What's on our Tech Radar: Tools we're tracking (and tinkering with)

“No man ever steps in the same river twice–for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”

– Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who (probably) scrawled this on a piece of papyrus long before it became an SNL-sketch-worthy font

Nevertheless, it’s quite #relatable to the modern world of tech: 

Ours is a dynamic industry, characterized by a constant ebb and flow of new technologies. To stay abreast of emerging trends and tools, our engineering team routinely convenes to review the latest “blips” (technical term) on our Tech Radar–which is, in fact, not just a figure of speech, but a dedicated wiki within Pixo’s internal knowledgebase. 

After all:

“No tools will make a man a skilled workman…nor be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them, and has never bestowed any attention upon them.”

– Plato

Read on to learn more about a few things we’ve been tinkering with recently. 

And thanks for g(r)eeking out with us!

Bootstrap:

While we’ve long been familiar with the popular CSS styling library Bootstrap, we got to use it in a more robust way in 2024.

For a recent software project that prioritized utility and timeliness over custom styling, our developers used Bootstrap to efficiently spin up prototypes with “just enough” polish. It was so successful, we ended up delivering a final product completely styled in Bootstrap as well.

We attribute this success in part to Bootstrap having improved its documentation. Prior iterations could be a little fraught, as there were not a lot of guardrails to ensure accessibility compliance, for example. But they’ve now introduced a lot more accessibility tips, reducing that learning curve and making it more widely applicable.

Our takeaway: Don’t sleep on off-the-shelf solutions. They may provide avenues to efficiencies that can benefit your project and client.

Svelte:

Svelte is a front-end framework that’s been steadily on the rise, making a name for itself in the last few State of JavaScript Surveys and used by giant tech brands including Apple, Square, Stack Overflow, and more.

One of our lead software engineers, Andrew, has used it on personal projects and even developed his own Svelte starter kit, which we used recently to build Pixo’s trade show selfie app.

The built-in accessibility checker is a favorite feature for our team. After all, it’s much easier for the SvelteKit compiler (versus a human brain) to remember all the ins and outs of accessibility. 

We’ve also used Svelte to create a JavaScript component for a client project. Someday soon, we hope to use it for a content-focused app or web app.

Excaladraw:

On the less-techy side of things, we’ve been enjoying Excalidraw, a collaborative online whiteboard (like a stripped-down Miro) that renders elements in a hand-drawn “sketchy” style. This is great for subtly reinforcing when something is a “rough” concept—everything “looks bad on purpose,” so there’s no confusion about whether something is in its final form. Plus, it’s clean, uncluttered interface makes for an inviting virtual space to ideate.