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Today Tracey sat and passed the final exam of her certification, meaning she’s now a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer. Congratulations Tracey!

The short working months of December and January make it really easy to fall behind on things such as blogging. We’ve had a few updates worth writing about between December and now, so here's a quick update from the world of Ignition Development. Towards the end of last year we finally got around to becoming a Microsoft Certified partner (Silver Application Development for now, maybe some gold in the future? Who knows!). Thanks to Tracey and Jan for smashing an exam each, and to our customers who allowed us to use them as references. We actually finalised the requirements in...

The year isn't quite done yet, but it's rapidly drawing to a close. So, before we all head off for a well-earned break, we thought we’d share a little bit about some of the exciting technologies and projects we've worked on this year. Elasticsearch For us, 2014 was very much the year of Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch is a powerful open source search and analytics engine that makes big data really easy to explore, and happens to have a really confusing name. Elasticsearch sounds like an offering from Amazon Web Services, which it isn't. And because the name contains the term...

One of the things we pride ourselves on at Ignition is providing flexible solutions that can be developed further as your business grows and changes.  One of our customers recently came to use with the request to add further options to how their customers can pay for their goods. The Limery, a boutique Hawkes Bay orchard specialising in Limes, wanted their customers to be able to order online but pay via a credit account at the end of the month. This needed to be an option available only to customers who had credit approval and required sending order confirmation emails...

I came across a couple of links talking about working remotely. It’s something we’re big believers in here at Ignition, so I thought I’d post them here: Why We (Still) Believe in Working Remotely – I especially like point #3, as we believe it’s way more positive to look at the code that people are checking in, rather than making sure they’re sitting at their desk for a certain amount of hours per day. A (Short) Rant About Working Remotely Remote working isn’t suitable for every business, or for every person, but it works well for us.

In a recent “end of year” type conversation in the team IRC channel we were talking about the range of external providers/third party services that we’d worked with / integrated to over the course of 2011. Here’s the list we compiled – I still have a nagging feeling we’ve missed a couple, but nonetheless it’s a pretty varied range of products and services that we’ve worked with on top of our standard stack of ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, and jQuery. Google Commerce Search – working with the latest version of this while the documentation was being written/revised was certainly a challenge,...