Tips and tricks we've picked up along the way.
At a recent Olio Apps hackathon, teams were given a clear assignment: build a multiplayer game in one day, using a generative AI code assistant. One team's response became Breakin' the Louvre, a three-player heist game that reveals what happens when AI isn't just present, but required.
Cloud Strategist
Over the course of a single day, multiple teams designed, built, and deployed playable games, many with multiplayer capabilities. This post recaps the demos, highlights the engineering patterns that emerged, and explains what we learned about AI-assisted development.
Cloud Strategist
During a recent internal hackathon, our dev teams set out with a clear constraint: build a game that's playable, online, and real in a single day. By the end, they had shipped 6 online multiplayer games, with the winner being a multiplayer Minesweeper complete with spectators, chat, and real-time updates.
Cloud Strategist
While vibe coding can get you quite far, the hardening process that makes an application secure, scalable, and production-ready still requires a disciplined software development lifecycle. Without that, organizations run into problems with security, stability, and compliance.
Cloud Strategist
While vibe coding can get you quite far, the hardening process that makes an application secure, scalable, and production-ready still requires a disciplined software development lifecycle. Without that, organizations run into problems with security, stability, and compliance.
Cloud Strategist
Many founders and innovators come to us with a vision already forming in their minds. But often, those early visions are obscured by assumptions, blind spots, or competing priorities. A discovery session is where we peel back the layers, hold up a mirror, and ask the hard questions that bring clarity and refine the product before valuable development time is spent.
CEO
Vibe coding is a rising trend in AI-assisted software development that allows users to build functional web apps, landing pages, and tools by simply describing their vision through natural language prompts. Instead of writing full codebases, you 'vibe' with an AI giving instructions and letting the tool generate the code.
Cloud Strategist
Backrs’ mission is to help students and young professionals figure out what they want to do and how to get there, now supported with actionable, AI-driven guidance. Think career coaching, resume feedback, and college recommendations, all delivered in a personalized and context-aware interface.
Cloud Strategist
Artificial Intelligence is changing how software is written—and who writes it. Thanks to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude, anyone with a clear idea can now generate code, learn new frameworks, and prototype apps—all by collaborating with an AI assistant. This emerging approach has a name: vibe coding.
Cloud Strategist
Artificial Intelligence is changing how software is written—and who writes it. Thanks to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude, anyone with a clear idea can now generate code, learn new frameworks, and prototype apps—all by collaborating with an AI assistant. This emerging approach has a name: vibe coding.
Cloud Strategist
Drawing from industry observations and our own development experience from developing and refining LLM solutions, this post offers a roadmap and tangible LLM development strategies for navigating the complexities of enterprise AI and overcoming common GenAI roadblocks in 2025.
Cloud Strategist
In a recent episode of Code & Cognition, the Olio Apps team sat down to talk shop on the evolving world of Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic workflows, and how these tools are changing how we design, scope, and implement software projects in 2025.
CEO
In a recent episode of Code & Cognition, the Olio Apps team sat down to talk shop on the evolving world of Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic workflows, and how these tools are changing how we design, scope, and implement software projects in 2025.
CEO
In this guide, we’ll walk through how our team tackled these challenges by restructuring our AWS environments and implementing Lambda auto scaling with provisioned concurrency—a move that significantly improved both performance and cost-efficiency.
CEO
You might wonder how to quickly and effectively choose colors that create a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing design. I'll explore how I used AI, specifically ChatGPT-4o, to solve this problem by leveraging color theory principles to generate color schemes mathematically.
At Olio Apps we acknowledge that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an industry leader when it comes to providing reliable and scalable cloud services for companies across all domains.
CEO
At Olio Apps, EventBridge has become a huge topic of conversation ever since we’ve been using it with one of our clients. As the app continues to grow in complexity and perform more complex functions, it becomes harder to manage all of these different threads and if-thens.
Engineering Manager
At Olio Apps we acknowledge that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an industry leader when it comes to providing reliable and scalable cloud services for companies across all domains.
CEO
At Olio Apps we acknowledge that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an industry leader when it comes to providing reliable and scalable cloud services for companies across all domains.
CEO
We have decided to grow our partnership with Amazon Web Services through the Amazon Partner Network, focusing on designing, prototyping, and building Generative AI solutions with Amazon Bedrock and serverless development on AWS.
This is a collection of techniques and tools we use at Olio Apps to make UI application development faster and more efficient!
CTO
When does recursion in a frontend framework make sense, can it be a practical solution to your problem, and how do we do it?
Software Engineer
Joining a new team can be daunting. This article serves as a guiding light for developers joining new software teams or companies and is meant to improve your onboarding experience. It goes through an entire walkthrough of what to expect between different milestones at your new company, not to mention a comprehensive checklist of what you should be focusing on during your onboarding process. Have a look!
Software Engineer
In this article, I discuss seven principles for minimizing the time and money spent building a mobile app. If you're looking to build an app, are pressed for time, and don't have an unlimited budget, keep reading!
CEO
Providing an internship to junior developers comes with a wealth of challenges and rewards. I share tips on creating a well-rounded internship for juniors while reflecting on our most recent experience hosting interns at a software consultancy.
Software Engineer
What really makes crunch time different from what we deem normal and how did we successfully end up with a functional prototype that met all of our client’s requirements?
Software Engineer
Does your API need a REST from all that polling? You can improve real-time communication between web services using your REST API and the REST Hooks pattern.
Software Engineer
Dispelling complaints about daily stand-up and tips for making the most out of your scrum.
Software Engineer
A tutorial on how to hack in a tooltip, a static Y-Axis, and truncated bars into a Recharts graph.
Software Engineer
Over the past year, Olio Apps has made a commitment to changing our company culture around working remotely. We’d seen other teams enjoy success by going fully or partially remote, but for us, working outside the office felt like an inconvenience. We wanted to change that, and we knew that we had the technology to make it a reality.
Software Engineer
In a typical software life cycle, most projects begin as a bouncing baby prototype and later develop into a strong, trusted production application. At these two distinct stages of software development, the priorities, pace, and coding practices can differ greatly. Understanding these nuances and properly planning your prototype to transition into a product can save you a lot of time and money. And by protecting your bottom line, it can increase your chances of project success.
Software Engineer
I spent the weekend making a technical design and implementing it to challenge myself and evaluate a few different unfamiliar libraries.
Software Engineer
Wellness or well-being is the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy. This state of well-being can exist in one's life as a whole, as well as in each arena of a person's life, eg. they have a state of well-being in their social life, their home life, their emotional life, and their work life as say, a software developer.
Software Engineer
A technical and philosophical approach.
Software Engineer
As a software engineer, I find my self torn between two seemingly opposite goals: becoming a master of the skills that I already have and also constantly trying to learn new things. And I'm definitely not alone.
Software Engineer
Another quarter, another chance for the staff at Olio Apps to try their hand at hacking together a project over an 8 hour work day in a friendly competition.
Software Engineer
When you have a new idea for an app, you want to get feedback from users as quickly as possible to see if the idea has legs, and start refining it. The best feedback comes once people try it.
CEO
Sitka is a small but powerful framework for state management. It organizes your application into modules, each managing a logical area of state. It builds on top of Redux and Redux Saga, giving you all the benefits of those tools without the boilerplate.
Software Engineers
Recently, Olio Apps took a little break from our regularly scheduled programming (😜) to do some hacking. We broke off into teams two, designed and built projects over the course of a pizza-fueled "work" day.
Software Engineer
We love TypeScript. I’ll get into the reasons why later. And we love virtual reality. Being able to create WebVR experiences has been a focus at Olio Apps this year. This lead us to create a set of tools to help developers to make A-Frame experiences using TypeScript.
Software Engineer
Here at Olio Apps, we have taken the next step into the world of augmented/mixed reality and added a Magic Leap to our catalog. This decision was driven by our interest in the mixed reality space and the possibilities of the domain.
Software Engineer
At Olio Apps, we are eager to present our first tool for creating scalable WebVR applications. Our experience engineering web and native apps along with our motivation to develop in the virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) space has brought us to create aframe-typescript-redux.
Software Engineer
When Cory and I decided the make the transition from our previous career fields to development, one of largest deciding factors in picking a code school was career services and job preparation. We both chose Epicodus because it offered an internship as part of the schooling process, which is how we were both placed at Olio Apps.
Software Engineers
I wrote git-format-staged to apply an automatic code formatter or linter to staged files. It ignores unstaged changes, and leaves those changes unstaged. When run in a Git pre-commit hook git-format-staged guarantees that committed files are formatted properly, and does not clobber unstaged changes if formatting cannot be applied to working tree files cleanly.
Software Engineer
We recently had a new intern at Olio Apps and during the first couple days they were given a mini coding exercise to work through. By way of Friday afternoon banter, this was extended as a challenge to the rest of us devs to come up with our own solution. I wanted to write down my approach to solving this problem because it may be useful for some student, intern or Jr. dev preparing for an interview.
Software Engineer
Envision the following scenario: you are working away at the final 5% of a project, glad to be near the end, when you catch the first hints of unexpected changes coming in the near future.
Software Engineer
Automated browser testing with Selenium can be a developer's best friend, and at the same time, their worst enemy. Tests that once seemed to work well can mysteriously start to break, fail only sometimes, or slow to a crawl. But, your relationship with Selenium doesn't have to be so complicated.
Software Engineer
The shape of data defines a program. There are important benefits to writing out types for your data. Let's consider a Hacker News client...
Software Engineer
...I pinched my fingers together and placed a ballerina on the desk in front of me. With a swipe of my hand, the little ballerina disappeared and the office transformed into Rome.
Software Engineer
I work on a lot of Javascript projects. The fashion in Javascript is to use build tools like Gulp or Webpack that are written and configured in Javascript. I want to talk about the merits of Make.
Software Engineer
I am always interested in making my coding process faster and more robust. I want to be confident that my code will work as expected. And I want to spend as little time as possible debugging, testing, and hunting down pieces of code that I forgot to update when I make changes to a project.
Software Engineer
Code documentation is the collection of easy to understand images and written descriptions that explain what a codebase does and how it can be used.
Software Engineer
Pull requests are an essential collaborative tool for modern software development. I wanted to capture the kinds of questions a developer should ask themselves before asking another developer for a peer review.
CTO
While writing about optimizing data for performance, I rewrote my transformation function a few different ways and benchmarked the performance of each. Wow! The results were surprising.
CEO
Sometimes APIs return data in a form that's not ideal for the client. We can deal with this by applying data transformation functions to the incoming data, to reshape it into exactly what we need.
CEO
We frequently work on front-ends along side other teams building APIs. Sometimes those APIs are not yet available. But deadlines and sprint demos are approaching. Are we to sit around twiddling our thumbs? Nope!
CEO
Over the past couple of months I've started to become a little bit more serious in applying functional programming techniques to my favorite client side language, JavaScript. In particular I've discovered the joy of using Map and Reduce.
CTO
At Olio Apps, we use the technical design process to understand a problem, and to formally articulate a solution that is possible to validate with oneself and with one's collaborators.
CTO
A few gotchas with the interaction between the FormData and fetch APIs, for those used to $.ajax and xhr.
Software Engineer