OpenResearch

🚀 Join us for the next OpenResearch Meetup: Mobile Development
📍 OR Office, Prishtina
📅 June 10th
⏰ Door open from 18:00

We’re bringing together mobile developers, iOS enthusiasts, and tech professionals for an evening of practical insights, modern Apple ecosystem discussions, and networking over pizza & drinks.

🎤 Talks

18:30 TCA – The Composable Architecture by Andreas: An alternative approach for building clean, scalable, and modern native iOS applications using The Composable Architecture.

19:00 Beyond the Apps by Ermal: Widgets. Live Activities. Dynamic Island. Notifications. App Intents. A deep dive into the iOS surfaces most apps ignore - and how they turn your app into something users see, glance at, and use without ever tapping the icon.

19:30 Apple Intelligence – The Next Era of Smart Apps by Armend: On-device AI. Writing Tools. App Intents. Siri evolution. A practical look at how Apple Intelligence is reshaping app experiences, developer possibilities, and the future of the Apple ecosystem.

🍕 20:00 – 21:00 Networking, Pizza & Drinks

Whether you’re an experienced mobile engineer or just curious about where the Apple ecosystem is heading, this meetup is a great opportunity to learn, connect, and exchange ideas with the local tech community.

Please register with Armend under ✉️ [email protected].

Looking forward to seeing you there! 🙌

If you haven't looked at .NET recently, you're missing out.

What modern .NET delivers:

⚡ Performance that competes with Go and Rust
🌍 True cross-platform: Linux containers, ARM, everywhere
📦 Minimal APIs - less ceremony, more productivity
🔥 Hot reload during development
☁️ Cloud-native by design
NET 8+ brought native AOT compilation. Startup times dropped dramatically. Memory footprint shrank.

ASP.NET Core handles millions of requests per second. Benchmarks put it near the top.

The tooling matured. The ecosystem grew. The community expanded beyond Windows shops.

For new projects, modern .NET deserves consideration regardless of your current stack.

What's your impression of .NET today?

A well-designed API is invisible. Developers just use it and it works.

A poorly designed API? That's where the complaints, workarounds, and technical debt begin.

Principles we follow for API design:

📝 Consistency above all else
🎯 Clear naming that explains itself
🔍 Predictable error handling
📖 Documentation that stays current
🔄 Versioning strategy from the start

Whether it's REST, GraphQL, or gRPC, the principles remain the same. Make it easy for consumers. Make it hard to use wrong.

We've built APIs that power mobile apps, connect enterprise systems, and enable third-party integrations. The investment in good design always pays off.

What makes an API great in your experience?

Everyone uses Git. Not everyone uses it well.

Workflow practices that make a difference:

🌿 Small, focused branches - easier to review, easier to merge
📝 Meaningful commit messages - future you will thank you
🔄 Rebase for clean history, merge for collaboration
🔒 Protected main branch - always deployable
🧪 CI runs on every push - catch issues early

Conventional commits help automation. Semantic versioning communicates change impact. Good branch naming explains intent.

Git is a tool for collaboration. Your workflow should reduce friction, not create it.

The best workflow is the one your team actually follows. Complexity without compliance is worse than simplicity.

Start simple. Add process when pain points emerge.

What Git practices does your team follow?

Summer is here. And at OpenResearch, that means one thing: work doesn't have to mean being chained to a desk.

Some of our best work happens when engineers can choose their environment. A focused morning on the terrace. A deep-work session at a mountain café. Async collaboration across time zones.

What we've learned about summer productivity:

☀️ Trust your team to manage their time
📱 Great tools enable location independence
⏰ Focus on outcomes, not hours
🌴 Rest and recharge: it improves everything

Of course, collaboration still matters. We sync when needed. But the flexibility makes all the difference.

How does your team handle the summer months?

Microservices solve organizational problems, not just technical ones.

When microservices actually help:

👥 Multiple teams need to deploy independently
📈 Different services have different scaling needs
🔧 Technology diversity is genuinely beneficial
🚀 Deployment frequency varies significantly by component

When they hurt:

❌ Small team trying to manage distributed complexity
❌ Premature optimization before understanding the domain
❌ Network calls where function calls would work
❌ Distributed debugging without distributed tracing

Start with a modular monolith. Extract services when you have clear reasons and the operational maturity to manage them.

The infrastructure overhead is real. The debugging complexity is real. The benefits are also real - when the context is right.

Most systems don't need microservices. Some genuinely do.

What's your architecture approach?

Some write off Angular as "too heavy." We respectfully disagree.

For complex enterprise applications, Angular's opinionated structure is a feature, not a bug.

Why Angular works for serious projects:

🏗️ Clear architectural patterns baked in
🔧 TypeScript-first from day one
📦 Dependency injection that scales
🧪 Built-in testing utilities
📊 Great for large teams with varying experience

Is it the right choice for a simple landing page? Probably not. But for applications with complex state, multiple teams, and long maintenance horizons? Angular shines.

The key is matching the tool to the job.

Vue, React, Angular - we use them all. Each has its place.

Which frontend framework is your team betting on?

Sometimes you need messages delivered reliably. ActiveMQ has done this for decades.

Why ActiveMQ remains relevant:

📨 JMS compliance for Java enterprise
🔄 Multiple protocols: AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, OpenWire
🏢 Battle-tested in enterprise environments
📊 Flexible messaging patterns: queues and topics
🔧 Manageable complexity

ActiveMQ Classic for traditional deployments. Artemis for the next generation with better performance and clustering.

For Java shops using JMS, ActiveMQ is the natural choice. The integration is seamless.

Kafka handles event streaming at scale. ActiveMQ handles point-to-point messaging with guaranteed delivery. Different tools, different jobs.

Not every system needs Kafka's complexity. Sometimes a reliable message queue is exactly right.

What's your messaging strategy?

We don't just build software.

We build engineers. And that makes all the difference.

At OpenResearch, personal growth isn't a nice-to-have. It's fundamental to how we work.

What that looks like in practice:

📖 Regular knowledge sharing sessions
👥 Pair programming across experience levels
🎓 Conference attendance and speaking opportunities
🧪 Time for experimentation and learning new technologies
📝 Constructive code reviews that teach, not just critique

When engineers grow, projects benefit. Fresh ideas, new approaches, better solutions.

The investment in people pays dividends in everything we build.

What does your organization do to foster engineering growth?

Not everything belongs in the public cloud. MinIO gives you S3-compatible storage anywhere.

Why MinIO deserves attention:

🏠 Run on your infrastructure - full control
🔄 S3-compatible API - use existing tools
⚡ High performance - designed for speed
💰 No egress fees, no surprises
🔒 Your data stays where you put it

MinIO runs on a single server or scales to petabytes across clusters. Same API either way.

For development environments, MinIO replaces S3 perfectly. For production, it's a legitimate alternative when self-hosting makes sense.

Data sovereignty requirements? Predictable costs at scale? Airgapped environments? MinIO solves these.

Open source, Apache 2.0 licensed. The project is active and well-maintained.

Self-hosting isn't always the answer. But when it is, MinIO delivers.

Where do you store your objects?