Oh, what a year it's been! Watch our video for a year-end recap and exciting news coming up in 2018. And, don’t forget to scroll down. We’re sharing our five most popular blog posts of 2017 with you. Enjoy the read.

On behalf of the entire Eikos Partners team, thank you for your continued support. We look forward to working with you in the New Year.

Trends in the IT world are probably its most defining character. Just when you have finished (or mostly finished) building your applications based on the current technology it is time to start thinking about what is next. Today, now that the Microsoft Windows Operating Systems are no longer the only players in town and mobile devices are so ubiquitous, a major trend we see is the ability to service multiple platforms from a single code-base.

The Challenge

You may think that your IT dollars are going towards new and exciting systems, but roughly 60 to 70 cents are for the applications that existed when you first joined the firm.

David Lattimore-Gay, CTO, Eikos Partners and Brian Slater, founding partner, Eikos Partners sit down and chat about open source initiatives, and the ways in which they can be approached, improved and implemented.

From our February 8 breakfast seminar: Speeding up app delivery from weeks to days, our Senior UX Designer Mike Lee on using a design thinking process to better collaborate with the business while enabling the delivery of business functionality within days.

Two years ago we built an app to run in the browser and then the client asked us to create the same app in a desktop version. This app had all the challenging stress characteristics of trader apps: high volume update, and low latency. We had two options to build the desktop app: WPF or OpenFin. WPF was a well-known and proven technology in the industry and at Eikos, whereas OpenFin was a technology we had never used before.

On February 8, the Eikos Partners team held a breakfast seminar at The Bryant Park Hotel's Terrace Loft. It was a morning filled with engaging presentations, breathtaking views of the Manhattan skyline and thoughtful discussions on hot topics facing the industry today.

With the increasing popularity of mobile browsing, it has become expected of us web developers to build some sort of responsiveness into our projects. From personal experience, the majority of sites I visit on my mobile device do have some responsive design elements, however the experience is often still lacking due to poor performance. Site performance is a broad topic and can be affected by a lot of areas, but I will focus on some simple line items you can use to increase the rendering performance of an application.

Recently, I started doing research into protocol buffers and decided to run performance tests to see if they are a viable option for reducing server response time over traditional JSON APIs. As I am new to protocol buffers, I made a demo site to test the different API types. See it here.