Blog
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 the use of digital learning tools across...
The State of Mobile Apps in the Cruise Industry
Since 2018, Sourcetoad has been very interested in the world of cruise mobile applications and their features. We’re...
Sourcetoad is Laravel Certified
April 11, 2022 — We are proud to announce that Sourcetoad is now the first US-based company to receive a Laravel...
2022 Trends in FinTech
The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the digitization of the financial services sector. As with many other...
2022 Trends in Education Technology
The unexpected shift to remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic has forced educators of all kinds to rethink...
2022 Healthcare App Trends
The global pandemic has fueled a surge in health-related app development, with an average of 250 healthcare apps...
IoT: The Revolution Will Be Integrated
While the term “Internet of Things” (IoT) was coined over 20 years ago by Procter & Gamble employee Kevin Ashton,...
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 article here.
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 the Tampa Bay Business Journal. ...
Integrated Booking Portals: What Are They, Underlying Tech, and Complexities
What Is an Integrated Booking Portal? An integrated booking portal (IBP) — also known as an integrated booking system...
Technology firms partner for property management system development
Cruise & Ferry— Dec 4, 2020 Read about Sourcetoad's partnership with Otalio here.
Sourcetoad & Otalio
November 9, 2020 Sourcetoad partners with Otalio to unlock the potential of the most state-of-the-art PMS on the...
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 Sourcetoad CEO Greg Ross-Munro.
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 ranked in Inc.'s 250 most Successful...
Sourcetoad ranked No. 1733 on the Inc. 5000 list
Tampa Bay Newswire— Sept 22, 2020 Sourcetoad has ranked on the Inc. 5000 list for the third year in a row. Read the...
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 Ross-Munro and Scott Price. Read the...
Sourcetoad ranked No. 1733 on the Inc. 5000 list
TAMPA, Fla. — August 25, 2020 — Sourcetoad, an enterprise software development company specializing in cruise industry...
Sourcetoad named in Business Observer Top 500 2020
Business Observer Top 500 2020 — Aug 14, 2020 Sourcetoad ranked 485 in Business Observer's Top 500 for 2020. Read the...
Cruise Technology: How It Could Look After COVID-19
Speculations on the Future of Cruise Health and Safety As cruise lines prepare to reopen, we are starting to see some...
How Sourcetoad is Keeping Its Company Culture Alive
Creating a positive company culture is no easy task, and it’s something Sourcetoad takes very seriously. We have...
Software Design Methodology in Cruise
Designing and building anything that requires more than one person can be a challenge. The work becomes even more...
What Oscar Wilde can Teach You About Cruise Technology
The first vessel built exclusively for luxury cruising launched in 1900. Oscar Wilde, the Irish poet and playwright,...
The Future of Cruise Brands
Cruise passengers have a strong sense of brand loyalty. The variety and offerings of different cruise lines is...
Progressive Web Apps for Cruise Lines (Part 1 of 2)
There is an ever-growing excitement building around progressive web applications (or PWAs) in almost every industry....
Progressive Web Apps for Cruise Lines (Part 2 of 2)
If you haven't read the first part of the article and want to learn more about the basics of PWAs, you can read part...
The Future of Shore Excursions
As cruise passengers have enjoyed increasing abilities to customize their experiences over the last decade, the...
Sourcetoad Recognized on the Inc. 5000 for the Second Year in a Row
TAMPA, Fla. — August 13, 2019 — Sourcetoad, an enterprise software development firm specializing in cruise industry...
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 software development firm specializing...
Building Innovation Cultures Inside of Cruise Lines
I recently learned the most powerful lesson of my entire career in technology. I was sitting on the top deck of a...
The Cruise Industry’s Problem with Technology ROI
A significant concern in the cruise industry at the moment is the seemingly decreasing ROI on guest-facing software....
Cruise Line Apps: How Often are they Updated?
Once an app is live, regular updates are important. As technology changes, operating systems are updated, and new...
5 Mistakes Cruise App Developers Make
Designing software for cruise lines can be extremely tricky. Cruise ships are strange beasts; they have all the...
Data Synchronization in the Cruise Industry
For the past few years, one of the biggest trends in tech has been the transition to the cloud. Almost every industry...
DevFest Florida 2017
We spent last Saturday sponsoring and attending the 2017 edition of DevFest Florida, an annual conference for web and...
Hack Hospitality Cruise Challenge – LocalMotive
At the Tampa Bay Hack Hospitality hackathon, Mitchell Garcia, Kevin Mircovich, Aaron Wasserman,...
Hack Hospitality Cruise Challenge – The Iron Yard
One of the teams that chose the Sourcetoad Cruise Challenge at the Tampa Bay Hack Hospitality hackathon was The Iron...
Hack Hospitality Cruise Challenge – BellBoy
At the Tampa Bay Hack Hospitality hackathon there was only one team that included a robot — BellBoy. Austin...
Hack Hospitality Cruise Challenge – Team Cheeseburger
The Tampa Bay Hack Hospitality hackathon brought together professionals with a variety of experience and talents. Team...
Hack Hospitality Cruise Challenge – Ryma
At the recent Tampa Bay Hack Hospitality hackathon, one of the teams who chose the Sourcetoad Cruise Challenge was...
Hack Hospitality Cruise Challenge Winners
The recent Hack Hospitality hackathon presented Tampa Bay developers with problems that hospitality businesses...
Hack Hospitality Interview Sourcetoad’s Joey deVilla
Over the next few weeks, we'll be diving deeper into our cruise challenge. In the mean time, here's an interview with...
Hack Hospitality Hackathon
Congratulations to Mandy Jacobson, Keri Spencer, Taylor Cox, Rob Venables, and Alex Spencer for winning the Tampa Bay...
Sourcetoad at DevFest Florida 2017
We're proud to announce that both Connor and Joey are speakers at DevFest Florida this year. Take advantage of the...
Buying Technology For Cruise Ships – Lessons Learned
Custom software and hardware systems are driving the cruise industry forward at a remarkable pace. However, over the...
Apktool Sponsorship
Apktool is the original Android application package (Apk) decompiler. Released in January 2010, Apktool is still the...
Sourcetoad on 83 Degrees Media
A big thank you to Cheryl Rogers and and 83 Degrees Media for the feature article on Sourcetoad. We're proud to be a...
Sourcetoad on ABC Action News
Thanks to ABC Action News and Nicole Grigg for featuring Sourcetoad in their report on technology education and...
2017 Daveler Pitch Competition
On Saturday, Greg Ross-Munro, Sourcetoad's Founder and CEO, joined 4 other judges at the University of South...
Trello: How I Found Balance in My List Obsession
Once upon a time, I was a habitual list maker — grocery lists, to-do lists, prioritized lists, wish lists, work lists,...
Magic Methods Within Yii2 __set
This article is continued from the previous post about the __get method. The basic __set method is contained within...
Controlling a Light Bulb via Voice Recognition in Pure Javascript
Final Product Amazing production quality, I know. I'm sort of a big deal. Prequisites: A LIFX bulb. A lamp to...
ES6: Constants Can Change
I recently made the switch from the archaic JavaScript of yester-year that everyone loves to hate to ECMAScript 6...
How To Build A Successful, Cross-Platform Mobile App
One of the most gratifying feelings an app development team can experience is seeing an app they’ve worked on for...
View Models in the Yii Framework
Ever since I started using Yii 2, I felt that the default way of passing data from controllers to views was not ideal,...
The Benefits of Using React
React is a simple, yet powerful, UI library. When it was released in 2013, it offered an alternative to the existing...
Improve Backups with S3
Perhaps the most important aspect of any system is the backup strategy. All sysadmins would agree that without good...
Adding Personal Flair to Your Code
I've been thinking recently about the naming conventions I use while coding, and I noticed I tend to follow pretty...
Progressive Loading Of Images
Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday, or whatever it is that you do. And while I am not the most festive...
Presentations: 6 Guidelines to Follow
Powerpoint or Keynote presentations are infamously terrible. In the software development world (and the rest of the...
Edge Computing
Edge computing is the newest tech buzz phrase you might want to consider with some seriousness. I recently heard a...
An Atari for Productivity
While the Atari video computer system from 1977 gave us plenty of classic games, the Atari 8-bit computer line...
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 swing, I thought it would be a great time...
Adding Some Pizzazz To Your Terminal
How many times have you bashed numbers and letters into your basic old terminal, thrown the keyboard down to the...
Magic Methods Within Yii2
Yii and Yii2 utilize various magic methods within the framework, the implementation of which can be found in the...
No One Has Time to be Wait()ing.
Like any dev shop worth its weight, we strongly promote testing of our products. In order to produce a quality...
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 without user data, which makes it especially...
Debugging PHP: Save Time with Xdebug’s Remote Autostart
Whenever I find myself working with an unfamiliar PHP codebase, Xdebug becomes one of my most important tools. Xdebug...
When to use Monotonic Time
When writing about time and software development, most people think of time zones. This Youtube video does a pretty...
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 general, and in part 2, we talked about what a...
Preprocess All The Things
In a quickly mutating world of web software development, preprocessors are rapidly becoming the new emperors of the...
3 Web UX Rules to Follow (When Designing for Short Attention Spans)
Working at a software development company is a daily reminder of why communication is so challenging. I'm not...
Pattern Library Frameworks: Astrum, Fractal, and Pattern Labs
For those of you unfamiliar with pattern libraries, I'd recommend reading Paul Boag's excellent blog post on the...
Phone Number Validation: A Cautionary Tale
We recently received a ticket for a project requesting phone number validation in some forms. Seems like a simple...
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 lost in a mess of custom-written code....
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 you’ve seen split payments in action....
PhpStorm: Useful Features to Make Your Life Easier
Is PhpStorm the best PHP IDE out there? In my last blog post, I talked about switching from my long-time editor of...
JavaScript Decorators: True Power In ES7
JavaScript can be pretty annoying at times. You would think that with classes implemented in ES6, this would be...
The Economics of Efficiency
Sourcetoad develops many different types of applications for many different types of customers. Many of our projects...
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 in part 1 of this series, and we have 2...
Responsive Content Canvasing With Fixed Ratios
Today I would like to discuss a concept aimed at preparing an area of content that is yet to be loaded. Or, more...
Flat Design: An Origin Story
As quickly as we threw away our pens, notepads, sound systems, address books, alarm clocks, and anything we could...
Picking a Domain Name – Hints and Tips
Every time you start a new project, or need to create a new business, you're faced with the old question of, what...
On the Origins and Applications of Substring Matching
Today I'm going to be looking into substring matching algorithms. The benchmark appears to be the Boyer-Moore...
Thinking About Micro-Services
I've been thinking about micro-services lately as a way to organize projects. I think I understand the concept better...
Organizing Project Dependencies
No matter what language or framework you use, you are bound to have dependencies. The days of copying blocks of code...
Flex Your Box
If you have read any of my previous articles, you may have noticed by now that I tend to write about things that I am...
Logo Design: Start at the Font
Logo design is becoming easier and easier these days. You can get a website to spit a logo out in a few seconds, you...
Getting Started with PouchDB to Replace Parse
With the demise of Parse, I had to be receptive to alternatives. Luckily I had already been suggested a contender,...
The Benefits of ‘Auto-Updating’ Programs
Auto-updating programs are definitely useful. When one evaluates their most-used programs, they’ll probably just as...
The True Cost of AWS: Part 2
Part one of this article discussed the downfalls of running a “VPS-style” site on a single AWS instance. It is...
The True Cost of AWS Hosting: Part 1
As we always like to tell our clients, Sourcetoad is not a devops company. That isn’t our core competency. However,...
An In-depth Look at Regular Expressions Part 1: Languages
Most programmers have used, or are at least aware of, regular expressions and how they work. But, fundamentally, what...
Gulp-Webserver For The Win
Gulp Webserver For the Win I love when a great set of tools gets an update; especially when it’s an improvement on...
How I learned To Stop Worrying and Love the IDE
As developers, the integrated development environment (IDE) we choose to use is both incredibly important and...
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 is scoffed at or looked down on. In...
SSL Certificates
I don't want to freak you completely out, but I can most likely read your email. Well, not from here, but if you're on...
Using Jira’s Issues To Communicate More Effectively With Clients
As a project manager in a technology setting, communication between clients and agencies can sometimes get pretty...
Good Practices for Using Heroku
The nice thing about using Heroku is that it is very simple to deploy. Just git push Heroku master. There are,...
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 system. Nothing nearly as complicated and...
Ugly Websites Built For Your Enjoyment, Anguish
I like to give the guys something fun to do ONCE in a while. So this time round, we hosted the "Bad Website Design...
Filling the Blanks: Hiring Practices and Thoughts Upon Such
We’re growing! Which means we’re hiring developers and designers of caliber whose talents we can utilize to relieve...
Mutual Exclusion In JavaScript
Many years ago, when I was still a student in High School, I enrolled in a summer program for Computer Science. I had...
5 Very Spooky Viruses
It’s almost Halloween. Time to buy a bunch of cheap candy, put up a few spooky decorations around the house, and...
Six Rules For Non Technical Managers in Software Roles
We live in a world where very few businesses have NOT been affected by technology. Even organizations far removed from...
JavaScript Task Runners and Bower Components
For this article, I will assume you have, at least, some basic knowledge of what a Task Runner is and how to use them....
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 and is quickly picking up adoption. With...
Developing Code Standards for Teams
“Write a blog post” they said, “It will be fun.” Okay, then, let's talk about code standards. This is something we've...
HTML5 on Embedded Devices
Many years ago, embedded systems were fairly complex to build. They had extremely limited resources that required...
How To Get A Job As A Programmer
We’re always on the hunt for talent. I think that almost everyone is these days. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t...
What Are API Calls?, Part 1
In almost every application project, the topic of APIs will inevitably come up. A lot of the times, clients with less...
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 realm of user experience: “How will...
Cost Benefits vs Sacrifices in Cross-Platform App Design
Ok, so there are a thousand articles out there doing a Pros/Cons analysis of cross-platform applications (including...
An Introduction To Scope In ECMAScript 6
6 (ES6) introduces some new features that improve upon ECMAScript 5 (ES5) scoping. In this post we’re going to look at...
How to QA the Sourcetoad Way
Client QA Cycle Setup Instructions Welcome to your QA cycle! At Sourcetoad, we take QA very seriously. It’s the last...
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 with, in just a matter of moments....
Part 3: The Planning Process
Thanks for coming back! As we’d talked about on the 21st of October, we’ll be continuing the final portion of our...
Part 2: The Planning Process
Last week we talked a lot about the importance of planning and research in regards to your new website or app; From...
Part 1: The Planning Process
During this three-part series, we’ll be discussing some of the more important aspects of going from idea to reality....
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 one of the main reasons this market...
Monetizing Your Mobile Apps (Part 2)
Let's take a look at some of the various ways you can monetize your mobile apps. In most cases, your best bet is going...
Monetizing Your Mobile Apps (Part 1)
It's no secret that a great mobile app can be an excellent source of revenue, but it's easier said the done. This may...
How to Plan a New Web Application
So, you've come up with an idea for the next web application that is going to take the world by storm, but there's...
Offshore Development vs. Onshore Development
When most people think of outsourcing, they probably think of physical products that are manufactured in a factory in...
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 choose between a website or something...
Questions to Ask When Hiring a Mobile App Developer
6 Important Questions You Should Ask Before You Hire a Mobile App Developer It’s...