Welcome to Sourcetoad’s Blog
Your digital compass for the latest trends, insights, and expert knowledge in software development. Dive into our sea of articles where we unravel the complexities of technology, offer innovative solutions, and share our passion for software excellence.
Running Your Own LLM Instance: When It’s Worth It (and When It’s Not)
The decision to host a Large Language Model (LLM) in-house is a strategic one. The allure of enhanced data privacy, compliance adherence, and potential cost savings at scale is compelling.
AI is the New OS
ChatGPT isn’t an app, it’s an operating system, and the pattern that was developed by OpenAI has now become pervasive. This is exactly how Gemini, Claude and X work. It’s how all AI codegen apps work. This is the new pattern for computing in the future.
How the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Big Bend Are Using AI to Transform Operations
Most nonprofit teams operate on tight budgets and even tighter bandwidth. We delivered a custom, hands-on training engagement built specifically for nonprofits.
How MCP Servers Are Rewiring the Internet and Why It Matters Now
Instead of hardcoding bespoke connections between agents and services, MCP servers provide a way for AI to find and use tools as needed, on the fly.
Privacy as a Human Right
At Sourcetoad, we don’t find compliance boring or a series of burdens. We believe privacy is fundamentally a human rights issue.
Outgrowing v0: How to Transition Your AI MVP to a Scalable Production Stack
You had an idea. You built something fast. Maybe you used v0 to turn your vision into a working MVP in days instead of weeks. That was the right move…
Rethinking Product Launches: MVP vs. SLC
While Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) help you move fast, they can leave users underwhelmed. Enter the Simple, Lovable, Complete (SLC) framework…
Sourcetoad Joins the Official Laravel Partner Program
Discover why Laravel chose Sourcetoad as an official partner and see how we use the framework to build secure, scalable software.
How Burger King’s “Million Dollar Whopper” Campaign Showcases the Power of Generative AI in Franchise Marketing
Learn how franchisors can leverage AI for innovative marketing strategies.
AI Tools Roundup: “Conversations and Creations” Edition
This week, we’re diving into tools that help you master social media, stay ahead of financial markets, and build AI agents
AI Tools Roundup: “Smart Sidekicks and Magic Tricks” Edition
Learn how AI tools are transforming interactions, automation, and design in this week’s roundup.
Launching Lean: A Case Study in Testing Assumptions First
Launching a new product, app, or feature is risky and expensive. There’s a...
Day-to-Day Automation with GenAI: Part II
Discover how to create custom AI automations with GPT Builder to automate review responses in simple steps.
Day-to-Day Automation with GenAI: Part I
Automation with generative AI has the potential to transform how businesses...
From Buzzword to Bottom Line: How AI is Transforming Franchises
AI and human-centered design enhance personalized financial solutions and decision-making
How to Build Any Product in 12 Weeks
You can build just about any* product in 12 weeks or less, from idea to...
7 Non-Profit Challenges That Generative AI Can Solve
When it comes to non-profits, the mission is always bigger than the budget....
Practical Ways to Augment Your Customer Service Team Using GenAI
Customer service is the heart of any company. When customers reach out, they...
How Laravel’s $57M Accel Investment Benefits Sourcetoad Clients
Today, we’re excited to share some incredible news: Laravel, the PHP framework we specialize in, has just received a significant $57 million investment from Accel, one of the world’s leading venture capital firms.
Personalized Financial Solutions with AI and Human-Centered Design
AI and human-centered design enhance personalized financial solutions and decision-making
How GPT-4o Can Transform Projects at Sourcetoad
OpenAI’s GPT-4o: Advanced AI with multimodal capabilities and efficiency.
Sourcetoad’s First Staff Augmentation Deal Sets a New Model for Technical Industry Partnerships
Sourcetoad recently achieved a significant milestone with our first Cost+...
Apple’s New EU Policies for Apps
Apple and the EU's Digital Markets Act In light of the European Union's new...
The Power of Proximity in Design
Welcome to the Davis Design Debrief, where we delve into the…
Laravel on AWS Fargate at Sourcetoad
Sourcetoad’s Laravel on ECS Guide: Comprehensive tips for enterprise-grade migration.
Building an AI Policy for Your Company
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an integral part of our present-day technology...
Sourcetoad Presents: Fine-Tuning OpenAI
Welcome to Sourcetoad’s first video in our Artificial Intelligence series! In...
Meet Sourcetoad, a 2023 Best Places to Work honoree
Tampa Bay Business JournalSourcetoad has been selected as a 2023 Best Places...
The Agile Manifesto in Practice: Part 2
The Agile approach to software development first emerged in response to the...
This Year in FinTech: Trends to Watch in 2023
The financial services industry experienced rapid digitization throughout the...
Education Technology Trends: What to Expect in 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic was a huge catalyst for growth in the education...
The Agile Manifesto in Practice: Part 1
How Sourcetoad Values People Over ProcessThe software development process can...
The Evolution of Buy Now, Pay Later in eCommerce: Part 2
In Part 1, we talked about the rapid growth of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) and...
The Evolution of Buy Now, Pay Later in eCommerce: Part 1
If you’ve shopped online recently, you’ve probably noticed an increase in...
The Rise of Ransomware Attacks on Schools: Why the K-12 Cybersecurity Act is Only the First Step
The shift to remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated...
Sourcetoad is Laravel Certified
April 11, 2022 — We are proud to announce that Sourcetoad is now the first...
2022 Trends in FinTech
The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the digitization of the...
2022 Trends in Education Technology
The unexpected shift to remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic has...
IoT: The Revolution Will Be Integrated
While the term “Internet of Things” (IoT) was coined over 20 years ago by...
Tampa software company makes pandemic pivot to keep business afloat
WFLA News Channel 8— TAMPA— July 14, 2021 Watch the WFLA segment and read the...
Get to Know Sourcetoad, a 2021 Best Places to Work honoree
Tampa Bay Business Journal—Mar 18, 2021 Click here to read our 2021 profile in...
Technology firms partner for property management system development
Cruise & Ferry— Dec 4, 2020 Read about Sourcetoad's partnership with...
Sourcetoad & Otalio
Sourcetoad partners with Otalio to unlock the potential of the most...
Sourcetoad CEO, Greg Ross-Munro, Shares with Us How He Founded His Hospitality Technology Innovation Company and Talks about Lessons Learned from COVID-19
Startup Info — Oct 31, 2020 Click here to read Startup Info's interview with...
Get to know these Fast 50 honorees: Burgess Civil, KnowBe4, Spathe Systems, Sourcetoad, Elite Insurance
Tampa Bay Business Journal—Oct 19, 2020 Read the article here.
Sourcetoad is ranked #140 in Inc. 5000 Florida Series
Inc. — Sept 2020 With a 95% revenue growth over two years, Sourcetoad has...
Sourcetoad ranked No. 1733 on the Inc. 5000 list
Tampa Bay Newswire— Sept 22, 2020 Sourcetoad has ranked on the Inc. 5000 list...
Tampa Bay Tech summit gets personal with A-LIGN, Sourcetoad CEOs
St. Pete Catalyst— Sept 19, 2020 Tampa Bay Tech's CEO2CEO panel featured Greg...
Sourcetoad ranked No. 1733 on the Inc. 5000 list
TAMPA, Fla. — August 25, 2020 — Sourcetoad, an enterprise software development...
Sourcetoad named in Business Observer Top 500 2020
Business Observer Top 500 2020 — Aug 14, 2020 Sourcetoad ranked 485 in...
How Sourcetoad is Keeping Its Company Culture Alive
Creating a positive company culture is no easy task, and it’s something...
Sourcetoad Recognized on the Inc. 5000 for the Second Year in a Row
TAMPA, Fla. — August 13, 2019 — Sourcetoad, an enterprise software development...
Sourcetoad Ranks #34 on Tampa Bay Business Journal’s Fast 50 List of Fastest Growing Companies
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE TAMPA, Fla. — July 26, 2019 — Sourcetoad, an enterprise...
DevFest Florida 2017
We spent last Saturday sponsoring and attending the 2017 edition of DevFest...
Sourcetoad at DevFest Florida 2017
We're proud to announce that both Connor and Joey are speakers at DevFest...
Apktool Sponsorship
Apktool is the original Android application package (Apk) decompiler. Released...
Sourcetoad on 83 Degrees Media
A big thank you to Cheryl Rogers and and 83 Degrees Media for the feature...
Sourcetoad on ABC Action News
Thanks to ABC Action News and Nicole Grigg for featuring Sourcetoad in their...
2017 Daveler Pitch Competition
On Saturday, Greg Ross-Munro, Sourcetoad's Founder and CEO, joined 4 other...
Trello: How I Found Balance in My List Obsession
Once upon a time, I was a habitual list maker — grocery lists, to-do lists,...
Magic Methods Within Yii2 __set
This article is continued from the previous post about the __get method. The...
Controlling a Light Bulb via Voice Recognition in Pure Javascript
Final Product Amazing production quality, I know. I'm sort of a big deal....
ES6: Constants Can Change
I recently made the switch from the archaic JavaScript of yester-year that...
How To Build A Successful, Cross-Platform Mobile App
One of the most gratifying feelings an app development team can experience is...
View Models in the Yii Framework
Ever since I started using Yii 2, I felt that the default way of passing data...
The Benefits of Using React
React is a simple, yet powerful, UI library. When it was released in 2013, it...
Improve Backups with S3
Perhaps the most important aspect of any system is the backup strategy. All...
Adding Personal Flair to Your Code
I've been thinking recently about the naming conventions I use while coding,...
Progressive Loading Of Images
Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday, or whatever it is that you...
Presentations: 6 Guidelines to Follow
Powerpoint or Keynote presentations are infamously terrible. In the software...
Edge Computing
Edge computing is the newest tech buzz phrase you might want to consider with...
An Atari for Productivity
While the Atari video computer system from 1977 gave us plenty of classic...
6 Holiday Tips to Stay Safe When Browsing Online
As 2016 draws to a close, and the holiday rush of online shopping is in full...
Adding Some Pizzazz To Your Terminal
How many times have you bashed numbers and letters into your basic old...
Magic Methods Within Yii2
Yii and Yii2 utilize various magic methods within the framework, the...
No One Has Time to be Wait()ing.
Like any dev shop worth its weight, we strongly promote testing of our...
Why You Can’t Trust Local Storage in Your Cordova App
Settings are an important part of any mobile app. A mobile app is nothing...
Debugging PHP: Save Time with Xdebug’s Remote Autostart
Whenever I find myself working with an unfamiliar PHP codebase, Xdebug becomes...
When to use Monotonic Time
When writing about time and software development, most people think of time...
An In-Depth Look at Regular Expressions Part 3: Finite State Machines
So in part 1, we talked about different ways to represent languages in...
Preprocess All The Things
In a quickly mutating world of web software development, preprocessors are...
3 Web UX Rules to Follow (When Designing for Short Attention Spans)
Working at a software development company is a daily reminder of why...
Pattern Library Frameworks: Astrum, Fractal, and Pattern Labs
For those of you unfamiliar with pattern libraries, I'd recommend reading Paul...
Phone Number Validation: A Cautionary Tale
We recently received a ticket for a project requesting phone number validation...
Learning to Work With (and Not Against) Your PHP Framework
Too often have I come upon a code base, in a framework that I know, just to be...
Split Payments: Braintree Marketplace vs. Stripe Connect vs. Paypal Adaptive Payments
If you’ve ever used web platforms such as Uber, Kickstarter, or Elance, then...
PhpStorm: Useful Features to Make Your Life Easier
Is PhpStorm the best PHP IDE out there? In my last blog post, I talked about...
JavaScript Decorators: True Power In ES7
JavaScript can be pretty annoying at times. You would think that with classes...
The Economics of Efficiency
Sourcetoad develops many different types of applications for many different...
An In-Depth Look at Regular Expressions Part 2: Regular Languages
So we've discussed what a language is from a computer science theory viewpoint...
Responsive Content Canvasing With Fixed Ratios
Today I would like to discuss a concept aimed at preparing an area of content...
Flat Design: An Origin Story
As quickly as we threw away our pens, notepads, sound systems, address books,...
Picking a Domain Name – Hints and Tips
Every time you start a new project, or need to create a new business, you're...
On the Origins and Applications of Substring Matching
Today I'm going to be looking into substring matching algorithms. The...
Thinking About Micro-Services
I've been thinking about micro-services lately as a way to organize projects....
Organizing Project Dependencies
No matter what language or framework you use, you are bound to have...
Flex Your Box
If you have read any of my previous articles, you may have noticed by now that...
Logo Design: Start at the Font
Logo design is becoming easier and easier these days. You can get a website to...
Getting Started with PouchDB to Replace Parse
With the demise of Parse, I had to be receptive to alternatives. Luckily I had...
The Benefits of ‘Auto-Updating’ Programs
Auto-updating programs are definitely useful. When one evaluates their...
The True Cost of AWS: Part 2
Part one of this article discussed the downfalls of running a “VPS-style” site...
The True Cost of AWS Hosting: Part 1
As we always like to tell our clients, Sourcetoad is not a devops company....
An In-depth Look at Regular Expressions Part 1: Languages
Most programmers have used, or are at least aware of, regular expressions and...
Gulp-Webserver For The Win
Gulp Webserver For the Win I love when a great set of tools gets an update;...
How I learned To Stop Worrying and Love the IDE
As developers, the integrated development environment (IDE) we choose to use...
Three 2015 Web Design Trends That’ll Give You Hope for 2016
Trend is an unattractive word. More often than not, a trend is something that...
SSL Certificates
I don't want to freak you completely out, but I can most likely read your...
Using Jira’s Issues To Communicate More Effectively With Clients
As a project manager in a technology setting, communication between clients...
Good Practices for Using Heroku
The nice thing about using Heroku is that it is very simple to deploy. Just...
How We Migrated a Legacy Code Library into a Modern Composer Package
Introduction: A couple projects ago, a client of ours wanted a simple forum...
Ugly Websites Built For Your Enjoyment, Anguish
I like to give the guys something fun to do ONCE in a while. So this time...
Filling the Blanks: Hiring Practices and Thoughts Upon Such
We’re growing! Which means we’re hiring developers and designers of caliber...
Mutual Exclusion In JavaScript
Many years ago, when I was still a student in High School, I enrolled in a...
5 Very Spooky Viruses
It’s almost Halloween. Time to buy a bunch of cheap candy, put up a few spooky...
Six Rules For Non Technical Managers in Software Roles
We live in a world where very few businesses have NOT been affected by...
JavaScript Task Runners and Bower Components
For this article, I will assume you have, at least, some basic knowledge of...
Migrating a Module From Yii1.x to Yii2.x
Yii is an amazing framework. As it has been iterated on version 2 is now out...
Developing Code Standards for Teams
“Write a blog post” they said, “It will be fun.” Okay, then, let's talk about...
HTML5 on Embedded Devices
Many years ago, embedded systems were fairly complex to build. They had...
How To Get A Job As A Programmer
We’re always on the hunt for talent. I think that almost everyone is these...
What Are API Calls? Part 1
In almost every application project, the topic of APIs will inevitably come...
The Hamburger Menu: The Dreaded Second Cousin We Can’t Seem to Avoid
For web and app developers, one question has always been a top concern in the...
Cost Benefits vs Sacrifices in Cross-Platform App Design
Ok, so there are a thousand articles out there doing a Pros/Cons analysis of...
An Introduction To Scope In ECMAScript 6
6 (ES6) introduces some new features that improve upon ECMAScript 5 (ES5)...
How to QA the Sourcetoad Way
Client QA Cycle Setup Instructions Welcome to your QA cycle! At Sourcetoad, we...
Introducing Tadpole.js: A JavaScript Library Built to Enhance Backbone.js
Backbone.js is a JavaScript library that any developer can get up-and-running...
Part 3: The Planning Process
Thanks for coming back! As we’d talked about on the 21st of October, we’ll be...
Part 2: The Planning Process
Last week we talked a lot about the importance of planning and research in...
Part 1: The Planning Process
During this three-part series, we’ll be discussing some of the more important...
How Mobile Apps Are Driving Revenue for Businesses Using Geo-Targeting
One of the things we specialize in is creating mobile apps for businesses, and...
Monetizing Your Mobile Apps (Part 2)
Let's take a look at some of the various ways you can monetize your mobile...
Monetizing Your Mobile Apps (Part 1)
It's no secret that a great mobile app can be an excellent source of revenue,...
How to Plan a New Web Application
So, you've come up with an idea for the next web application that is going to...
Offshore Development vs. Onshore Development
When most people think of outsourcing, they probably think of physical...
Should I Build a Mobile Website, Mobile App, or Both?
The Internet used to be a simpler place. Once upon a time, you didn’t have to...
Questions to Ask When Hiring a Mobile App Developer
6 Important Questions You Should Ask Before You Hire a Mobile App Developer...