React Native is becoming extremely popular in mobile development among small companies and well-established enterprises. We’ve also seen a big interest in React Native coming from our clients, so we decided to conduct a small study to see what’s behind the framework’s success.

Every IT project is either new, when you start everything from scratch or based on legacy code when the project is taken over. In case of the latter, the cost of diving into a project which hasn’t been properly maintained for a while may surprise you. There are two kinds of legacy projects. Some of them will allow you to just sit down and get on with your work. These are both maintainable at a reasonable cost and they are a positive experience for your developers. The other kind is the one that an army of tooled up devs must enter into and spend weeks working on, trying to tidy them all up. One man is not able to do it - anything he or she touches there, fails miserably. So what are the differences there? Are there any common things that make one project cheaper to maintain than the other?

High bounce rates are one of the key indicators that your web app is not working properly. When a user leaves your app, in practice you lose money. Moreover, in most cases you waste some of the budget you have spent on marketing. First you paid to acquire this customer, than you lost the opportunity to earn. There are plenty of reasons why users leave - flawy technology, bad business model or a solution that doesn’t really solve a problem. Let’s focus on the tech details of why your users can leave your app and what a good development company should do to prevent it. 

Thanks to our clients we have a chance to participate in some of the most innovative and futuristic projects on the planet. One of them is ShiftWear. A New York based startup that threw down a challenge to the biggest fashion corporations. The goal is to create "most advanced, immersive sneakers ever".

Hi there, iOS enthusiasts! Let’s see what’s new this month in the iOS world. 

Welcome to the 45th edition of Ruby Brief – your monthly selection of best news, tips and trends from the Ruby world. Enjoy!

The major benefit of Saas Solutions for clients being that they don’t have to invest in hardware on their premises and have the opportunity to outsource their IT needs and responsibilities.

Barometa's founder Rupert Sellers came up with an idea for the next generation job platform for career-oriented people in luxury hospitality. In looking for a technology partner, he chose Netguru.

Like many other tech hubs in the CEE region, the Baltic states are getting more and more attention from venture capitalists and investors. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, with a joint population of over 6 million inhabitants, are one of the most active tech hubs in the region. It comes as no surprise that the business is thriving in the region. According to the FT report on Central and Eastern Europe: Technology & Innovation, the Baltic states have been ranked top 3 among the countries in the CEE region where it’s the easiest to do business. But what is the driving force behind the tech development in the Baltic states? And, more importantly, what are the biggest advantages and challenges for these countries?

GraphQL has grown a lot as a technology since it was released in 2015, and at the moment of writing this article, it has been adapted in 20 different programming languages and has been used in production by many companies across the world. If you want to know why this has happened, you can read a short explanation why Github decided to move to GraphQL and read our in-depth article on the topic here.

When you think about SEO, probably the first thing that pops up in your mind is content. Indeed, the keywords you use on your website play an important role when comes to your site’s position in Google search results. However, it’s not the only thing you should focus on. A big potential for improving SEO is hidden in code. A good web development company should take care of its quality -  it can bring measurable results for website accessibility and result in driving more traffic to your app.

Speed of a web app is one of the most crucial things that influence SEO, conversion rate or user experience. It is something you and your web development company should be concerned with when it comes to user retention. According to an Aberden Group Report, a 1-second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions. Moreover, according to Gomez.com, increase in page response time from 2 to 10 seconds increased page abandonment rates by 38%.

Ruairí Doyle, Head of Product at Apps for Good, is transforming the way technology is taught in schools by turning young tech consumers into tech creators. Apps for Good partners with educators in schools and learning centres to deliver its app development course to young people between 8 and 18 years of age. Since 2010, the Apps for Good course has been delivered to more than 50,000 students in over 1,000 schools across the UK. We asked Ruairí how they achieved that.

We’ve just built Ember Socket Guru, a package for Ember.js, which enables easy integration with WebSockets services and implementations such as Pusher.js, ActionCable, Socket.io and Phoenix Channels.

SEO is really important for many projects. It can increase the number of people who view your application or even boost conversions! For example, in e-commerce, 38.9 percent of purchases came from search engines such as Google. Also, search engines can make use of the website’s content to allow the user to buy products straight from the search engine. Here are a couple of tips you can use to make sure that search engine robots will love your website.

Facebook has just made a huge gift to developers using their technology stack all over the world. The company made quite a number of announcements about the new releases of Facebook’s open source libraries. A lot of love was given to React developers, which is not a surprise, if we consider the fact that this view library has been growing in popularity ever since it was released in May 2013. React has received a new library for creating visual reality experiences, called React VR and a massive update to the reconciliation algorithm with the release of React Fiber. It has also received a new, refined version of its GraphQL client library Relay. The new version of Relay, called Relay Modern, introduces a variety of changes that are worth discussing.

Recently, the trend for “serverless” started gaining a lot of traction both among developers and business people. As you’re reading this, you might be wondering, what on Earth does the new buzzword, serverless, even mean.

In the past, it was quite normal for there to be only one technical person per project – this person was called a web developer and was responsible for everything: starting from creating a layout, through coding, to designing the back-end architecture of the website/app. For years, the process of creating websites and applications has been evolving – the technologies, best practices and the average number of people needed in a project have changed.

Julia Hatton, Director of Youth Programs at Rising Sun Energy Center, a non-profit working to empower individuals to achieve environmental and economic sustainability for themselves and their communities.

Conversion rates are one of the most popular and accurate KPIs in web apps. That’s why you want to keep them high. There are many reasons why conversion rates are low, and we usually associate them with design issues. That said, the reasons for poor conversion rates can go way beyond interfaces, colours and the content used. Solving the non-design issues mentioned in this article will help you boost conversion rates and will also take less time, money and effort than redesign and implementation.