system is speedy and flexible
Direct access to Core and App directories
Tools for safe and secure apps
The documentation needs to be better
Little support for migration changes so hard to update versions

The Pros and Cons of CakePHP

There is no one single programming language that is perfect. CakePHP is no different. In the first place, we will cover the Pros.

Documentation: You will find the documentation is informative, easy to read and clearly structured

Speed: Some PHP developers consider Cake to be one of the fastest

Structure: It’s important that you follow the rules of Cake, and ensure your models and methods are named in a specific way

Next, a quick look at some of the downsides.

Safety: It is difficult to comprehend the whole access control

Documentation: It lacks information on what to do if something goes wrong

Complexity: It’s not the best option for a programmer who is just starting out

Skills to Look For in a CakePHP Developer

The requirements to hire a developer are never set in stone, but it is advisable to find a candidate who has experience in:

WordPress
CakePHP
Core PHP
HTML
CSS
JavaScript and/or JQuery
MySQL

It would also be great if your candidate had some experience in project management and hands one object-oriented PHP programming. Other necessary skills may depend on your project.

Should You Choose to Outsource CakePHP Developers?

If you are looking for a CakePHP developer, you will likely discover that searching to outsource will open up more possibilities for you. You will be able to find developers with more experience, more flexibility, and often better project management and faster turnarounds. One of the other attractions is that you will be able to reduce your costs.

Employer

What Opportunities a Developer Is Looking for in a New Job

December 31, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

Your job listing needs to be catchy, informative and professional, all in a limited number of words. Sometimes, this is a difficult task to face and normally the hardest part is understanding what a developer is looking for, particularly when you aren’t sure of their biggest requirements.

If you are in need of inspiration for your job listing, we have researched some of the key things developers are looking for. Needless to say, an attractive salary and the potential to develop their careers were both high on the list, but there were also a few requirements that you may not have considered.

The Level of Experience Stated in the Job Description

A developer is often referred to as outstanding or amazing and this encourages recruiters to presume a developer is fit for any job independent of the required levels of experience. Nevertheless, the necessary experience that was stated in a job listing was high on the list of things they took into account.

There are two sides to this. First, if your role is for a management position, you need to make sure that your job description details the responsibilities you require so that non-qualified candidates don’t waste your time or theirs in applying. On the other hand, if there are certain things that are more flexible, word the description in such a way that talented developers aren’t put off.

The Company’s Financial Situation

While a developer isn’t going to be sold solely on financial benefits not do they want to see the profit and loss statements, they do want to that the company is financially stable. On a scale of 0 to 4, with 4 being extremely important, the financial performance of funding had an average rating of 2.5. With this in mind, you should be fully prepared to be open with regards to your company’s financial situation, and more so when the situation isn’t that great.

Certain Roles or Job Titles

The job title is seen as critical when recruiting developers. A job title that oversells the position will give the impression that you are hiding something or even deceiving the candidate. If a candidate reads a job title that is not appealing enough, they are likely to just skip past the job listing completely. Be as accurate as possible about the role you need filling.

Travel Time

Nobody wants to have to sit in traffic for an hour to get to their workplace. This is made worse when a candidate doesn’t realize just how far your location is. This isn’t really in your control but there are ways you can make the candidate’s life a bit easier. Even just by adding your address in the job listing, candidates can search for the best and most convenient method of commuting. Never underestimate the power of remote work. By offering the candidate the chance to work from home for one or even two days, it makes potentially long commute the other days a lot more bearable.

Employer

What Machine Learning Engineers Look for in a Job

December 26, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

The Machine Learning field is growing rapidly and is good news for both the engineers and the companies looking to hire a machine learning engineer.

Machine Learning Engineers carry out extremely complex work, so it’s not really a surprise that companies may have a hard time hiring one. The field highly technical and requires a deep knowledge of systems design, math, stats, engineering, and domains. The actual day-to-day role can vary enormously and depends on the company and its needs. For instance, an engineer could be developing new models, applying existing models to new domains, or applying models in alternative ways.

We have put together a few tips on what Machine Learning Engineers look out for when looking for a new job that will help your hiring efforts.

A Rewarding and Enriching Work Experience

Most fields could benefit from advances in machine learning. Speech recognition, Internet fraud detection, genome analysis, and artificial intelligence, are all things that Machine Learning Engineers are trained to work on. Machine engineers want to work for a company that is cutting edge and provides them with a stimulating and interesting work environment.

Strong Leadership within the Tech Team

Machine learning is no longer something only huge software companies use. Any company can use utilize it to tackle the practical problems within its industry. Not any company will do – Machine Learning Engineers want to work for a company that both understands the benefits and values it.

Advice for Hiring Machine Learning Engineers

A piece of advice from job seekers is that companies should do their research to determine what type of role they’re looking for. Frequently, companies think they require one type of developer, but then after a few interviews, realize they really need another.

Employer

What You Need To Know Before Hiring A Mobile Developer

December 24, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

During the interview process, your mobile developer isn’t expecting you to know the intricate details of the latest software, after all, it’s their job to impress you with their expertise. That being said, you will earn more respect and be able to discuss the technical requirements of the job if you have a good grasp of the subject.

A quick online search of mobile software trends will inform you of the popular (and not so popular) programming languages at the moment. For now, we are going to go over some of the necessary things you should know before you begin your interviews.

Popular Mobile Platforms

Android is by far the most popular platform. There is approximately double the number of Android developers than there are iOS developers. While it might be easier to find an Android developer, both are crucial in mobile app development.

You will run into problems finding Windows Phone developers, as the platform has never really been able to compete with iOS or Android.

The Highs and Lows of Frameworks and Libraries

The platform used only scratches the surface of mobile app development. iPhone, Android, and Windows have been popular for years but recently we have begun to see the rise of cross-platform apps. A cross-platform allows developers to create an app that will function in exactly the same way whether the user is on an Android device or an iOS device.

Cordova is a framework that has been around for some years. 2011 and 2012 saw a huge increase in its popularity and it has remained high since then. Xamarin took a while to gain interest but in 2016 saw a sharp increase when Microsoft acquired it. The youngest framework to make a noticeable presence is React-native.

On the contrary, jquery-mobile peaked in popularity in 2013. Developers can make responsive web apps that are equally functional on desktops and mobiles. Yet it has steadily declined since then.

2015 was a great year for parse.com. It supported mobile apps without the need to create a backend. But in 2016 took a great fall due to Facebook (the owners) announcing it was going to shut down the platform.

If you are going to risk discussing these frameworks make sure you are talking about them in the past tense. If not, your candidate may come across as out of touch with the latest technologies.

Going Beyond Mobile Developers

If you are looking to add a web developer or even a data scientist, you will want to make sure you are well aware of the trends and patterns in the field for you hiring for.

You only get one shot at an interview with a candidate. This is just as much your first impression as it is theirs. A little bit of research will allow you to come across as informed and invested in your product, as well as making your company more attractive for the candidate.

Employer

Employing Developers During the Year

December 19, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

Employers have a lot of questions when it comes to hiring developers. The questions mainly are focused on employing developers during the year. A lot of employers are questioning the best and the worst timing for approach.

For example, some of them believe that certain months are better for the attention of interested developers and ask about them. Others, on the other hand, want to know is it bad to hire someone just before the holidays or during the summer? These questions and a ton of others related to this topic can be easily answered.

The search provided on different sites has all the information. The traffic of developers and their answers and questions on multiple different IT sites and forums can say a lot about this problem.

We have the same results year after year. Drop-In traffic can be significantly seen around the holidays so this question is answered. Do not hire people around the holidays. While this may be true for the holidays, it cannot be said about summer days. The traffic is not low during the summer at all but there is a catch. There is a slight decrease when it comes to students. Academic institutions are not present during the summer so sites are overflown with professional developers only. This means that summer is the ideal period of posting a job.

It can be said that the traffic is steady during the year but the question is changed. When do developers look for new jobs? What is the perfect time for them? When do they apply?

A steady rate result once again. There are no drops during the Holidays and there are also no drops during the summer. To put it differently, developers are looking for jobs during the whole year, without exceptions.

Do not put anything on hold. If you plan to hire someone any time is good. There are no wrong or right seasons.

Employer

The Intimidating Scrum Master

December 17, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

Honestly speaking, the name Scrum Master seems to refer to an online game character that rules the imaginary kingdom inside that game. It also sounds like every other character in that game is afraid of it due to the control and the authority the creators gave him.

Jokes aside, Scrum Master draws a lot of attention around it, not only for the name but for the role and the existence as well. The basic purpose of the Scrum Master is to build trust and empower members of the team.

Conquering Scrum, in fact, is not that hard because let’s be realistic, the path to becoming a master is really not that long, it lasts two to three days and it ends with an online test.

After taking and mastering the online tests, you get a certification and your new role takes action. Of course, everything runs smoothly but if you take the core of Scrum master into consideration you realize that its duty is to empower the team and give more quests.

You have already reached your goal so why would you like to break something so good by following its recommendations? Should Scrum Muster be ditched after reaching a good position for yourself and your team? Should you take a step back? What’s next? To be fair, Scrum Master, after all, has a responsibility to empower the team and give new tasks.

The role of the Scrum Master

No matter how simple it looks like, Scrum Master does not operate normally. Somehow it does restore confidence among the team and we know that regaining and restoring confidence is extremely hard. Why is it so special? Is it because of its tools? Is it because of its processes?

A couple of Scrum experienced people revealed that Scrum Master usually maintains its process tools, delivers reports to the team and the shareholders and updates indicators.

The Best Scrum Master – Fiction or Nonfiction?

Generally speaking, if you want a “job well done” you should hire someone qualified with tons of experience. The same applies here. The perfect Scrum Master does exist, only the path of finding it is a bit tricky. The role requires a lot of incredible organizational and leadership skills which will end up being praised.

Finding someone who can supervise and direct other workers what to do, or to put it another way someone with sky-rocketing soft skills requires calculations and long hours.

The Scrum Master is crucial for your company so, a better start by finding someone well experienced especially in this territory and someone who is easy and adaptable to change their mindset to Agile. It will be a great challenge, yes, but for teams willing to improve won’t be an extremely difficult task at all.

A lot of material is involved around the Scrum Masters and they should not be hated or ignored. Each profile should be made according to one person’s needs and it must be remembered that an Agile mindset and promotion are key points for success.

Employer

What is the reason for hiring white label developers?

December 12, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

Businesses all over the world are starting to use products provided by white-label or mass-market software. The reason they are switching is very simple. The cost of development.

Custom software developers significantly increased their cost over the years. It has been estimated that about $122 billion were paid for their services in the period between 2012 and 2015. This is a big number that didn’t go well with the companies and the allowed budged. They found a solution in a short time.

Many companies recently have started to demand white label developers who make all their wishes come true and who have big experience in a lot of different areas. White label developers are present in the software platforms, in the website development, web applications, and applications.

The big demand is, in fact, the reason why many companies started to purchase. The demand for them implies that they can be trusted and that they can do excellent work. Let’s elaborate on the most important reasons below.

Why do companies use white label developers?

Startups and big organizations have one goal. To offer their partners and buyers the best services while at the same time keep their spending low. This is why white label development is the best option for them. Here are a couple of reasons why big companies hire white label website developers:

They easily can brand different types of products and services
They deliver their work in a short time
The work they deliver is equally acceptable to partners and corporations
The set-up of partnership is easier
Larger customer base is guaranteed
Decreased cost
They can customize anything
Increase sales, marketing and resell
Significant business reach and amazing ROI for all shareholders

Dedicated white label developers can also:

Increase the distribution
Offer custom software development
Offer custom application development
Better the user experience
Decrease the development time
Decrease the cost
Better SEO and social media

Their main duties include:

Developing, managing and then presenting unique new applications, tools and other solutions required by the corporation that hired them.
Branding the application and making it suitable
Testing the application
Making and updating technical documentation
Making responsive website designs and codes which
Developing APIs
Designing APIs
Monitor and improve the performance
Making tools according to the latest trends
Offering security policy
eCommerce websites

Five big companies shared their experience with the white label developers. Each one of them offers a successful story and tells why every corporation should consider and later implement the services. They agreed and made their business customized and branded according to the mass market platforms.

Western Union – With over $473 million revenue in 2017 Western Union is for sure one of the leading financial corporations on the globe. This company requires SEO, SMM, PPC, and white label developers to take care of them. White label developers also take care of the marketing.

Drive Time – Purchasing cars in the United States of America has been significantly easier after Drive Time Company took over. It has a lot of partners and it uses its services though white labeling as well.

High Jump Supply Chain Co – This company also offers a lot of different brands through multiple partners around the world. It has spread across 66 countries in the world and it operates successfully thanks to the help of a white label.

Santander Group – The growth this company received in a short matter of time also happened because of the white label developers. Different financial companies in the country agreed on partnership after the services of the white label were implemented.

Amazon – Amazon’s services are needed across the world. This is why it has become the leading retail store. Of course, it uses white label branding and development for millions of partners and affiliates.

Employer

Make Application Development Easy With Quasar Engineers

December 10, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

Modern technology makes our lives easier. Our processes are becoming simpler by using different tools. One such tool that eases our worries is the Internet. It builds connections and makes us reach people. Currently, there are approximately 4.39 billion users who use the internet around the world, and this proves how vital it is in helping communicate and exchange information. Businesses have banked on this opportunity by relying on the internet to build connections with customers. For example, through applications.

Businesses communicate with their clients through the web and different applications. Customers gather information about the services, contact the client through mediums – leading to business transactions. Therefore, the web & mobile industry has been climbing to the top. Since web and mobile applications ask for different techniques, there are ways through which applications can be designed to target both web and mobile users. It assists in entering and grabbing hold of cyberspace with applications.

One such way is to use the Vui.JS framework, a front-end framework. It allows developers to build responsive web applications. Moreover, you can view these applications from any screen, whether it’s a desktop or a mobile. Along with SPAs (single-page applications), they copy the behavior and performance of domestic mobile applications. Ultimately making the interface look attractive and providing the user with premium service.

Vue has met new frameworks that provide a better experience in developing cross-platform web applications, making them faster than before. The article focuses on the towering Vue.JS-based web application development tools, which is called the Quasar framework.

An outlook of Quasar Framework

An application development framework based on Vue.JS. It allows developers to hasten their development process in cross-platform applications. Moreover, it responds quickly, provides quality to the domestic app web applications and allows the development of mobile applications. Also, you can create both web and mobile applications at the same time, without using a different code base saving extra work.

Quasar is a fresh framework, as it was released to the public in August 2016, it works wonders for the developer community. On Quasar’s GitHub page it has collected 9,835 stars and gathered 194 contributors from the developer community – these are outstanding figures compared to its young age.

Features:

Multiple Platform Support:

Quasar grabs cross-platform support from one source code. Developers only need to develop once and can set the application as an effective web application that grants native-quality performance (it utilizes the single-page application, plus progressive web application tech), mobile apps, plus desktop applications (using the Electron framework tech).

Best Practice Compliance

It follows various practices that exist in the industry for developing web and mobile applications, is built to back developers that use the Quasar framework too. It uses minification, grants feature that allow accessibility, utilizes lazy loading to split code, does ES6 transpiling and uses tree shaking. Together, they’re implemented without the developers providing any configuration.

Right-to-Left (RTS) Scripting

Often, languages and frameworks are Left-to-Right (LTR) scripts, they exist for LTR writing systems (English alphabet). But few writing systems read from RTS. Quasar provides RTL scripting to assist the people who rely on this way, so codes are written and read R-to-L.

Enhanced Quasar Framework

Quasar CLI

Quasar banks on a developer-friendly command-line interface (CLI). It grants desirable features for developers. Quasar CLI is renowned for the state-preserving hot module reload (HMR). Developers don’t have to refresh/restart anymore, they can edit the code and view the results immediately. It has its error compilation overlay technology and developers do not need to manually refresh/restart the app development servers of Quasar. Quasar CLI is easily installable. It needs Node JS installation on the machine, and it’s easy as a single on the command line:

Npm install -g quasar-cli

Platform Support & Wide Developer

Quasar sits on the top with a responsive developer community – they assist each other. It has an official forum for freelance Quasar developers, a Discord server, an official Twitter account! Talking about platform support, Quasar works with Windows, Linux, and macOS along with famous browsers and common operating systems.

Quasar VS Vuetify

Constructed atop Vue.JS, Vuetify is coming up to pace with Quasar. Hence, it’d be convenient to compare the two.

Quasar stacks at 436 KB while Vuetify is 815 KB – making Quasar light. This allows Quasar apps to load quickly. Vuetify faces backlash from the developers’ community as it lacks detailing in several of its functionalities, it asks for edition on the inner workings. Whereas, Quasar’s documentation is appreciated for being competent. Moreover, if you’re strict with adopting the principles of material design then Vuetify is tailored for your needs (proving minimum customization) whereas Quasar grabs material design as an option but allows customization.

It seems that Quasar takes the win here! Owing to its outstanding features, the Quasar wins by a considerable margin.

Employer

How to Find and Hire a QA Engineer

December 5, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

The Quality Assurance engineer is the last route out for whatever the end product. The QA engineer makes sure that the product is the best it can be when it hits the market. Because of this responsibility, the QA engineer is top-of-the-line in his profession and is the most difficult to find and recruit. It can, however, be done with the right approach that begins where QA engineers spend spare time. The QA engineer, therefore, represents not only the entire engineering team but the company’s reputation as well.

Know Where They Spend Their Free Time

As is true with most engineers, QAs stay away from the networking social forums. Instead, they frequent forums in which they can share information and comfortably talk with their peers. Forums of most interests to QAs are more general software testing forums. The focus is not so much on language-specific issues. Software Testing Club and QA Forums attract QA’s feature conversations around quality assurance best practices. It’s estimated that the Software Quality community on Stack Overflow attracts more than 13,000 visitors per day.

When potential candidates are spotted, it’s best not to launch into a recruiting spiel. The forums are places for engineers to relax and talk to others who are there for the same purpose. While they might be interested in a new job prospect, it’s best to not jump into hearing about one. Instead, enter the conversations. To do that, a prior recruitment strategy might be to learn as much as you can about the QA’s daily tasks and challenges.

Understand Their Biggest Challenges at Work

Minor glitches in an application might be accepted as something the final users can tolerate, but the best QA engineers often escalate the glitches to bugs and send the application back to the engineers.

A scalable testing process is a QA task. Getting stakeholders to use the same process and tools can best be accomplished with clear guidelines.

Regardless of the QA’s best efforts, it is not improbable that there will be bugs in an application. Setting up and managing expectations across multiple teams whose jobs are affected by the product is one of the QA’s most difficult challenges.

Know What They Look for in New Jobs

Understanding the other side of the recruitment coin is an important tool for success. It’s not enough to understand some of the tech talks, but you should also be aware of what the candidates are looking for. At least one QA professional speaks of what is important in her job search. Ludmilla Sivanathan, QAManager at Clearbridge Mobile, says she needs to be challenged, and if the job doesn’t demand she “push” herself she won’t apply. Additionally, she asks “if the developers are open to feedback” and does the team share responsibility.

The last, but certainly not the least, the concern of the potential QA candidate is whether the company will encourage advancement.

Employer

How to Find and Hire Site Reliability Engineers (SREs)

December 3, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

The initial problem with finding and hiring a Site Reliability Engineer is that not everyone is on the same page as to who is one and what would be his/her exact requirements. While that, of course, is an awkward exaggeration the question remains:

Is an SRE responsible for building servers?
Does am SRE write a lot of code?
Who is impacted the most by the work of an SRE?

The definitive answer to the problem comes from Ben Treynor, VP of Engineering at Google. He knows all about SREs because he is one.”It happens, he says, when a software engineer is asked to design an operations function. In addition to automating processes like server configurations, SREs ensure that websites are fast and available and provide a best-in-class web experience for the customer base.

Does it sound overwhelming? It’s a lot of responsibility and those who can handle it are in high demand. That means they are difficult to recruit, but first, you have to find them.

Where do you Find Them?

You won’t find them at the popular social networking sites. They just don’t have the spare time to spend where nobody understands their work and their problems. Specialized forums such as The Cisco Learning Network and Spiceworks are favored spots to hang out. SRE’s share knowledge and conversation at AnandTech, Server Fault, and Network Engineering.

How do you Talk to Them?

After you find one, how do you recruit him? Know enough about him and the work he does to maintain a reasonable conversation. No. You don’t have to have a degree in the subject. Just show an interest in the work. The willingness to ask questions is important. This is especially true concerning SRE challenges.

SREs create run books with instructions on what to do or check when something goes wrong with a device. Such documentation resolves issues as quickly as possible
SREs are not stuck with a lot of code writing. This observation comes from Andrew Fong, Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Rather, he says, “SREs are worried about data center deployment and design.”
SREs, he adds, “worry about other layers of the stack.” This directs their attention to areas other than the software engineering side.

Know What They Look for in New Jobs

From the other side of the recruiting process, there are a few specific things that SREs want in their workplace. An interview with Mark Henderson, an SRE at Stack Overflow explains.

Organizations open to change that allows flexibility in the exploration of new technologies is important. Organizations that are too gith are to be avoided.
Relying on the mutual respect between developers and operations is essential. Everyone works better if developers trust the SREs.
Realistic expectations about on-call shifts are a “must” part of recruiting. Henderson explains that most SRE’s expect to be on-call on a rotating schedule,