Category: Infrastructure

At Small Improvements, we are always keen to learn about our customers and how we can make the product better for them. Speaking to customers is great (and we do it all the time) but using the data we hold to find trends and usage patterns helps to find things that the customer won’t tell…

Whalecome to this blog post 🐳. I want to share with you how we use Docker at Small Improvements, how it helps us to get our everyday tasks done and what we learned from working with it. For starters, I added an introductory section about what Docker actually is – if you are already familiar with…

It’s no secret that we at Small Improvements love to use cutting edge technologies for our application. On the client side, there’s no limit, that’s why we’re rapidly transitioning to React. In the backend, we’re pushing the limits too, but we’re currently bound by what the App Engine has to offer. The main grievance for us is that…

Our SaaS application is built with Java, managed with Gradle and runs on Google App Engine. That makes a surprisingly lean and agile combination. Since we do like to work with the best tools available the folks responsible for the back-end love IntelliJ IDE. So of course we utilize the IntelliJ plugin for Gradle. It’s amazingly simple to…

I recently did a presentation at the Berlin Java User Group, during which I summarised the past two years that we’ve been operating Small Improvements on the Google App Engine platform. Some things went great, others not so much. Here are the slides (German only)[slideshare id=15704136&w=510&h=410&sc=no]