Blog

Explore how UKAD streamlines multilingual website management with Translation Manager on Umbraco CMS. This article details UKAD's integration process, including using Deepl as a translation connector, and highlights how the capabilities of the Translation Manager allow content editors to efficiently handle language versions directly within Umbraco. Learn how this setup enhances consistency, workflow efficiency, and accessibility across multiple languages.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing industries, but many business owners think they need to build custom models from scratch to benefit. In reality, by customizing existing large language models (LLMs), businesses can automate tasks, improve efficiency, and access specialized knowledge without the time and expense of developing their own AI solutions. In this article, we’ll explore how techniques like prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and embedding retrieval can help your business tailor AI to meet its unique needs.

UKAD is excited to participate in Opticon 2024, a premier event for digital innovation held in Stockholm and San Antonio. Opticon, hosted by Optimizely, gathers top industry professionals to explore the latest digital trends and AI-driven solutions. As a Bronze Member of Optimizely's Enterprise Solution Partner program, UKAD brings over 18 years of expertise in software development, offering full-stack solutions across various sectors. Attendees at Opticon 2024 can expect insightful sessions, networking opportunities, and practical strategies to advance their digital transformation efforts. UKAD looks forward to connecting with partners and exploring collaborative opportunities at the event.

On May 30th, our team from UKAD had the pleasure of attending the Finnish-Ukrainian Tech Day in Espoo, Finland. The event brought together leaders and innovators from the tech industries of Finland and Ukraine. The aim was to foster collaboration and share insights on AI, software development, and growing businesses. Advicera OY organized the conference in partnership with the City of Espoo. It was an excellent chance to expand our network, gain new perspectives, and find new paths for innovation.

The evolution of IT constantly reshapes how we work, live, communicate, and network. Especially in the financial sector, information technology unlocks new opportunities for businesses, enabling them to innovate and improve their operations and security. Technology has already proven to be a major role player in the growth of the financial sector. With the popularity of digital banking and Neobanking being examples, IT is growing by leaps and bounds in the financial industry.

Staff augmentation is a methodology that allows you to expand your team quickly by hiring temporary employees to optimize business processes.

Maintaining a balance between work and personal life is crucial for the overall well-being of people. When teammates have the time and energy to engage in activities outside of work, they can draw inspiration from various aspects of their lives and apply those insights to their work, leading to more creative and effective solutions. A proper work-life balance allows employees to allocate sufficient time to tasks, leading to higher-quality outputs and fewer errors.

In the ever-evolving landscape of information technology, staying ahead of the curve is essential for any company seeking to provide innovative and efficient solutions. One such groundbreaking concept that has gained immense popularity is the microservices architecture

In today's digital age, healthcare providers are embracing technology to improve patient care, streamline administrative tasks, and enhance overall operational efficiency. Healthcare software has emerged as a game-changer, offering a wide range of solutions to meet the diverse needs of medical practices. From medical billing software to patient management systems and mental health software, these technological advancements are reshaping the way healthcare is delivered. In this article, we will explore the variety and utilization of healthcare software and how it is transforming the industry for the better.

As a well-known eLearning development provider, we want to talk about the basis of this area to bring an understanding of why everybody needs EdTech solutions for any kind of business

There is one thing that looks as revolutionary as the steam-powered engine centuries ago, surrounded by those who believe in its unique value and those who oppose and call it a waste of time. The thing is a neural network, more specifically Chat GPT - a chatbot using downloaded information to generate unique answers. It's capable of talking like a living person, composing various texts, answering questions, writing poems, and so on. No discussion, it's a perfect toy for grown-up boys and girls, but can it be beneficial to the business?

And here it is, the moment has come. You are focusing on your work and coming up with 'definitely that' idea capable of solving the problem. And then, you start working on it. What could go wrong? Only the sound of an incoming message on Slack. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

When venturing into ASP.NET development, it's crucial to grasp the fundamentals and the unique characteristics of this powerful framework. In this article, we will delve into the world of ASP.NET, discuss the differences between .NET and ASP.NET, explore the reasons why ASP.NET is a popular choice for web development, and highlight the application of ASP.NET Core CMS

Cook up a successful discovery phase with UKAD. Learn how our expert method streamlines software development for a successful project outcome

Staff augmentation is a popular approach that businesses use to address skill gaps in their workforce. It involves outsourcing highly skilled professionals to fill specific roles in a company for a predetermined amount of time. Augmentation staffing is different from traditional staffing services in that it is more targeted and specialized, often providing specific expertise that companies may not have in-house. In this article, we'll explore what augmentation staffing is, the difference between staffing and staff augmentation, and the benefits of using staff augmentation placement services

ChatGPT, as well as other AI-powered chatbots, is booming now! Somebody tries to write an essay using it, and somebody tries to fit it for programming. A bunch of people is even scared that artificial intellect may replace them very soon. So, I decided to check is ChatGPT capable of replacing content marketing experts and asked it to write several marketing texts about Umbraco

Technology is changing the way we do business and the tools we use to get there. By leveraging the power of smarter technology solutions, businesses can drive business results and maximize their potential. The integration of Uberall and Umbraco CMS is an example of this, connecting two powerful business tools to drive even better results. This blog post will discuss what Uberall and Umbraco CMS are, how to integrate the two technologies and the benefits of this integration.

We are proud to announce our latest achievement i.e UKAD is now also a Finest 500 Company for Mobile App Development according to a press release published by TopDevelopers.co

SquadGurus and Red Jumpers surveyed 67 Ukrainian IT companies and got quite interesting and promising results that indicate a stable situation and sustainable growth. In this article, I want to analyze the digits from this report and explain what they mean for our foreign partners. Let's go!

Disclaimer: This article was created before our headquarter moved to Seattle, USA!

As an outsourcing software development company with R&D and engineering teams, UKAD helps its clients develop their software according to their requirements. With specialization in .NET and PHP technologies, the company aims to deliver the best robust solution to clients and assist them in obtaining a competitive advantage.

If you're into web development or doing business online, you may know about content management systems. Now, we want to speak about the cutting-edge solution related to this field — Headless CMS. To be more specific, we also reviewed Contentful, Storyblock, and Strapi, as the most popular platforms UKAD works with

Success in the digital industry is about taking one step at a time, ensuring that you did everything right before moving on to either expansion or specialization. Our team has done exactly that since we began operating in 2005, and now we’re reaping the rewards of our team’s patience.

Search Engine Optimization is a vital part of most online businesses around the globe. It is especially relevant for those who depend on so-called organic traffic from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and so forth. And everybody wants to be on the 1st page of Google search results — that is true. So, what if you prefer Umbraco CMS and your goal is to be as much “SEO-friendly” as possible?

We are glad to make the first great announcement of 2022! Despite the harsh situation, UKAD opens an RnD center in Malaga, Spain. For us, it's a notable step in development that provides access to fresh talents and opportunities never seen before, as for our future and existing partners. Hope, this decision will drive UKAD's future achievements!

The war started in the early morning of February 24th by Russia is not a war on Ukraine. It is a war against humanity. Russians brutally devastate Ukrainian cities, murder civilians trying to evacuate, shell hospitals and kindergartens. Since the beginning, over 14 hundreds civil Ukrainians, including over a hundred children, were brutally murdered only according to the available data. The real numbers are still unknown because russian military forces don't allow collecting and burying bodies.

We are proud to announce that our name was included in a press release about the best mobile app developers in the industry by TopDevelopers.co.

Starting a project, it's really important to understand which vendor suits your needs best. So, based on our experience, we are gladly explaining when and why you should either hire a freelance developer or switch to a software development agency. I hope it will help you once, nurturing your project, to understand that it's time for UKAD!

In 2020, it was almost impossible to find a project without IaC, microservices, blockchain, VR, and other stuff  from the description, as well as without AWS, Azure, or GCloud mentioned in the tech stack...

Every good service starts from an appointment, regardless it's a dental clinic or car workshop. At this point, the business turns contact with a customer into bountiful relationships either reputation loss. Thus, it should be clear, providing vast information, and friendly with every user, including seniors and non-tech people.

Since the last weeks of 2019 the world is facing a new outbreak caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. We already can see how service proposals are changing to meet the emerging requirements for safety and reduce the effect of flight prohibitions in many countries

As the digitized world becomes closer, it is a must for today to extend and move your business online. One of such niches we are going to discuss today is online learning.

When a customer chooses a provider of software development services, one of the important selection criteria is the balance between team expertise and solution budget. If the planned project is quite large or complicated, IT companies often include a business analyst to the development team. And it’s the moment when the customer meets a question: why should we add a business analyst?

No matter how much we try to prevent it, problems and issues have a way of making themselves present in our business. It’s unavoidable, almost non-negotiable. While it is a normal occurrence, we must do what we can to make sure they’re only experienced once.

While the entire world is focused on the usual public clouds the private ones are behind the scene. We’re going to look into that to figure out the purpose of usage.

UKAD, an outsourcing software development company with R&D and engineering teams, specializes in .NET and Python technologies. Delivering quality projects within time, and cost constraints endows UKAD to thrive as one of the top software development service providers in Seattle at GoodFirms.

While managing our website, I've got a question: how to spend less time on different minor actions. Such as digging into the pile of alike pictures, which is one of the most painful things for everyone managing content. So, I got interested in Digital Assets Management applications - the software solutions used to catalog, store and, sometimes, edit multimedia files - and discovered it using Digizuite as an example.

This article aims to present an innovative approach to curbing the expenses associated with maintaining and enhancing outdated applications. As we are all aware, the regular update of mobile applications plays a pivotal role in their lifecycle. This practice not only maintains market relevance but also facilitates the integration of new features, ultimately enhancing financial performance. When the time comes for a much-needed update to your service, consider this strategy for potential improvement.

If you've already spent several minutes on UKAD's blog, you should get out that we love Umbraco. Overall, it's a very flexible CMS allowing us to use it for literally everything. For example, e-Learning solutions in which we are masters.

On the testing processes of medium and large-sized projects, there is a lot of repetitive work for regression tests on each iteration of the development process. To reduce the expenses for QA processes, as a rule, companies use testing automation.

While we were testing the UKAD web site manually, we’ve defined that there are over a hundred web pages, so manual reviewing all of them for each deployment takes too much time. Also, people can just make mistakes while doing a big amount of monotonous work. That’s why we decided to use a pixel-by-pixel comparison tool aShot, which allows testing our GUI state automatically

As every professional software development company, UKAD pays much attention to the quality of our solutions. We asked one of our Quality Assurance experts to explain the way from a raw piece of code to an excellent product.

Every year many companies either developing eCommerce projects or operating play an interesting game: the hottest trends prediction. And this year UKAD gladly takes part too and presents its list of the hottest trends in eCommerce-2020! We hope, this list will be useful for everyone reading it.

As each software development company, from time to time we pay some attention to SSL certificates. Such protection is a de-facto standard of modern web development as well as a very good practice which requires a constant expenditure of time and effort.

Specializing in .NET and PHP technologies and delivering quality projects within time and cost constraints accelerate UKAD amongst the top web service providers at GoodFirms

What is the most important problem faced by each technology-related startup? For the USA, Canada, and Western Europe it will be RnD costs. Talking not only about Silicon Valley with all these 6 digit salaries but also other locations it's very expensive to develop your product at home when you live in Sweden or the United States. What about 100+ USD hourly rates at below-the-average quality? Easy! In fact, high living standards lead to equally high labor costs, commonly unbearable for most of all except the grandes such as Facebook. So, here comes an obvious idea: outsource it!

Nowadays, a great variety of different CMS are applied by website developers and a very rare website is fully custom developed. The variety of content management systems is so rich that it is almost impossible not to find a CMS, which will be fully along with client's requirements and will save time and money comparing with custom solution development. Moreover, extension of the CMS-based application is much easier and cheaper

Nowadays the most modern designers work with Sketch. Because of its ability to draw in the interface interaction and its tiny weight. Being NET developers we use Windows so there is a complication to collaborate with Sketch which was created only for Mac users. But those dark days are away and the clouds begin to dissipate over the world of NET developers. So, meet - Avocode

As we know, informational security is extremely important, especially when we talk about any money-related operations. Now, most of all users realize that they should set strong passwords or even utilize 2FA with banking apps. But here come many more cybersecurity issues aiming your business such as unsafe credentials sharing...

UKAD was once again highlighted as a top performing company on one of Clutch’s annual reports. This time, Clutch listed UKAD among the best development firms in France — a huge honor for our team. We appreciate this recognition and look forward to seeing how it helps us grow as a company.

Hooray! We proud to announce that we became the Umbraco Registered Partner! Umbraco is our love since 2008. The partnership will help us to always be at the forefront of Umbraco as a business

Clients may succeed in communicating with business clients and partners, but when it comes to developing websites or software, they lack the background to explain the details of what they want. If a client allows the developers to take the reins, in most cases the final result may disappoint and not be exactly what the client wants

You can now cast your votes to determine which 5 lucky people win these years much-coveted MVP awards. The community is the best feature of Umbraco and the people who are actively helping other people discovering every nook and cranny of Umbraco are a huge part of our friendly DNA. The MVP awards are the community’s way of thanking the people that we find the most valuable. MVP in the Umbraco world means Most Valuable People

CQRS stands for Command Query Responsibility Segregation. It's a pattern that performs segregate operations that read data from operations that update data by using separate interfaces. This can maximize performance, scalability, and security. Supports the evolution of the system over time through higher flexibility, and prevents update commands from causing merge conflicts at the domain level.

We are thrilled to announce that we have been listed in Clutch’s 2019 Report among the top .NET developers on their platform.

The question “is it worth to use Docker containers for Windows” is still valid. Due to Microsoft .NET had solved problems where containers rock in PHP and NodeJS worlds.

So why should we use containers for .NET?

There are several reasons...

There is a good tradition in Kharkiv to take part in the international marathon. People from over the Kharkiv region come to anticipate it. It is annual marathon which is brought in Record Book of Ukraine as the most popular race in the number of registered participants

My top set of plugins that helps to boost Umbraco with few clicks adding SEO capabilities, improving editor experience and simplifying development and reduce maintenance.

Umbraco is flexible and developer friendly CMS. Here some tips on how to optimize the editorial experience.

In UKAD we widely use Azure for the projects. In this article, I want to outline the list of top Azure services we work with

E-Commerce is an ever growing industry. Launching your web shop, although being a very wide-spread business idea, it still is could be quite profitable.

E-commerce website development service is very popular Client request for UKAD team .  The time or budget limits could be a constraint for a Client to start a custom webshop project. In case when none of the cloud platforms meets the customization requirements, our development team could use CMS systems in conjunction with a third party eShop packages.

Considering Umbraco for a new project you might want to know, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the potential web platform. And if the choice of Umbraco it is the right decision. Here we will try to share our view about Umbraco pros and cons.

UKAD Aligns Project Experience and Platform Expertise for Optimizely Digital Experience Cloud Customers.

We completed a thorough certification process to earn the Bronze Partner status in Episerver’s Partner Success Program and to join as a qualified, value-add seller of Optimizely Digital Experience Cloud™ platform.

Outsourcing is no more about the budget. The choice of outsourcing and outstaffing providers gives businesses an opportunity to launch a win-win professional partnership with effective and transparent management and top-qualified development team

We discovered a revolutionary solution for Umbraco performance, that I want to describe in this article.
Here you WON’T find tips and tricks “How to change 10 Umbraco settings to make it work faster”. We implemented a completely new approach that solved all server-side performance issues for us forever.

Each project has its own requirements and goals that influence on a CMS choice. When Umbraco is the best alternative?

Bellow I will try to clear out the main reasons to decide on Umbraco.

Azure Blockchain Workbench is a new cloud service platform that reduces time and effort needed for a blockchain network configuration and deployment. The tool is quite handy for blockchain projects usage.

It supports the main blockchain platforms and can be easily integrated with existing systems and applications utilizing Microsoft Flow and Logic Apps.

The article considers the pros and cons of ASP.NET Core based applications development from a business point of view.

React Native is a JavaScript framework to build mobile apps that are rendered natively for iOS and Android. Build once the application run on both iOS and Android devices.

Being a software house working both with Optimizely (EpiServer) and Umbraco, we got numerous questions from customers about the differences between the two CMS platforms. If Umbraco free and Optimizely is costly, why some clients still choose Optimizely? Which platform is better for editors? Which could be the ideal choice for the project?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project from Google and Twitter, allows you to create pages with instant download. These are common web pages that have AMP HTML. Average page load is 0.7 seconds.

The article doesn’t aim to be a comprehensive overview either of the Sketch nor of Figma. There is plenty of articles on the internet that do it great. We just want to consider important points of our workflow in UKAD.

.NET developers demand to keep highest rates on the global employment market during the past 18 years. Companies worldwide are looking for qualified .NET engineers, as a simple research of job opportunities shows. For example, a google request “.NET developer” gives more than 7,240,000 results

UKAD needs to work hard at standing out among the crowd. We do this by delivering quality products to our clients and by striving to always use the most up-to-date tech practices when building for the businesses we serve.

Among some development teams, there is a misconception that the software release is an only about “to deliver the code (the new functionality) to a production server”. In case of such an approach, the release management flow stops right after the code delivery.

In this article, I would like to consider a tool that allows you to facilitate the work of the system administrator and make monitoring client servers more cost-effective and resultative. The overview will be helpful for system administrators, DevOps specialists, customers who cooperate with IT companies, developers. 

The Internet gives QA engineer a wide choice of tools to optimize the site. Some of them are paid (f. ex., Netpeaker Spider) others are free like Xenu. While choosing the tool I always consider free options first. But despite a huge advantage of being payment-free, such programs are usually limited in their features and specialization. Therefore, to achieve the best result and cover the whole tasks log QA engineer could combine two or more tools.

Here we want to start with some React Native critics, sharing the opinion of our front-end developer after he got acquainted with RN.

Android and iOS development: 4 differences

The only official Windows IDE to work with Android apps is Android Studio. There are some unofficial iOS simulators for Windows to test iOS apps, but their reliability isn’t guaranteed by Apple.

CSS Grid technology appeared in 2011, but interest is still growing. This article is a small technical guide to the most interesting features and functions.

This article will be useful for frontend developers as well as for other web development and design specialists.

Testing is an important part of software development. Its purpose is to provide information about product quality. Automated testing uses software to simplify the testing process and verify results.

Medical organizations currently face a significant challenge when integrating systems and processes across the care continuum. Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems have become a mission-critical component for delivering appropriate and timely high-quality care. They function as the single source of truth for providers and patients. Healthcare providers need their EHR and supporting infrastructure to be always running and compliant with strict regulations for health data security and privacy.

Application security isn’t a feature or an advantage but rather an essential and necessary element. A security breach can affect a company financially but even more importantly can wreck its reputation. That’s why app security should be a priority during development.

Ionic is a technology that lets you build full-fledged apps for both iOS and Android using your existing web development skills and without needing any deep platform-specific knowledge. Some restrictions apply, but in general, you only need to be familiar with Angular (a popular web framework) to get started with developing your app. For styling, you can apply your knowledge of SCSS to make the app look the way you want.

Our main objective was to build a system that could help us easily monitor the temperature and humidity inside our office building. There were no strong requirements in terms of what the end product should be - an app, a website or some kind of a GUI that could only be used inside the office, so it would be our future task. For the first few months, we focused on the hardware and the firmware.

Challenge: Amid the daily routine, programmers can forget to report their time. We were in search of an easy way to get a daily report so we could notify programmers who forgot to log their time.

Solution: We designed a bot on the Microsoft Bot Framework. Every day at 11:00 pm and 9:00 am, the bot verifies that time reports are complete and notifies employees via direct messages on their corporate Slack accounts in case they aren’t.

If you are familiar with the Umbraco CMS, you’ve probably heard of a webshop package called Ucommerce. Even if you haven’t, it’s not hard to guess its intended purpose. Ucommerce is an enterprise-grade solution which seamlessly merges the content creation possibilities of the Umbraco CMS with powerful and modern commercial functions. The name of this platform reflects the modern trend in business, which can be summarized by one word - ubiquitous. The idea of this approach is to make trading simple and accessible for everyone.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a Google technology which allows mobile devices to load web pages in a blink of an eye. It is intended for the whole English-speaking segment of the Internet. You can easily integrate it into your project, provided that you know some of its peculiarities

The problem of continuous integration is quite particular for iOS, it is particularly sensitive in significant enterprises and is not-so-critical in small outsourcing companies. Of course, there is already a whole bunch of ready-made solutions, the most popular of which is fabric.io, diawi.com, testflight, but there are many others. Consider the basic pros and cons of these three application distribution platforms

Firebase is a web app development platform created by Google. It lets you develop the whole app on the front-end without any server-side code. At the same time, it does let you set up some server-side logic via Firebase Functions if you need to react to certain events (creation of data or files, login, https requests) so you can send emails or push notifications or process the data after it is written

Outsourcing software development in Ukraine already has a 20-year history. The history starts with the removal of the Iron Curtain and formation of a new independent democratic country. In the legacy of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has obtained a strong scientific base and a huge entrepreneurial potential

In 2016 Umbraco company launched the cloud version of their CMS - Umbraco Cloud. The company says that Umbraco as a Service gives us the all-in-one solution: Azure hosting and predictability in the projects, built on 10 years of experience. Umbraco as a Service or UaaS finally came to me, so let's start

Can you imagine our life without the internet? Nowadays, by the click of the mouse, you can get any information in a second. It's true, but mostly for the people who can use a mouse, see the screen, listen to an audio file... In this article, I want to share the importance of Web Accessibility for the people with disabilities (WAI)

The proposed new EU GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] law extends the scope of the EU data protection regulation to all foreign companies processing data of EU residents. It provides for a harmonization of the data protection regulations throughout the EU, thereby making it easier for non-European companies to comply with these GDPR acts; however, this comes at the cost of a strict data protection compliance regime with severe penalties of up to 4% of worldwide turnover

Wow, what a year 2016 was! Brexit, US presidential election, and talks how it will impact on the technology world… I think, we’ll touch this issue later, but now we want to take some local talk: about Ukraine and our hometown - Kharkiv