We’ve all done it. Imagine you’re browsing around the AllSaints online shop, dreaming about refreshing your fall wardrobe. You find a couple items and add them to your cart. You continue browsing but then, for some reason, you don’t check out. Instead, you close the browser tab and move on. In the e-commerce world, this is what’s known as shopping cart abandonment.

Aydrian Howard

July 26, 2023

Disclaimer: this blog is not just for sports fans The vast majority of the Super Bowl’s approximately 100 million annual viewers aren’t actually fans of the teams taking the field. They’re just people who are just looking for an excuse to get together with friends, eat healthy amounts of seriously unhealthy food, and watch commercials. But if congeniality and carbohydrates aren’t enough to hold your interest, a little action can make the “Big Game” a bit more interesting. Historically, most of the wagering on Super Bowl Sunday happens not at the big Vegas sportsbooks like Caesar’s or MGM, but instead in people’s homes, with friendly, informal wagers. The reigning champion of gambling games is a simple-to-learn, no-sports-knowledge-needed game commonly called “Super Bowl Squares.”

Aydrian Howard

February 10, 2023

‘Tis the season for gift giving. And, if you’re like me, you enjoy getting gifts for dogs. Atticus (my tri-color corgi) gets his fair share of balls and stuffed toys (that he promptly destroys), but those are all from me. We’ve never participated in a pet-specific holiday gift exchange before, until this year. While Atticus doesn’t have his own Instagram account, mine is pretty much exclusively Atticus content and we follow many of his corgi friends. In a recent story, his friend Lulu invited fellow dog owners to join a gift exchange. All that’s required is for me to send a gift valued at least $10 to the assigned dog and in return, Atticus could receive anywhere between 6-36 gifts!

Aydrian Howard

December 16, 2022

Very few traditions can melt the corporate ice as well as an ugly holiday sweater contest. Which is why, this past December, I took on the challenge of building an Ugly Sweater Voting Application to entertain our 100% distributed team. The application (which can be used to vote on any images - not just ugly sweaters) consists of a dashboard that displays the status of the contest and a serverless backend that facilitates bootstrapping the dashboard and handling updates from SMS messages using websockets. The results of the contest were…ugly! (Aside from our CEO, of course, who somehow wore an ugly sweater but made it fashion.)

Aydrian Howard

September 14, 2022

In this tutorial, we’ll create an app for coordinating social events. In the process, you’ll see how simple it can be to create a web application powered by Next.js and hosted on Vercel. The tutorial will also demonstrate how quickly we can create a fully-fledged relational database on the cloud without installing it locally.

Aydrian Howard

April 29, 2022