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Curated links from external sources — not 360Softy original articles.

ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

How to Verify a Canadian Contractor Licence — Free Lookup + API (2026)

Every year, homeowners in Canada lose money to unlicensed contractors — and every province has an official registry that would have caught the problem in 30 seconds. The trouble is that each province has its own registry, its own search form, and its own data format. In this guide: how contractor licensing works in Canada, how to check a licence for free, and how to get the full licence datasets by API if you're building something — a lead-gen tool, a due-diligence check, or an AI agent. There i

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ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

Design systems for startups

A design system sounds like something you earn later — a luxury for companies big enough to have a design-systems team. For a startup that's exactly backwards. A right-sized system is what lets three people ship a coherent product fast, without re-deciding the same button padding on every screen. The trap isn't building one too early; it's building a heavyweight one you don't need. The answer is to start tiny and grow it only as it earns its keep. Before any component library, agree on the primi

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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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Database indexing explained

Almost every "the database is slow" complaint we investigate comes down to a missing or misused index. Indexing is the highest-leverage performance skill a developer can have, and yet it's often treated as arcane. It isn't. Once you understand what an index actually is and how to read a query plan, you can turn a ten-second query into a ten-millisecond one on purpose instead of by luck. Think of an index like the index at the back of a book. Without it, finding every mention of a topic means rea

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ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

Custom e-commerce vs Shopify

Most brands should start on Shopify. That's not a concession — it's the fastest way to a working store with payments, tax, shipping, and a checkout that converts. The real question isn't whether Shopify is good; it's whether your specific business hits a wall that only a custom build can clear. Answer that honestly and you avoid the two expensive mistakes: premature engineering (rebuilding solved problems to feel in control) and platform lock-in you've outgrown (paying in lost margin and blocked

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ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

What Is Vibe Coding? How AI Builds Games From Scratch

How AI Builds Complete Games From a Simple Description If you've spent any time in tech circles recently, you've probably heard the term vibe coding. It sounds casual — almost too casual for something that's reshaping how software gets built. But that's exactly the point. Vibe coding is about describing what you want in plain language and letting AI handle the implementation. At Vibe Arcade, every game in our collection was built this way. No one on our team sat down and wrote thousands of lines

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ExternalTechnology Trends
The Verge Tech

Meta is reportedly working on smart glasses that would be recording all the time

Meta might be the next company to make an always-on AI wearable. The company is working on prototype "super sensing" always-aware smart glasses that could continuously record audio and snap photos "every few seconds," according to the Financial Times. The wearer could then ask Meta AI about the captured audio and images. However, the images and audio might not be directly available to the user. Here's how the FT describes one way the glasses could use the data: In one proposed system, raw footag

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