Dev Talk Archives | White Cloak Technologies

Quickly Implement Fuzzy Searching in your Software Application

Bryce Mercines — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 13:43:34 +0000

Search functionalities are vital for software applications but can be challenging to implement. For this reason, you can use a Javascript-based library called Fuse.js to implement a user-friendly search.

When to use Fuzzy searching?

Fuzzy search is a search behavior that allows users to search for data in a software application dataset, even if they have no, incomplete, or incorrect information about what they are looking for. If you think about it, it is the best way to implement searching in any application.

The best example of this behavior is a Google search where you can provide vague search queries or even misspelled words, but it will still try to give you the best result.

Fuse.js

Fuse.js is the library we are exploring today because it is fast, lightweight, has zero dependencies, and can work on both the backend and frontend sides of your application. What’s more, it is super easy to get started. Finally, it returns the closest possible result for search queries, even for misspelled ones.

Usage:

You can begin by downloading Fuse.js using yarn or NPM

You can then proceed to import it into your file as shown below:

From here you can define a JSON object that you want to search, then create a Fuse.js instance where you can pass the object to search and keys that you would like Fuse.js to focus on.

Try Full Demo here.

As you can see, it will return the nearest possible match from the search parameter.

Conclusion

Now, although Fuse.js is awesome, it does have some limitations. Being a JavaScript search library, it can only do so much on the backend and the frontend side of your application. For instance, searching a JSON dataset can be resource intensive, and is not ideal for critical applications that deal with a large amount of data. For small to medium-scale applications, however, Fuse.js is highly recommended. You can learn more about it here.

UX and UI Cooking 101

Amy Domingo — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 07:06:16 +0000

User Experience Design (UX) is like preparing food according to your customer’s “taste”. What do they feel like eating? What spice level do they want it in? Are they following a certain diet? There will even be times that they won’t even be able to describe what they want. They’ll just know it when they taste it. Sounds familiar?

Likewise, when making your product, you really need to get to know your customers to make your product palatable to them. Put yourself in their shoes. Discover which ingredients work best with their taste and needs. Through the process of getting to know them, you might even find out that what they need is actually different from what their current taste is. As a UX designer, your job involves balancing out their needs with their wants.

Now that you’ve got the taste and nutrition right, it’s now time to make it look great and aesthetically pleasing. It looks as good (or even better) as it tastes! That’s where the User Interface (UI) Design comes in. Can you make your product appealing enough so that your customers can’t wait to dig into your product?

“But wait, is making it look good is part of the cooking and food preparation process too?”

Yes, you’re right! And that’s why UX and UI need to work seamlessly together. This is the White Cloak way. You need to consider both practices to cook up a great product that keeps your customers coming back for more!

Agile

miguel.fermin — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 07:05:27 +0000

“When can we launch?”

This is probably the most frequently asked question we get from our clients. As always, we love the eagerness, but as any software development goes, there should be critical planning and proper prioritization of which features should be done first.

Here at White Cloak, we also want to launch as soon as possible! This is why we opt to work with our clients who understand how to work with agility in mind. Through conducting workshops about the agile mindset, our clients get a better picture of how they can get to the launch date as quickly and efficiently as possible. By having measurable ROIs through a definied iterative delivery of features, there is constant feedback and small but continous releases.

In the coming weeks, we will do a high-level explanation of the methodologies, how to get feedback, and what success metrics to look out for. At the end of this series, we hope that everyone will have a better understanding of how to use these practices to the fullest.

Environments in Software Design

miguel.fermin — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 07:03:42 +0000

Did you know that testing cars are a lot like the best practices in testing software?

Much like car manufacturers go through rigorous tests before they deliver their cars to customers, we too in the software development industry have different stages wherein we make sure that the app of our clients is operating perfectly. We call these different stages: Environments.

We have the development environment where features are incrementally added and tested by developers. Once passed, developers hand the build off to quality assurance to be checked in the Testing Environment. Here they perform testing activities to detect all possible defects or faults related to the added feature. After this, we move on to the Staging Environment to simulate all possible user behaviors and use real data to see how the application behaves. Similar to crash testing in cars, we want to know how our software fares in extreme circumstances.

Finally, once the car or the software is done through these testing environments it is now ready to be used in production. Are you testing your software like how you test cars? Are you making sure that the personal data of your software users are protected? Have you tested if the security of your applications is impenetrable? Are you confident that users will be able to use your app as planned without issues? If any of your answers in the questions above are no, then you might want to revisit how you test your software.

At White Cloak, we test our software the way car manufacturers do, like our users’ lives depend on it.

MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

miguel.fermin — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 07:01:41 +0000

More often than not, even when the puzzle is still unfinished, you already have a rough idea of the final picture. An MVP or Minimum Viable Product is similar to that. An MVP is a version of your product that shows your customers the value you bring them with the least amount of resources and effort. Sounds great, right? But you might wonder how one starts building an MVP. It is critical that we list down the most critical features and only work on those that will convince our customers to try our product or service.

The MVP is only a piece of an even larger picture called Build-Measure-Learn framework that teaches us to get feedback early that leads to launching a business model that actually works. If you think you have a big idea to launch, and you are worried about the resources needed, make sure you start with only the most critical to your customers – not to you.

Thinking of building your MVP, send us a message and we can brainstorm on it together!

Automation

miguel.fermin — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 06:50:34 +0000

Test Automation is using software to control the execution of tests and compare the expected outcome versus the actual outcome.

With the ability to run hundreds of thousands of tests, test automation allows us to try out features quickly. It gives us the agility we need to refine our software more efficiently. The result, award-winning apps, efficiently fine-tuned thousands of times, perfectly working and ready to use.

Our clients also love automated software testing not only can they:

Deploy products faster
Reduce testing costs and most importantly
Get a fully-working, 100% tested software that ensures their users will have a seamless user experience.

So, what are you waiting for? Don’t know where to start?

Send us a message!