A typical day at Netguru looks as follows: One team is building an app for one of the biggest banks in Europe. Another team is working with Volkswagen to help them create a unique customer experience for their first boutique store. Yet another team is sitting at one table with a group of designers and developers experienced in creating cutting-edge unmanned ground vehicles.

ClickMechanic brings a revolution to the car repair and automotive industries. People uncomfortable with their lack of knowledge when leaving their car at a garage no longer need to worry thanks to ClickMechanic’s vetting system for mechanics and a fixed price for repair services. Mechanics can sign up to the platform to get more work and save on the costs of customer service. The result? 18,000 mechanics already on board and prices 50% lower than those of franchise dealers. I had the chance to talk to Andrew Jervis, ClickMechanic’s founder, about what inspired him to create this project, what they offer to customers and mechanics, and how they stay competitive on this highly specialised market.

From this interview, you will learn: How Peter Grosskopf, solarisBank’s CTO, scaled up a tech team How having no financial background was actually the prerequisite in his leading role in the banking platform What Lego bricks have in common with digital banking What the recent investment by BBVA might mean for the Berlin-based fintech startup. For anyone not yet familiar with the company: solarisBank is a Berlin-based, 150-person tech company with a full banking license, serving 60 corporate customers. It all started with the concept of building solarisBank as the first banking platform native to the digital economy – a platform that would enable any company to offer financial services. A few years ago, fintech startups used to working in the agile way, were struggling with lengthy and inefficient setup processes with traditional banks.

There's no denying that Vue.js has been gaining a lot of traction, fast. According to The State of JavaScript 2017 survey, 48% of developers want to learn this JavaScript framework, and 20% of developers used it so far. What's even more important is that 90% of developers who dipped their toes into the technology would use it again in their future projects.

It has been a while since my last post on must-have UX practices for fintech. I enjoyed the feedback I got, and I’m sorry I have kept you waiting. But there is a reason. For some time, I have been solving UX challenges for one of the biggest banks in Europe and a groundbreaking investment platform that enables individuals and their advisors to invest in top-tier private equity funds.

Even if ASP.NET has established a strong presence among industry leaders over the years, Node.js is quickly gaining traction as a viable alternative. Successful enterprises such as LinkedIn, Groupon, Uber, Netflix, and Ebay recently took advantage of Node.js in building their solutions.

- I think it was one of the best panels I was on during the last two years. It turned out to be a great opportunity to discuss more or less ‘contradictory beliefs’ of N26 and solarisBank with the help of other smart people - said Jörg Howein, Chief Product Officer of solarisBank.

Used by millions of developers all over the globe, Java has remained one of the most popular programming languages for the last 22 years. Still, JavaScript holds the title of the most widely deployed language in the world, and its surrounding environments such as a runtime like Node.js are gaining traction as well.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve kickstarted Machine Learning practice at Netguru. Matthew Opala, who became our ML Tech Lead, has dynamically grown a team of top experts in the industry.

Thanks to the microservices architecture, it is easier to set up a quality web application than ever before. Just write the core engine and connect it with the best services that provide the application repository, database, communication, payments, login, and authentication. Doing all this is much easier if your app runs on Node.js than on any other backend environment.