The Japanese Way of Coding
I’ve been diving into Japanese software development practices, and honestly, it’s totally changed the way I look at writing code. While a lot of developers in the West are caught up in chasing the latest JavaScript framework or debating tabs vs. spaces, Japanese teams are quietly cranking out some of the most reliable, maintainable code…
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What’s New in Storybook 9
1. Storybook Test: A Complete Component Testing Suite 2. Significantly Lighter & Faster 3. Stories as Testable Units 4. Tag-Based Organization & Globals 5. Framework Support & Upgrades Why It Matters What to Do Next Bottom line: Storybook 9 is no longer just a playground—it’s now a compact, powerful component development and testing platform, built…
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Google I/O 2025: A New Chapter in Everyday AI
Day one of Google I/O 2025 was packed with bold announcements, painting a clear picture: Google is going all-in on AI, not just as a buzzword, but as an everyday utility. Here are the key highlights that caught my attention. Gemini: Google’s New AI Super Assistant One of the biggest reveals was Gemini, Google’s next-generation…
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Build 2025: AI Agents, Open Web, and the Future of Dev Workflows
Microsoft Build 2025 just wrapped, and it’s clear: we’re entering the age of AI agents, open platforms, and developer-first tooling. Here’s a quick rundown of what went down and what it means for us as developers. AI Agents: From Assistants to Autonomous Collaborators The star of the show was the rise of “agentic AI.” Microsoft…
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Figma Config 2025: Key Takeaways for Tech Teams
Figma Config 2025 just dropped a whole bunch of shiny new toys, and you know I had to dig in and see what’s actually going to matter for us in the web and mobile world. Forget incremental updates; this Config felt like a strategic leap, blurring the lines between design and code in exciting new…
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Pagination in API and Frontend Development
It’s been a great experience interacting with our freshers while assessing their projects at the end of their fullstack training. One of the key things that I observed was the concept of pagination wasn’t implemented. Pagination is a crucial concept in both API and frontend development. It allows developers to manage and present large datasets…
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TerraCognita: Reverse Terraform
While we were checking out competitors for an opportunity with one of our clients, we came across this feature at cycloid.io to generate Terraform state files for existing infra on public cloud infrastructure (Azure, AWS, GCP) or VMWare. Was surprised to see that they had open-sourced the core of this functionality with TerraCognita! Since I have worked with…
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GitOps Workflow – Simplified Visual Guide
GitOps brought a shift in how software and infrastructure are managed with Git as the central hub for managing and automating the entire lifecycle of applications and infrastructure. Here’s a simplified visual guide (from my favourite blog, bytebytego) It’s built on the principles of version control, collaboration, and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). Key features…
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Modern CSS Upgrades (Part 2)
We continue our journey through the transformative world of modern CSS upgrades! color-scheme You may be familiar with the prefers-color-scheme media query to customize dark and light themes. The CSS property color-scheme is an opt-in to adapting browser UI elements including form controls, scrollbars, and CSS system colors. The adaptation asks the browser to render…
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Modern CSS Upgrades (Part 1)
In the ever-evolving landscape of web development, the language of design undergoes constant refinement. CSS, the style sheet language that breathes life into the digital realm, is no exception. Sometimes, improving your CSS just takes a one-line upgrade or enhancement! Learn about 10 properties to start incorporating into your projects, and enjoy reducing technical debt,…
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Say Hello to NLUX
Conversational AI has taken off, and chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are becoming a must-have for many apps and websites. At Brillio, we already have kicked-off many engagements on conversational AI. As a web developer, you want a simple way to build a great chat interface backed by these incredible LLMs.…
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Accessibility Testing with Chrome DevTools
The internet, once considered a luxury, is now an integral part of our daily lives. From work to education, entertainment to social interaction, it serves as a gateway to a vast array of opportunities. However, amidst the digital revolution, it is essential to recognize that not all users experience the online realm in the same…
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What’s New in WCAG 2.2
Last month I had shared an article on Web Accessibility for Front-end Devs and another one sometime back on Mobile Accessibility. Last week Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 was promoted to stable W3C Recommendation. Let’s see what’s new and what has changed. One key point is that WCAG updates are intended to be backwards-compatible – by satisfying the…
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Web Accessibility For Front-End Devs
Website accessibility is the practice of designing and developing websites in a way that ensures they can be easily used and navigated by people with disabilities. This concept can be related to a real-world example by considering how physical spaces are designed to be accessible to individuals with disabilities, such as wheelchair users or those…
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MARS: Chatbot using Power Virtual Agent
Power Virtual Agents (PVA) has been popping up in conversations for a few months now and I’ve always been meaning to try it out. We have an ongoing proposal for developing a chatbot. And once again PVA was mentioned. This was the perfect time to try it out. I set myself a target of completing…
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CSS Nesting
When we use a CSS preprocessor like Sass or Less, we can nest a CSS style rule within another rule to write clean and understandable code. This nesting rule is now supported in native CSS. Before nesting, every selector needed to be explicitly declared, separately from one another. This leads to repetition, stylesheet bulk and…
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WWDC 2023: TipKit
It may be a little surprising that Swift did not have a tip framework upto now! WWDC 2023 announced the release of a new iOS framework called TipKit! So what is TipKit all about? The goal of TipKit is to make it as easy as possible for developers to display short contextual information that highlights or explains a feature of…
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SwiftUI: ContentUnavailableView
SwiftUI was introduced by Apple at WWDC 2019 as a modern and declarative user interface framework for building apps across all Apple platforms. SwiftUI represented a significant shift in the way developers create user interfaces compared to the traditional UIKit or AppKit frameworks. SwiftUI was designed to make app development faster, easier, and more intuitive…
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Build a Chatbot with Hugging Face and Gradio
Over the last few weeks, I have been reading up a lot on LLM stack. Tools such as LangChain, Aviary, Hugging Face. Over the weekend, I thought I’d explore creating a chatbot using Hugging Face and Gradio, two cutting-edge frameworks that simplify the development and deployment of conversational AI models. I started out with building…
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How does SSO work?
We’ve just begun working on an internal portal for a client. One of the things our dev team has to work on is integrating SSO for authentication. Single sign-on (SSO) is a user authentication tool that enables users to securely access multiple applications and services using just one set of credentials. Instead of twelve passwords…
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Optimising Frontend Bundle Size
In today’s digital landscape, where web applications are becoming increasingly complex, optimizing frontend bundle size has become crucial. JavaScript frameworks play a pivotal role in building dynamic and interactive user experiences, but they often result in bulky bundles that can adversely impact website performance. The bigger the project size, the longer it takes to download…
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The World of Fonts and Typography
In the vast digital landscape, developers are the architects and builders who shape the online world we inhabit. Their expertise is crucial in creating functional, visually appealing, and user-friendly websites and applications. While developers traditionally focus on code, algorithms, and functionality, a critical aspect often overlooked is the impact of fonts and typography on the…
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Figma’s Dev Mode: Bringing Designers & Developers Together
Figma’s Config conference is on at California and there have been some pretty cool and much needed announcements! According to the company, the mission of this year’s Config is to bridge the gap between design and development. During the opening keynote, Figma announced a bunch of new tools and features, all geared towards its mission…
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Stack Overflow Developer 2023 Survey: React Still King
The field of software development is constantly evolving, driven by advancements in technology, emerging programming languages, and shifting industry trends. To gain insights into the current state of the developer community and better understand their preferences, practices, and perspectives, Stack Overflow conducts an annual survey known as the “Stack Overflow Developer Survey.” This comprehensive survey…
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An incomplete list of skills engineers need beyond coding
Over the weekend I came across The Manager’s Path, written by Camille Fournier, through Addy Osmani’s post on LinkedIn. This is a valuable resource for both new and experienced managers seeking guidance and insights on navigating the challenging world of management. Fournier, a former CTO, draws from her own experiences and provides a comprehensive roadmap…
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The Feynman Technique: Mastering Concepts through Simplicity and Clarity
The pursuit of knowledge is a lifelong journey that often presents challenges in understanding complex concepts. Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate physicist, devised a simple yet powerful technique to overcome this hurdle – the Feynman Technique. This method, named after the brilliant mind who created it, emphasizes the art of simplification and clarity as the…
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SwiftData: Apple’s New Persistence Framework
SwiftData, a new framework introduced at WWDC 2023, provides a Swift-like API for working with persistence in iOS apps. It simplifies the usage of Core Data by offering a more user-friendly syntax, making it easier to define models, access and query data, and handle data insertion and deletion. An important distinction to make here is…
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Apple’s WWDC 2023: Vision Pro & iOS 17
Each year at WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the company showcases what’s next for its biggest platforms — iOS, macOS, and more — and what developers can do to make apps and services for them. Let’s take a look at two key announcements made at the keynote address on Monday, 5 June 2023. Apple Vision Pro, a…
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How to Reduce Mobile App Size
Mobile phones have evolved a lot over the last few years. However storage is still a big concern. In addition to all the apps we have installed, we still would love to have a lot more storage for our photos and music. This makes the mobile app developer’s job a little more challenging as they…
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Javascript: Measuring Time to Make Informed Decisions
As an engineer, especially when working on enterprise-grade applications, our coding is influenced by many factors. It is no longer about if your function worked or your ability to achieve the desired result. It is rather about writing performant code, thinking about time complexity vs space complexity, scaling, and ensuring that your application is as fast…
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Shoelace: A Framework-Agnostic Web Component Library
Web components were introduced in 2011, but if you ask most frontend developers, they aren’t their first choice for composing UI layouts. This is partly due to an increase in JavaScript frameworks, component-driven development enthusiasts, and other esoteric factors over the years. Two key drawbacks of web components are: Now, in comes Shoelace, a UI library…
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Do you know you can build Flutter apps in Python? 😮
I am guessing most of you have heard about Flutter. If not, here you go in just one sentence. Flutter is an open-source framework by Googlefor building beautiful, natively compiled applicationsfrom a single codebasefor iOS, Android, Web, MacOS, Windows and Linux. Dart is the programming language used to code Flutter apps and at the start most developers find it a little…
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iOS & Android Quick Actions
Quick actions are a great way to provide your users fast access to your app’s common functionality within the home screen. iOS 13 introduced the concept of quick actions, where a user can touch and hold an app icon to display a set of shortcuts or actions to perform right from the home screen. Many…
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What is Mobile Accessibility?
With over 6.3 billion global smartphone users, it’s critical mobile apps are inclusive of everyone, including those with vision impairment, hearing limitations, or other physical or cognitive conditions. What do we mean by an accessible app? An accessible app means that most people can use it without help from another person, regardless of ability or situation.…
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How Do Apps Like Google and Microsoft Authenticator Work?
Authenticators are applications that serve several purposes for Android and iOS devices. They’re mainly used for two types of authentication, known as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and multi-step authentication (MSA). They provide advanced security for user sites. What this means is that it’s not enough to know or have an account password. With increased hacking and…
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How does India’s 𝐔𝐏𝐈 (Unified Payments Interface) work?
UPI has gone through 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 since its inception in 2016. It builds a digital payments ecosystem with payment apps, banks, and NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India). It now takes up 60% of digital retail transactions in India. It is estimated that the digital payments market in India will grow by 3 times in…
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How does 𝐁𝐍𝐏𝐋 (Buy Now, Pay Later) work?
Earlier this year, we took over development of the mobile app for a retail app of a leading brand of kids clothings. And one of the features on the checkout page is the option of using Afterpay as you can see in the screenshot below. This got me wondering how do 𝐁𝐍𝐏𝐋 (Buy Now, Pay…
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How are Notifications Pushed to our Mobile Devices?
Most people have a love/hate relationship with mobile push notifications. On the one hand, they keep us updated with the information we willingly asked to be updated on. On the other hand, for people like me, that constant activity on my phone is annoying and distracting. My friends tease me, but I can’t go to…
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WWDC 2022: What’s new in iOS, WatchOS, MacOS?
Each year Apple kicks off its Worldwide Developer Conference with a few hours of back-to-back-to-back announcements, generally covering things from iOS to watchOS to new hardware. Here are some of the key announcements made at the keynote on Monday. iOS 16 The lock screen is getting an overhaul. It’ll allow for more customization, plus support for widgets —…
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Airbnb Moves from Webpack to Metro for Faster Builds
Like many companies, Airbnb has experienced growing pains with bundlers as its codebase grew. But even after its codebase quadrupled, the company was able to speed UX changes to the front end when it migrated its JavaScript code bundler from Webpack to Metro in 2018. With build performance significantly improved, UI changes appeared 80% faster, as per the Time to Interactive (TTI) metric.…
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.NET MAUI Reaches General Availability, Replacing Xamarin.Forms
Microsoft’s evolution of Xamarin.Forms, .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI), has finally reached General Availability status, providing one framework for both mobile apps and, now, desktop apps. Announced at the company’s big Build developer conference, the GA release is some six months late, as it was originally planned to debut with .NET 6 in November 2021…
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Google AR Glasses
There was a lovely surprise at the end of the Google I/O 2022 keynote last week. It was a look at its latest AR glasses. The key feature Google showed off was the ability to see languages translated right in front of your eyes, which seems to me like a very practical application for AR…
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Google I/O 2022: Everything New for Developers
Last night (India time!) we had Google I/O, which at its core is a developer focused event. Here are the some of the biggest announcements made at the keynote. Android With Android 12L last year and Android 13 this fall, Google has been focusing on enhancing the experience on “large screen” devices like tablets and foldables.…
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FIDO – The Password Killer
Did you know that the first Thursday of May is apparently “World Password Day”? I didn’t! And this year to celebrate this day Apple, Google, and Microsoft are launching a “joint effort” to kill the password. The major OS vendors want to “expand support for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and…
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The Cone Model
As managers, we are expected to provide an exceptional level of support to our teams. And this support could cover both technical and non-technical, even emotional support. This is extremely hard work and requires plenty of patience, trust and understanding on both sides. The Triangle There are many ways to build this A-grade level of…
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Kenrick Vaz 