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We write quality code

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"WE WRITE QUALITY CODE"
AKA "WHAT IF DEVELOPERS WERE RENAISSANCE SCRIBES?"

Hat tip to:

* Claudio Peressin for his gorgeous handwriting

* Marco Maschietto and Simone Marcuzzo for mastering the art of cinematography

* Karine SΓ©rafin for sharing her absolute pitch

* Max Mastella for transforming a refined 18th century string quintet into a home computer game soundtrack

* Luigi Boccherini for composing the first movement of his Op. 31, No. 2 on the theme H-C-E (german style notation) and by that prophetically anticipating Joyce's Finnegans Wake (and our existence...)
β€’ Intro β€’

Let's talk tech

What to expect from this section

This section of our website is for those who already know a bit about tech and are looking for the ideal IT partner for their company or agency. We will add here, whenever possible, all the news concerning our works in progress and we will add a summary of main articles from our company blog. 

β€’ E-commerce β€’

How to do e-commerce in the 2020s

Headless back-ends and Progressive Web Apps

The traditional structure of e-commerce is being disrupted by new, emerging technologies. The standard is now headless e-commerce platforms which are able to feed multiple front-ends, an increasing level of integration with external platforms like social media features and third-party e-commerce.

Front-ends can be developed as PWAs (Progressive Web Apps), which allow for an app-like feel to the end user, and even local installing just like an app. Transitions between pages are lightning fast, the user experience is more involving than ever.

The graphic/animation design standards for e-commerce have changed too: with so many e-commerce websites around, it is vital to provide a custom experience that, while keeping all standard e-commerce best practices, distinguishes a website from its competitors.

HCE can guide you through all this: our vintageria.it project is a great example of what we can do, and it has made waves in the e-commerce community, receiving praise from major players in the market and being presented in major worldwide conferences as an example of how you can create a modern, involving e-commerce platform.

It has been created using the latest edition of Shopware for the back-end, with a lot of custom features created by our team, and Shopware PWA (a Vue Storefront - Shopware joint project) for the front-end. We conceived the whole project, including its "tone of voice" and its digital strategy, we designed all of the UX/UI (with the usual contribuition of no.parking for the design part), we created all the animations, the memes and Easter eggs you see in the website and so on.

β€’ Front end β€’

Developing responsive websites in the 2020s

The wonderful world of progressive enhancement

We develop reactive and interactive HTML5 + CSS3 applications. We preferably use pure ECMAScript for the sake of performance. We test our work in our internal Device Lab, automating tests wherever necessary.

We optimize applications, especially mobile ones, by design, we do not wait for go-live day to worry about performance. The Speed Index is our daily bread and often the sites we create for our clients are 5 times faster than the competition's.

Here are some technologies we use (in random order): Vue.js, Nuxt, Babel, Webpack, Parcel, NPM, Yarn, Node.js, GreenSock, TweenMax, JQuery, ECMAScript 6+,  Tensorflow.js, ML5.js, Anime.js, Velocity, Incandenza, ReactJS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, BEM, CanIUse, CodePen, WebGL, three.js, D3.js, Mocha, JsDom, Jest, Nightwatch, MJML, Foundation for Emails, et cetera.

[One of the above name is not really the name of a software or technology, but a David Foster Wallace character. Considering the number of different pieces of software that cause the so-called Javascript Fatigue, you might not have noticed. We will give you a discount if you find it without googling.]

β€’ Back-end and System Integration β€’

What's under the hood?

We love open source

We were born with PHP and we know it thoroughly, including its most recent incarnations which make it a powerful and versatile programming language, regardless of the hype.  We have developed PHP e-commerce applications with millions of visitors and millions of transactions. We also use Node.js on several projects. 

 

We have developed major applications using state of the art Headless CMS solutions like Storyblok, Hygraph (formerly GraphCMS) and Contentful. These solutions have great benefits for big projects with multiple customer touchpoints, but can be beneficial for smaller projects as well.

 

We have created three generations of our internal custom framework and CMS (the last of which is integrated with Laravel). We have created a framework for the rapid prototyping of front-end applications and a framework for the creation of Wordpress themes and applications. We also develop and manage integrations for the Moodle LMS.

 

Some of the technologies we use (in random order): PHP, Laravel, Node.Js, Python, Java, Symfony, GraphCMS, Sulu CMS, Zend, Moodle, Git, GitLab, GitHub, Toggl, Slack, Docker, Wordpress, Drupal, FinneganCDS, Shopware, HCE Microframework, MySQL, Ubuntu, CentOS,  CloudFront, CloudFlare, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

 

β€’ Case Studies β€’

Spotlight on our new website

Smashing effects and dynamic interaction

We have decided to use Vue.js for this website. Vue (/vju:/)  is a JavaScript framework which is part of the recent trend towards event-driven programming and the transformation of JavaScript in a unified language for front and back end. 

One of the advantages o Vue is incremental adoption. With the purpose of creating a bleeding-edge website, we have selected the most robust front-end development libraries and we have stitched them together with Vue to achieve the maximum possible integration.

The site's project, which has been created using Standard Style Javascript, has become a sort of company lab for pair programming, and we have used several of the most interesting developments in the recent history of the Node.js community.

The end result is that the website looks like an app: persistent menu on every page, fluid transition between pages, 100% responsive with progressive enhancement, highly interactive contents (flow chart, pong application), original animations such as matrix transforms in the flow chart, as well as the interactive balloon roadmap in the Strategy section.

Yes, of course, we know, "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...", but it works, doesn't it?

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07 Nov
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