ITCL, Author at IT Creative Labs

Top 5 Learning and Development Trends 2023

Feb 16, 2023 by ITCL

Do you know what to expect in 2023?
If you are still writing your strategy we recommend to include relevant learning and development trends in it.
You don’t need to follow all these trends but as you look through the list, focus on just one of them.

Which one would make the biggest positive impact in your organization?
Let’s get ahead of the curve and take a peek into the latest learning trends:

Virtual and augmented reality for immersive learning experiences.
Increased use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in learning and development.
Personalization of learning, with a focus on individual learning styles and needs.
Use of microlearning and bite-sized content for on-the-go learning.
Greater emphasis on social and emotional learning to support overall well-being and workplace effectiveness.

Trends come and go! But your own app can become a long lasting brand story. Make it a strong, creative and unique one.

Let’s discuss how to turn your ideas into your own brand app.

AR/VR Trends for Better Clothes Fitting in Fashion Industry and Beyond

Jan 31, 2023 by ITCL

The fashion industry is constantly evolving, and with the advent of AR/VR technology, the way we try on and purchase clothes is changing. Here are some of the current AR/VR trends in the fashion industry that we have worked on for our clients thus far:

Virtual Try-Ons: AR and VR technologies are being used to create virtual fitting rooms where customers can try on clothes without physically being in the store. Brands are using this technology to improve the customer experience and reduce returns.
Customized Fit: With AR/VR, customers can see how clothes fit on a virtual model that is customized to their body shape and size. This allows customers to get a better idea of how a garment will fit, reducing the likelihood of returns.
Interactive Showrooms: AR and VR are being used to create interactive showrooms where customers can see how clothes look in different environments and lighting conditions. This allows customers to make more informed purchasing decisions.
Personalized Style Recommendations: AR/VR technology is being used to recommend clothes based on customers’ personal style and preferences. This helps customers find clothes that fit their body and style, and increases customer satisfaction.
Sustainable Fashion: AR/VR is also being used to promote sustainable fashion. For example, virtual try-ons can be used to showcase the environmental impact of certain fabrics and manufacturing processes, helping customers make more sustainable choices.

In conclusion, AR/VR is changing the way we try on and purchase clothes, making the experience more personalized, sustainable, and enjoyable. These were just some of the use cases we have worked on, as you can imagine, there are many more actual use cases. As technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative uses of AR/VR in the fashion industry.

Are you in the fashion or beauty industry and looking to stand out? Are you in a different industry but looking into AR/VR applications to solve your business problem? Reach out and let’s discuss what technology solution would be the best fit for you!

The Power of Effective Marketing Automation You Didn’t Know About

Dec 16, 2022 by ITCL

It’s no doubt that we live in a time when technology changed the world and our lives particularly. In a good way. It’s crucial for the businesses to adapt to the changes and improve the existing processes to stay successful and profitable.

At ITCL we think that human approach with the right tools can make the businesses succeed, one of those tools is marketing automation. Cloud based software designed to streamline the marketing efforts on targeting prospects and existing customers. There are so many great use cases for marketing automation available that would be hard to describe in one single article. However, I will try to briefly cover a few topics that might spark your interest in this technology.

To start, one of the most important goals for client-faced businesses is to optimize human resources engagement on repetitive tasks but still have contact with a customer. Let’s imagine that someone is organizing a big conference with multiple well-known speakers that bring quite a big audience. Managing the process of registration and supplying relevant information might not be an easy task. Marketing automation can help to collect, organize and spread the information among the audience of attendees. The whole process, easily. In addition to that, keeping engagement and customer satisfaction at a high level is another task that can be accomplished with providing relevant personalized information to the selected audience. Only useful, easily readable, only relevant information from the business to the customer with minimum efforts from the customer’s side. That would be a well-designed email easily readable across mobile and desktop devices, with information about speaker’s sessions that the customer subscribed to, organized in the right way based on start/end session time, and quick intro per each session. The list of enhancements is limited to imagination only, for example, add the functionality to add to the calendar, create a path plan on the exhibition floor to navigate the customer how to get from one session to another; when is the lunch break and what are the options and food/drink location on the map; provide the recommendations on the other speakers sessions based on customer’s persona/profile; etc. It’s also possible to include relevant advertising in these communications to further benefit the business and customers needs.

The successful setup and execution of this campaign will minimize the organizer time and effort in managing inquiries and responses from/to the clients. And let’s imagine the impact on the subsequent setup of such exhibitions down the road, when everything is pretty much defined and just small details would require adjustments and revisions.

How to Handle Pushback

Dec 11, 2022 by ITCL

Pushback is an inevitable part of our life in general and work in particular. There are different scenarios and types of pushback. Below is a simple powerful framework that you can apply in most situations to enable you to leverage pushback as a stimulation for candid and productive discussions.

Talk about the WHY. If pushback is expected then before vocalizing your idea or point of view (or whatever the case might be), start with the WHY. First explain why what you say next is important to consider or why it should be brought up right now or implemented the way you suggest. Then move to the solution or the discussion of the subject. Make sure your argumentation is short and straight to the point.
Ask about the WHY. Ask the people who are giving you pushback why they think otherwise.
Give them room to speak and be heard. Make sure the communication is in a professional and constructive manner. It has to be a dialogue not a tug-of-war.
Offer your point of view as an option and welcome other solutions for discussion. If you are putting forward a solution to the problem but all you hear is pushback with no feedback, welcome alternative ideas and discuss them as a team.
Come prepared. Do your research and ensure what you are bringing up is accurate and indeed relevant given the status quo. If applicable, circulate your idea/solution within the team or other project stakeholders, to get a certain level of validation and backup.
Use pushback as a tool to improve your solution and come back stronger.
Never take it personally, no matter what.

Digital Transformation Project for an Insurance Company

Nov 21, 2022 by ITCL

Over the years IT Creative Labs has implemented many different projects of various complexity and across many different niches. Our development team comprises senior professionals only and today we asked our lead backend engineer Vlad to share some insights on his work using one of the projects as an example.

The insurance company wanted to semi-automate the process of reviewing insurance claims, track statistics and semi-automate the process of filling out the forms, should the claim be approved for coverage. In order to achieve that the insurance company needed to automate the processing of user documents and to be able to obtain structured user data as a result of that processing. This automated process also needed to be integrated with the existing systems that the insurance company was using already. The first thing we did with the client is break down their requirements into smaller tasks, identifying key objectives.

Useful side note from Vlad: Any task, even the most difficult one, can be broken down into smaller sub-tasks. This concept is called Microproductivity.

Here is the breakdown Vlad & the team proposed:

Task 1

Problem: Documents were rotated differently, some were flipped upside down

Solution: Created an automated process of proper rotation for all the documents. A simple CV (Computer Vision) algorithm was used for that.

Task 2

Problem: Sometimes a scan of a document can be the size of A4 and the document itself is the size of an ID card.

Solution: Implemented a fixed-scale document template by cropping along the edge of the document and removing white space.

Task 3

Problem: Ability to identify the type of documents to be able to extract relevant fields from them.

Solution: A classifier model was implemented based on ML (machine learning), where the convolution neural network was trained on a high volume of documents and error validation (backpropagation).

Task 4

Problem: Different types of documents, a lot of older document types, hand-written documentation.

Solution: Implemented text recognition from image. A classic recognition model for Latin language was implemented.

Task 5

Problem: Extract recognized information and structure it properly mapping it to the correct fields, so it is presented in the cohesive and standardized manner.

Solution: Create an automated machine learning model, trained on specific types of documents, to extract information from the document and fill in the fields. When the fields were empty, we used an additional filling algorithm for placing all the appropriately identified elements on the coordinate grid.

In Vlad’s own words: “Everything was simple: just several models, algorithms, training and the task was done.”

For this project the following techstack was used: OpenCV, Python, Tensor Flow, Keras. React for frontend and Flask for backend, PostgreSQL for data storage.

As a result of creating this semi-automated machine learning-based process and integrating it with the rest of the existing systems, the insurance company was able to significantly cut down processing time and human error while being able to process larger volumes without increasing its staff count.

If you have a project in mind that you’d like to chat about – reach out!

Why Flutter is a Good Choice for Your Next Mobile Application Development Project

Nov 11, 2022 by ITCL

Flutter is an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase.
There are a few differentiating advantages of Flutter App Development. Let’s look at some of the major ones.

We have asked our flutter enthusiasts to provide their feedback on why they love flutter so much and why they’d recommend this framework above any other for your next software development project, especially when it comes to mobile application development. Here is what they said:

Cross-platform development

Flutter is cross-platform development, in which developers can build attractive apps in iOS and Android platforms contemporaneously.

As a result, Flutter programming is a great choice from cost-savings perspective, as you don’t have to hire two development teams to build a separate application for each of the mobile platforms.

Faster code writing

Flutter code compiles to ARM or Intel machine code as well as JavaScript, for fast performance on any device.

Hot reload

Typically, iOS and Android developers need to write code, then wait for it to compile, and be loaded on the device before seeing changes. But, with Flutter’s hot reload, they can check the effects immediately or without delay.

Reach users on every screen

Deploy to multiple devices from a single codebase: mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices.

Native performance

Flutter compiles down to native machine code for fast apps and beautiful animations.

Strong Community

Flutter is supported and used by Google, trusted by well-known brands around the world, and maintained by a community of global developers.

Some of them: Abbey Road, Alibaba, BMW, Byte Dance, Capital One, Dream11, Ebay, Emaar, Grab, Google, Groupon, Toyota, MGM, Nubank, NY Times, Philips Hue, Sonos, Square, Tencent.

Flutter continues to grow, both in usage and in the size of the ecosystem. Every day, more than 1,000 new mobile apps using Flutter are published to the Apple and Google Play stores, along with more usage on web and desktop. And the Flutter package ecosystem now comprises over 25,000 packages, providing further evidence of maturity and breadth.

Always open source

Trusted by a global community of contributors and supported by Google, Flutter is open, transparent, and reliable.

Interested to work with Flutter or apply it to your business idea?

We’ve got you covered! Tell us about the project you have in mind and we will help you turn your idea into reality!

What is the MVVM?

Sep 19, 2022 by ITCL

Model–view–viewmodel (MVVM) is a software architectural pattern that facilitates the separation of the development of the graphical user interface (the view) – be it via a markup language or GUI code – from the development of the business logic or back-end logic (the model) so that the view is not dependent on any specific model platform.

The viewmodel of MVVM is a value converter, meaning the viewmodel is responsible for exposing (converting) the data objects from the model in such a way that objects are easily managed and presented. In this respect, the viewmodel is more model than view, and handles most if not all of the view’s display logic. The viewmodel may implement a mediator pattern, organizing access to the back-end logic around the set of use cases supported by the view.

MVVM was invented by Microsoft architects Ken Cooper and Ted Peters specifically to simplify event-driven programming of user interfaces. The pattern was incorporated into Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) (Microsoft’s .NET graphics system) and Silverlight (WPF’s Internet application derivative).

Like many other design patterns, MVVM helps organize code and break programs into modules to make development, updating and reuse of code simpler and faster. The pattern is often used in Windows and web graphics presentation software.

The separation of the code in MVVM is divided into View, ViewModel and Model:

View is the collection of visible elements, which also receives user input. This includes user interfaces (UI), animations and text. The content of View is not interacted with directly to change what is presented.
ViewModel is located between the View and Model layers. This is where the controls for interacting with View are housed, while binding is used to connect the UI elements in View to the controls in ViewModel.
Model houses the logic for the program, which is retrieved by the ViewModel upon its own receipt of input from the user through View.

Features

Life Cycle state of Application will be maintained.
The application will be in the same position as where the user left it.
UI Components are kept away from Business Logic.
Business Logic is kept away from Database operations.
Easy to understand and read.

Advantages

Maintainability – Can remain agile and keep releasing successive versions quickly.
Extensibility – Have the ability to replace or add new pieces of code.
Testability – Easier to write unit tests against core logic.
Transparent Communication – The view model provides a transparent interface to the view controller, which it uses to populate the view layer and interact with the model layer, which results in a transparent communication between the layers of your application.

Disadvantages

Some people think that for simple UIs, MVVM can be overkill.
In bigger cases, it can be hard to design the ViewModel.
Debugging would be a bit difficult when we have complex data bindings.

From Server, Get Data(available in Model Objects), View Model reads Model Objects and then facilitates the easy presentation of data on the view.

What is CICD and why is it so Popular?

Aug 26, 2022 by ITCL

What is CI/CD?

CI/CD is a set of practices that automate the building, testing, and deployment stages of software development. Automation reduces delivery timelines and increases reliability across the development life cycle.

Most modern applications require developing code using a variety of platforms and tools, so teams need a consistent mechanism to integrate and validate changes. Continuous integration establishes an automated way to build, package, and test their applications. Having a consistent integration process encourages developers to commit code changes more frequently, focus on meeting business requirements, code quality, and security, which leads to better collaboration and code quality.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery are two distinct processes in CI/CD and have different purposes:

CI runs automated build-and-test steps to ensure that code changes reliably merge into the central repository.
CD provides a quick and seamless method of delivering the code to end-users.

So the main goal of CI/CD is to help developers ship software with speed and efficiency. The team continuously delivers code into production, running an ongoing flow of new features and bug fixes.

The most popular CI/CD tools

A CI/CD tool helps DevOps teams create a pipeline and automate integration, deployment, and testing stages. Some tools specifically handle the integration (CI) side, some manage development and deployment (CD), while others specialize in continuous testing or related functions.

Here is a list of the most popular CI/CD tools you can choose from:

Jenkins: An automation server that can handle anything from simple CI to a complex CI/CD pipeline.
TeamCity: A CI server that helps build and deploy projects with reusable settings and configurations.
Spinnaker: An open-source CD platform ideal for multi-cloud environments.
GoCD: A CI/CD server that emphasizes modeling and visualization.
CircleCI: A flexible, cloud-based CI/CD tool perfect for smaller projects.
Travis CI: A Ruby-based tool with a robust build matrix.
Bamboo: A CI server with support for several top stacks (Docker, AWS, Amazon S3, Git, CodeDeploy, Mercurial) and up to a hundred remote build agents.

CI/CD enables more frequent code deployment.

So, let’s sum up

CI packages, tests builds, and notifies developers if something goes wrong. The CD automatically deploys applications and performs additional tests.

CI/CD pipelines are designed for organizations that need to make frequent changes to applications with a reliable delivery process. In addition to build standardization, test development, and deployment automation, we get a holistic production process for deploying code changes. The introduction of CI/CD allows developers to focus on improving applications and not spend effort on deploying it.

CI/CD is one of the DevOps practices, as it aims to combat the tension between developers who want to make frequent changes and operations that require stability. With automation, developers can make changes more frequently, and operations teams, in turn, gain greater stability because environment configuration is standardized and continuous testing is carried out during delivery. Also, the setting of environment variables is separated from the application and there are automated rollback procedures.

However, CI/CD is just one of the processes that can contribute to improvements. There are other conditions for increasing the frequency of delivery.

To get started with CI/CD, the development and operations teams need to decide on technologies, practices, and priorities. Teams need to build consensus on the right approaches for their business and technology so that once CI/CD is implemented, the team consistently adheres to the chosen practices.

Everything You Need to Know About Docker & Docker Compose to Get Started

Aug 22, 2022 by ITCL

What is Docker Compose?

Docker is known for its use of OS-level virtualization and for the container system that employs to make creating, deploying and running applications much easier for developers.

While learning the basics of Docker, you may have come across the creation of simple applications that work autonomously, not depending, for example, on external data sources or on certain services. In practice, such applications are rare. Real projects usually involve a whole set of collaborative applications.

Docker Compose technology, if we describe it in a simplified way, allows, with the help of one command, to start many services.

So, Docker Compose is software tool used for defining and running multi-container Docker applications.

Difference Between Docker and Docker Compose

Docker is used to manage the individual containers (services) that make up an application.

Docker Compose is used to manage multiple containers that are part of an application at the same time. This tool offers the same features as Docker, but allows you to work with more complex applications.

Docker Compose Use Cases

Automated testing environments.

An important part of any Deployment or Integration process is the automated test suite.

Compose supports automated testing, which is an essential part of CI/CD and provides a convenient and easy way to create and destroy isolated testing environments for your testing. Developers can define and configure the environment needed for running automated end-to-end testing in just a few commands using the appropriate Docker Compose file.

Single host deployments.

In Docker Compose, containers are designed to run on a single host as they have traditionally been focused on development and testing workflows.

Development Environments.

Compose is a fast and simple way of starting projects as it can quickly spin up new isolated development environments. The software documents and configures all the application’s service dependencies (including databases, caches, web service APIs, etc.). It allows you to create and start one or multiple containers for each dependency using a single command.

Release notes.

You can see a detailed list of changes for past and current releases of Docker Compose, refer to the Changelog.

What features make Docker Compose so effective?

Multiple isolated environments on a single host
Preserve volume data when containers are created
Only recreate containers that have changed
Variables and moving a composition between environments

We have covered the basics of working with Docker Compose technology, the knowledge of which will allow you to use this technology and, if you desire, begin to study it in more depth.

Do you use Docker Compose in your projects?

Overwhelmed by this content? Reach out with your next big idea and we’ll take care of all the technical details so you can focus on the bigger picture.

How to Set Goals That Deliver Results

Aug 13, 2022 by ITCL

A lot of articles are written about goals but why it’s so important?

When you set goals, you take control of your life’s or work’s direction.

Goals provide you with focus

And when you have clear focus all your decisions and actions bring you closer to achieving those goals. When you create a vision of what your life or business could look like. Then you start helping yourself and your team to achieve the goal and get the best results as possible.

Think about it for a moment

Setting goals keeps you moving, increases your organization and brings you happiness.

How to set goals effectively?

Before setting the goal think about the results you want to see.

It’s really important to ask yourself: Is this goal something I truly want? You should understand that only sincere desire to achieve the goal can help you.

Create SMART goals. Here are the SMART criteria:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Time-bound

In addition, the goal must necessarily be positive. You can use any principle of goal setting and transform it for yourself.

Write your goals down. Yes, do it!

Written goals become real and tangible, from this moment they’re not just the idea in your mind. Keep your goals somewhere visible. While you’re writing down your goals, use a positive tone so you stay excited about achieving them.

Time to create an action plan and timeline

Many people set the goal but never create an action plan to understand how exactly they will meet that goal. Your action plan should all necessary steps you need to take to get the results. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your action plan. If you want to use crayons, markers or colored pencils – do it. As a part of your action plan use timeline, it helps visualize roles, tasks, milestones and deadlines to achieve your goal. Also timeline creates a sense of urgency, which motivates you to stay on schedule.

Take action

To achieve the goal, it is not enough to set it, it is necessary to act. Every step that you take should lead to another until you finish your goal.

Control and evaluate your progress

Consider scheduling a weekly evaluation, which could include measuring your progress and checking your schedule. Make necessary adjustments and keep going. The process of setting goals makes you achieve the results faster and more efficiently.