The Elm programming language is “a delightful language for reliable web applications.” It would be used as an alternative to React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and other web application frameworks. Elm is an opinionated, niche language and framework that is not for everyone, but those who use it often find it a defining experience that forever changes how they approach building applications.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a creative approach to problem-solving that starts with understanding the people you're designing for and ends with solutions tailored to their needs. It’s more than a buzzword, it’s a philosophy and a practical methodology that helps teams create intuitive, useful, and impactful products.

Rich Campbell, Co-Founder & President, discusses how managing expectations impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Anthony Overkamp, Creative Director, discusses how working with existing designs impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Brian Dukes, CTO, discusses how DevOps automation impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Whether connecting an Association Management System (AMS) with an internal database or an e-commerce platform with a 3rd party service, integration is a major part of software projects. Centralizing data and automating decision making, done well, can pay back dividends, in addition to the improved customer and employee satisfaction when everything just fits together automatically. A professional team with a diversity of skills can save integration projects from getting off on the wrong foot, focusing on delivering tangible value and working results.

At Engage, we believe that great software isn’t just built, it’s refined. One of the key practices in our workflow is the retrospective, a dedicated time for teams to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve. But what exactly is a retrospective, and why does it matter to our teams and clients?

DevOps is an approach to creating software which works to reduce the gap between coding and deploying, allowing the same team which created the code to deploy and monitor the application, generally through automating much of that deployment and monitoring process. In order to achieve the strong outcomes associated with teams practicing DevOps, the DORA Core model highlights building capabilities in the following categories: Climate of Learning, Fast Flow, and Fast Feedback.

Software teams typically include people with a wide variety of skills, including management, software architecture, visual design, UX design, data design, and business insights. A common “money-saving” approach is to have someone with management skills work closely with customers closest to the business goals in order to decide what should be done next, and then that management person will turn those ideas into tasks that the engineers and designers implement. However, the best teams understand that using designers and engineers only for implementation is a waste of their talents, and instead create a virtuous cycle of collaboration by bringing everyone to the table.

Released in 2002, .NET Framework introduced the world to the C# language and came to be a stable, productive foundation for many Windows-based applications, including web sites through the ASP.NET framework. A new cross-platform version of .NET (originally called .NET Core, and now just .NET) was released in 2016, which saw the lion’s share of investment from Microsoft. .NET Framework had its last major release in 2019 (version 4.8), with 4.8.1 coming in 2022. Knowing the level of attention given to the newer cross-platform .NET, why would teams in 2025 choose to start new projects using .NET Framework instead of using the newest platforms and libraries?

How can you know how long a new initiative to build a custom software product will take? What’s a reasonable amount to plan to pay to get started turning your vision into technically excellent software that can go live and start producing value? Once an estimate of the effort has been created, how close should you expect the true cost to be?

We’ve been patiently waiting for the next major release of DNN, and it is finally here (DNN 10.0.0 was published on April 9)! This update will be more disruptive than others in the past, as the maintainers have taken this opportunity to remove features that have been deprecated since DNN 8, going back to January 2016. In addition to clearing some accumulated clutter from years past, DNN 10 offers a number of improvements for both administrators and developers.