Deploy Friday: hot topics for cloud technologists and developers

Continuing our focus on women in tech, we discuss the multiple pathways to enter the tech industry, including coding, with our 3 guests, Elena Kolevska, a Senior Technical Enablement Architect at Redislabs, Helen Tabunshchyk, Director of ‘Women Who Code' London, and Kristina Kushner, a Senior Project Manager at PMP. Coding's gendered historyThough it's not the case anymore, coding used to be more friendly to women. Helen explains, “Until the mid-1980s, programming was most often a woman's job. But as the profession started to bring in more money, the competition started rising. And then suddenly, it wasn't a woman's job anymore.” Impostor syndrome is a symptomImpostor syndrome is an issue all our guests share. Helen says, “Often, you start thinking, ‘It must be me.' But when you have a community of women who all share the same story, you can totally see the common patterns. And you realize it's not you, it's society and our gender education.”Elena also links the chronic self-doubt characteristic of impostor syndrome to how women are socialized as children. “I think it's related to how we are taught to handle failure. As girls, we are taught to do everything perfectly and never make any mistakes,” she says, “And well, boys will be boys. But the world is not like that. We should be held accountable to the same standards.”To code or not to codeThere are many other touchpoints to enter the tech industry that aren't coding. Our guests name several:Project or product managementHuman ResourcesMarketingTechnical writingFinance/accountingDesignersBut how can you tell if coding is right for you? If you prefer to work with people more, consider one of the above roles, says Kristina. “But if you prefer to work on your own, to go deep into analysis mode, give coding a try.”Mentorship + teamwork are critical to diversityIn a previous episode, we've spoken about the importance of mentorship; studies also back this up. Helen says, “Research supports that it's not diversity and inclusion training that's effective, but mentorship programs.” She adds, “And working in teams as well. Those are the two deciding factors on how inclusive the work environment is.”Get more ideas for closing the gender gap in your workplace at Women in Tech or Women Who Code. Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Today we speak with three leaders and women in tech, Susan An, the Senior Sales Director of Tessian, Jessica Alderson, the Co-Founder & CEO of So Syncd, and Maria Antinkaapo, VP of Customer Success at Platform.sh, on the gender imbalance in tech, including the impact of internal and external biases.Fixing the disparity in tech requires a perspective shiftThe ratio of women to men in tech is often as unbalanced as 25:75. Susan is blunt, “We don't have enough female talent or leaders. Globally, only 2% of venture capital investment goes to all female-led teams.”However, this disparity can depend on what roles or departments you're looking at; Susan points out that management teams are often full of women. “So the question is if women are good enough to manage teams, why wouldn't they be considered leaders? What's the perception difference between a woman managing versus a woman leading?” She asks.Imagining a different “profile” of successWhen she started her career, her employers told Susan there was a “type” of salesperson to hire.“Loud and confident and aggressive ones,” she says. In addition to being more typically male-associated traits, which skews the hiring process, she adds, “I found that that's not necessarily the profile that gets results. You can hire introverts with softer personality types, who are thinkers, introspective, or more methodical. They also sell very well to customers and add great value to the trajectory of the company.”Jessica agrees. “When I talk to investors and ask the differences they see in women vs. men pitching to them, most of them say, ‘Men pitch a lot more boldly or exaggerate their numbers to some extent,' But that's a bias, because the stats show that that's not an indication of whether they'll be successful in running a company or not. Specifically, you should be more focused on the results you've achieved so far rather than these more superficial things.”Becoming a parent can make you a better leaderSome companies still hesitate to hire or promote women for fear of losing them if they start a family. Susan has a strong rebuttal to that line of thinking. “Becoming a parent is not a handicap. After I became a parent, it changed something in me as a leader. I really started to think about translating how I parent to how I manage my team. I feel like I've become a much more empathetic and insightful leader as a result of being a parent.”Check out Tessian or So Syncd.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Our guests today, Jane Frankland, owner and CEO of KnewStart, Fareedah Shaheed, CEO and founder of Sekuva, and Eliza-May Austin, Co-Founder of th4ts3cur1ty.company,  help us determine the state of the cybersecurity world today and how it can affect you.Defining cybersecurityAll three guests admit the term “cybersecurity” is broad. Eliza May says,” Cybersecurity is broad for a reason; it has to encompass lots of different avenues of data; computer, network, phone, apps, and there is a social aspect to it as well.”Education and social responsibility in cybersecurityJane believes those in the cybersecurity field have a responsibility to push the field in the right direction, but she acknowledges the difficulties. She says, “Cybersecurity professionals have a job to do in terms of trying to influence and steer countries into making the right decisions. But it's very difficult as technology advances, and we become more connected — we lose a certain amount of control.”Bringing more people into understanding cybersecurity can help lift the burden, explains Fareedah, “When we're trying to educate the public on phishing or social engineering attacks, we have to talk to them as if they're as smart as they actually are and in a way that they can understand, especially if they're from different backgrounds. Really breaking down concepts and being there with them and helping them understand how it affects them and their daily life is critical.”Cybersecurity strategies at a business levelAs with most things, there is no way to protect yourself 100% when it comes to cybersecurity. But Eliza-May suggests some steps you can take to make your business more secure.Know your risk level and level of risk-toleranceUnderstand the variety of strategies you could employAssess your resources  — what budget, processes, technologies, and talent do you possess to put your strategies into practice?The work is never overOur three guests emphasize that the cybersecurity field can be challenging for those who work in it. “Many cybersecurity professionals are stressed and under-resourced,” Jane admits. But that's also because the nature of the work is inherently more complex. “It's much easier for attackers; they only have to find one way in. Our job of protecting and defending is much harder.” she says.Learn more about our guests' organizations; KnewStart, Sekuva, and th4ts3cur1ty.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

EZContent is a Drupal distribution, decoupled framework, and publishing platform created by Srijan. It has many out-of-the-box reusable components for layout building and editing, including AI and machine learning features. We discuss EZContent with experienced Drupal folks, Ishan Mahajan, Kamalpreet Kaur, and Vinay KG.EZContent's features address modern-day marketer's needsAs a CMS, EZContent has many features that make editors', publishers', and marketers' lives easier, such as a drag-and-drop layout builder, the ability to preview drafts, and component-based architecture. In addition to these tools, EZContent addresses some key concerns for marketers today. Ishan says, “Marketers have so much on their plates these days, many KPIs they need to keep track of related to SEO, performance, and accessibility.” The burden of these responsibilities can be exacerbated or reach a bottleneck if a site has or needs fast content turnover. Ishan specifies three main ways EZContent can help.Multichannel outreach — An omnichannel experience is easier to deliver to customers with a decoupled framework like EZContentFaster time-to-market — EZContent's AI/ML toolset speeds up the content creation workflow Greater marketer independence — Marketers don't have to rely or wait on developers to build pages in the backendWhat differentiates EZContentTwo aspects of EZContent set it apart from other distributors: support for decoupled frameworks and its AI and machine-learning capabilities. EZContent's AI/ML features include:Auto-tagging and captioning of images — Kamalpreet explains, “Relevant tags will automatically be populated, which makes it very easy and quick for editors and marketers to do their work.”Auto-transcriptions of videosAuto-generation of podcasts and other contentThe goal of these AI/ML features is to free marketers up for other tasks that require their attention. Vinay says, “We want to give marketers the ability to focus on more creative tasks where they're more needed.”EZContent is an intelligent CMS that speeds your time-to-marketKamalpreet, Vinay, and Ishan have a lot of faith in their platform. Says Vinay, “At the end of the day, EZContent is for anyone who wants to save time and resources, gain a faster time-to-market, and improve the flexibility of their publishing platform.”Try EZContent on Platform.sh today. Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

We speak with María Paula Fernández, Mattias Nystrom, and Stefan Adolf about the Golem Network, and the implications of creating a future internet based on distributed computing, with more focus on privacy.The Golem NetworkThe Golem Network is an accessible, reliable, open access and censorship-resistant protocol, which democratizes access to digital resources and connects users through a flexible, open source platform. As María Paula Fernández defines it, “At the highest level, Golem is a protocol for the exchange of digital resources. And not just digital resources like computing power, but also devices. It's a constellation of digital marketplaces where you can exchange with users across the globe.”To enable these exchanges, Golem works with a reference implementation called the Yagna daemon. Mattias explains the daemon's function, “The Yagna daemon helps you sort out your agreements as a requester, provider, or developer on the Golem Network.” Golem is anonymous and permissionless to join, so anyone can make use of the network and become a requester or provider. Golem uses Ethereum-based tokens, called GLMs, to enable the peer-to-peer exchanges.Golem solves problems with monopolies and deplatformingIf you need more computing power or storage, Golem can help — but the network also goes beyond those issues. The motivation for Golem is not to be at the mercy of corporations which often don't have your best interests in mind. María explains, “If the project you're running maybe doesn't fit with any of the tech giants like Google, AWS, Azure, Microsoft, or Instagram's terms and conditions, which can be really vague, you risk being taken down, and you lose your work. If you get deplatformed and that's your livelihood, that's a really big deal. That's why we need decentralized and censorship-resistant alternatives to the platforms that we have.”Try the Golem Network as a provider, requester, or developer. Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Calling APIs to retrieve data can be a difficult and messy process. Our two guests, Mark Stuart and Shruti Kapoor, are both engineers at PayPal who use GraphQL to bring order to their APIs and data.What is GraphQLGraphQL is a query language for your API, but as Shruti says, “A common myth people have about GraphQL is that we're querying the database. But we're not; we're querying the API.” She adds, “GraphQL provides a way to call your API and get the data that you need.” Mark adds his own definition. “GraphQL is a query language that's used to grab data and as a way to tell the backend system to change things, such as mutating operations. It also hides the mess of your APIs by putting almost a facade in front of it.” GraphQL as an orchestration layerShruti says another way they use GraphQL at PayPal is as an orchestration layer. She explains this more in-depth: “Let's say you've got five different rest APIs, and now you want to combine them under GraphQL. So what you want is that your client should only see GraphQL APIs. But behind the scenes, you've got like this dirty table of all these REST APIs, which send you so much data, so you want to clean that up, right? So you put a nice tablecloth on it. That tablecloth is a GraphQL orchestration layer.”How GraphQL combines with ApolloThe Apollo Graph Platform is one of the most popular tools to combine with GraphQL, with additional resources and documentation to help out. Shruti sums up Apollo's uses for us: “They have Apollo Client for consuming GraphQL API on the client-side, and then they have Apollo server for building a GraphQL API on the server-side.” Apollo includes tools for consistent error handling, different hooks, as well as enterprise-level tools. Mark can attest to its usefulness. “At PayPal, we had a lot of duplication, a lot of graphs,” Mark says. “Apollo has some really cool tools to help merge all of that.” Try Apollo and GraphQL to declutter your APIs.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

As e-commerce has developed as an industry, the old guard e-commerce tools are phasing out to make way for new guard: headless e-commerce. Our two guests today, Product Marketing Manager at Strapi, Anastasiia Shpiliak, and Ryan Szrama, founder of Centarro, discuss the benefits of headless e-commerce and how to achieve it with Strapi and Centarro.Strapi + headless e-commerceStrapi is an open source, Node.js based, headless CMS with an e-commerce solution. Why headless? As Anastasiia explains, Strapi has been headless from the beginning because, “the founders wanted to give other developers this great experience of integrating their own tools, choosing their own stack, and the freedom to do what they want with the frontend.” Headless enables online shopping, performant fast, and personalized shopping experiences much more easily than traditional monolithic systems, says Anastasiia. It's also more future-proof and easier to deliver omnichannel experiences, especially with Strapi. Strapi's headless e-commerce solution appeals to businesses who are keen on:Flexibility — spin up your own architecture and front endSpeed and performance Freedom to choose tools like a Stripe integrationFreedom to self-hostTest and deliver new pages quicklyCentarro + headless e-commerceCentarro (formerly known as “Commerce Guys”) is Drupal's headless e-commerce solution. Ryan explains Centarro further. “We natively extend the data model of Drupal so that all of the things it does for content management like extensible data structures, database querying workflow content moderation, the whole nine yards, all that applies equally to commerce data.” This allows you to run Drupal Commerce full-stack or headless. Ryan adds, “In a sense, it's really similar to Strapi, but based on PHP instead of JavaScript.”The Centarro headless e-commerce experience appeals to customers who are interested in:ScalabilityPerformance Better front-end customer experience — as Ryan specifies, “‘Better' means nicer, faster, more responsive, and more modern-feeling.”Internationalization and expansion of their businessTry Strapi or Centarro for your move to a faster, e-commerce experience with an improved customer experience.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

OpenStack: scalable, automated cloud infrastructureWe introduced OpenStack, powerful open source software that automates the management of hardware and infrastructure, in our 50th episode. Organizations like Sardina Systems use OpenStack to offer their clients scalable, pay-as-you-grow cloud infrastructure. Today we have two guests from Sardina Systems, Kenneth Tan and Mihaela Constantinescu, who manage OpenStack installations for their customers. Our other guest, Dr. Jens Krüger, uses Sardina to deploy OpenStack for the University of Tübingen, Germany.Sardina Systems deploys OpenStack to private cloud customersSardina Systems knew they needed an open source cloud infrastructure base to build on. They researched the market and ended up picking OpenStack due to its “tremendous velocity of development,” as Kenneth puts it.Sardina Systems' flexibility, ability to scale, and attention to privacy and security are desirable to organizations in industries with particular needs regarding security and privacy. Sardina Systems' enterprise cloud platform, Fish OS, is specifically geared toward creating private clouds for finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and government clients. Sardina Systems is also highly cost-effective compared to many big-name competitors — a private cloud is a fraction of the cost compared to others like Azure or Google Compute Cloud. The University of Tübingen chose Sardina Systems because, according to Dr. Kruger, “Sardina provides a supportive environment for rolling updates with, theoretically, zero downtime, and practically, something very close to that. It saves the university a lot of headaches.” Open Source creating natural alliances where the competition can'tPlatform.sh also uses OpenStack, enabling us to offer public and private cloud services to various customers. Since OpenStack is open source, it can bring together ecosystems of cloud infrastructure service providers like Sardina Systems and Platform.sh in a way that public (often proprietary) cloud can't. There are alternatives to OpenStack, such as NFS, which work well for storage. But they tend to be slower, and they lack the self-healing and re-balancing that OpenStack offers.Try powerful open source software OpenStack to help manage your cloud infrastructure.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Three different paths to techElina Valeeva, CEO of Meditivity, Anna Radulovski, Founder of Coding Girls, and Claudia Mendes Silva, Project Manager for Siemens and an Ambassador of Portugal's Women in Tech chapter, each came into the tech industry in their own ways. Claudia Mendes Silva and Elina Valeeva both met  Ayumi Moore, the President and Founder of Women in Tech through their tech connections.  When Elina met Ayumi at a tech conference, she says, “We had a really deep conversation about how diversity, inclusion and female empowerment  are being discussed, but not really solved.”  When Ayumi and Claudia met, Ayumi encouraged her to start the Portugal chapter of Women in Tech.Anna Radulovski noticed and wondered about the low ratio of women to men in tech. “I wanted to know what was causing it, so I started researching,” she explains. “I found out that the problem actually starts in childhood, when girls and boys are exposed to sharply gendered toys and ways of playing.” To help remedy this issue, Anna started her own organization, Coding Girls, in 2017, which teaches coding to girls aged 7-12. “We announced one workshop, and then parents liked the idea so much, we ended up having two workshops in the same day,” she says proudly.Four steps toward gender parity at your company Anna, Claudia, and Elina have advice for organizations that want to achieve more gender parity on their teams.Be realistic on job postings. “It's more common for women to apply to positions when they have 100% of the skills listed, but for men it's 60%,” says Elina. In light of this information, take a hard look at the job skills the role truly calls for.Establish mentorship. Whether your company establishes relationships with universities to find interns, or uses already existing, more experienced employees to show new ones the ropes, start a precedence of mentorship.Offer flexibility and support. Flexible hours and paid maternity leave are especially attractive to working moms.Shake up your leadership team. Many leadership positions rely on referrals. Diversify your hiring practices for leadership roles to connect with more women who may be qualified, but whom your roles aren't reaching.Learn more about the Women in Tech organization.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

The Open Infrastructure FoundationJulia Kreger, Mark Collier, and Mohammed Naser are all part of the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF), a nonprofit that builds communities around IaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service. The OIF is vast and global — it spans 100,000 members across over 180 countries, and it focuses on projects in multiple areas, including:Edge computingContainer InfrastructurePublic/Private hybrid cloudAI and Machine LearningCI/CDThe OIF origin storyThe Foundation traces its roots to another open source project, OpenStack, which provides software for creating private and public clouds. Julia describes OpenStack. “OpenStack is a whole slew of projects that we've had to build, orchestrate, and integrate, which allow you to use software to manage your infrastructure.” These projects include Airship, Kata Containers, and Zuul, an open source CI/CD platform for gating changes across multiple systems.OpenStack accelerated and began to build a larger community. “Since its inception, over 8,500 developers have contributed to OpenStack.” says Mark. The team wanted to take their work with OpenStack even further. Mark explains the journey from OpenStack to OIF. “We wanted to apply the things we learned with OpenStack to make an even bigger impact, so we became the Open Infrastructure Foundation.”The Four OpensThe OIF follows a set of guiding principles dubbed “The Four Opens.” Mohammed explains them in the quotes below.Open source: “All the software we build is 100% open source — no paywalls and all with open source licenses.”Open design: “You have to have a public conversation about what you intend to do, you have to get that documented as a spec, that the community needs to all agree on together to make sure that it works for everybody. The community controls the roadmap of each project.” Open development: “All code commits and code review are done in public, nothing is behind any walls, nothing that you have to be invited to do.”Open community: “Any and all discussions are locked and made public. There's no discussion you can't be a part of.”Learn more about the Open Infrastructure Foundation or try one of their projects.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Azul, the JVM, and the JDKSimon Ritter and Geertjan Wielenga are the brains behind Azul, a company focused on providing the best Java Development Kit (JDK) and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) possible. It's also the biggest Java-only company in the world. As Simon says, “Azul is all about Java.”Azul has two products:Zing — A high-performance JVM. As Simon describes it, “Zing is where we've taken open JDK, we've taken Hotspot, replaced certain parts of it, and then make it into a high-performance version.”Zulu — A free and open source distribution of the JDK, commercially supported by Azul. Azul focuses on high performance with ZingThe JVM is very powerful, capable of high performance while also scaling well for hundreds, thousands, or millions of users. But Simon and Geertjan wanted to improve performance even further with Zing. They focused on two main areas: garbage collection and just-in-time (or JIT) compilation.With Zing, the garbage collection algorithm is written to allow garbage collection concurrently with the application threads. Simon explains the benefit of this. “From a garbage collection perspective, we eliminate pretty much all the latency that's there, and it's very beneficial to a lot of applications.” For Zing's JIT compilation, Simon and Geertjan replaced the C to JIT compiler in the JVM with one called Falcon (based on another open source project). Simon says, “By using Falcon, we can actually get better throughput in terms of number of transactions per second through our JVM.”Azul's open source contributionsSimon and Geertjan believe in giving back to the open source community. One way they give back is with Foojay (Friends of Open JDK), an integration platform for Java reference material. Or as Simon calls it, “a Wikipedia for Java knowledge.”  Foojay has a Slack channel, Twitter, blog, and events calendar where everyday Java users can connect and share tips and tricks.Azul has also produced another open source tool called J Hiccup, which monitors the latency effect of the JVM and the operations system hardware on an application. Simon says, “J Hiccup compares the impact of the JVM latency on your application, both with and without Zing. When you show the Zing latency graph, it's just a flat line at the bottom — no spikes. J Hiccup is quite an effective way of proving that we can do what we say we do.”Try Zing or Zulu, or connect with other Java users on Foojay.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Defining FissionFission is an edge app publishing platform for front-end developers. As Boris Mann, one of its creators, defines it, “Fission is a stack of tools, identity files, and data storage that gives developers everything that's needed to run a full web app using only the front end.”Out of the box, Fission has some key benefits.Runs anywhere: server, phone, laptop, or a mixtureEasy to deploy Automatic updatesIdentity security and authorizationFission offers great developer and user experiencesDeveloper-friendly features include:DNS and SSLCommand-line interface (CLI) — can develop locally, don't have to learn Git, can publish directly from CLIDistributed architecture via interplanetary file system (IPFS) — all the files in the system are content addressedFor users, Fission offers:Private and encrypted user dataData can be shared between appsRuns in all browsers, including mobile browsers, and offlineFission and identity authorization featuresThe typical OAuth authentication model uses access control lists (ACL), which have some downsides. The rules get complex quickly, and all authorization requests have to go through a central server, a potential bottleneck which can slow things down. As Boris puts it, “It's like handing someone your house keys, and now they have access to your whole house.”Fission works differently. It's a distributed authentication system built on JSON web tokens. Users have cryptographically signed certificates describing exactly what a given user is allowed to do. “In this model,” Boris explains, “you can delegate permissions to an app. And that app, in turn, can use a bunch of other services directly and sub-delegate things.”Fission bridges a gapBrooklyn Zelenka, the other creator behind Fission, concludes, “We've been trying to have these distributed, decentralized systems forever. But because there's this UX challenge, they get less adopted. With Fission, we're very much trying to bridge that gap. We want to make things usable and easy while still giving people as much autonomy and control as we possibly can.”Try Fission today.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Reducing risk when deploying code is a huge priority for many DevOps teams, and incidentally, the reason behind our podcast's name, Deploy Friday. Today, we speak with experts Jackie Balzer and Maryann Bell about best practices for risk reduction during code deployment.Defining code deploymentCode deployment can depend on the scale of your organization. Maryann and Jackie both work at large companies (Adobe and Spotify, respectively), where deployment likely differs from an individual developer's or a small organization's processes.Jackie says, "At a high level, deploying code is taking the code that you've written and putting it into all of these places. But in practice, for a product and an organization at the scale of Spotify, code deployment is taking it from one place and putting it into lots of places. Deploying code isn't necessarily the same as releasing code." Code deployment risksThe risks when deploying code are varied. You might accidentally bring down your app or website, or deploy a bug system-wide. According to Jackie, less obvious but more sinister risks include not knowing how to manage an incident if something happens.Some developers feel hesitant about deploying code, and with good reason. Jackie recalls an incident where her team made last-minute changes that ended up taking an entire site down. The experience made her hesitant about deploying code for a while, but she says it's best to just get back on the horse. "The important part is that you learn from those experiences and put improvements into place so that you can build that confidence back up."Deploy on Friday with confidenceDeploying code on Friday is often avoided because if issues arise on the weekend, no one is available to make fixes. Both Jackie and Maryann have tips to reduce this risk. Rollbacks allow you to go back to the last safe state with the press of a buttonSmall change sets inherently carry less risk, as well as being easier and quicker to testReview every pull request: at Adobe, where Maryann works, PR reviews are mandatorySelf-sufficiency: Have as many tools and resources at your fingertips as possibleScale thoughtfully: As you scale, think about employing a DevOps person to architect your infrastructure intelligently and safelyDeploy your technology on Friday on Platform.shPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

What is Jetty?Today, our guests share their extensive experience with Jetty. Greg Wilkins is the original software engineer for Jetty and Simone Bordet is a Jetty Committer. Jetty itself is an HTTP server and container for deploying Java servlets that run on HTTP, and it was also the first Java application server to be deployed as a clickable JAR file. Jetty started as a small open source project, and then moved to the Eclipse Foundation in 2009, where it still finds its home today.Greg adds, “Jetty is actually a lot more than an HTTP server. Over the years, the way we've developed the software is rather than being an application container, Jetty is a good software component first that can be used to make an application server, but it can also be used to make embedded applications and various other things.” Who uses Jetty?Jetty has a 25-year history with clients big and small, commercial and open source, from SaaS products to PaaS services. As Simone puts it, “Jetty is deeply battle-tested.” What do clients like about Jetty? It is:Highly extensible, flexible, and pluggableHighly scalable for large loadsCan be scaled down for smaller deploymentsWhat's ahead for Jetty?The new Jetty comes with significant improvements in performance and documentation, new features, and upgrades to Java 11 and Jakarta EE 9. Moving forward, Simone and Greg have plenty more they'd like to explore. “In the future, I'd like to see the standard support a good, reactive and/or asynchronous, scalable HTTP protocol and all the protocol features, and then have the application features layered on top of that,” says Greg. After working on Jetty for so long, Greg says it is just as relevant as it ever was. “It is amazing to keep doing it and to see the way Jetty keeps developing. What happens above us and the way people use the web changes all the time, but they still need this HTTP protocol.” Try out Jetty on Platform.sh: https://github.com/platformsh-templat... Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

“97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know” is a book of collected wisdom by cloud engineering experts. Our two guests today, Michelle Brenner and Dan Moore, both contributed chapters, and we speak with them about the book and the state of cloud engineering in 2021.What is cloud engineering?With most companies having at least part of their infrastructure in the cloud, some form of cloud engineering knowledge is necessary. Dan says, “I would say that a cloud engineer is someone who works in the cloud — public or private. Most people are cloud engineers nowadays, whether they want to be or not.”Michelle expands on this definition. “A cloud engineer is anyone who wants their application not on their computer and more widely available. Whether it's at a company internally or externally for the whole world to try, it's just kind of getting it out there and being more widely accessible.”Gain an edge with managed services Dan and Michelle are big proponents of managed services, that is outsourcing tasks to people who know how to solve a given problem better than you do. They acknowledge that it's a trade-off, but the reduced time-to-market and mental load can make it worthwhile.Dan says, “It's just so exciting to me, as a developer, to be able to let something that was previously a highly specialized job be taken care of by these specialists. I just don't have to worry about certain aspects and I can focus on building things that I only I could build.”Become a better engineerDan and Michelle come from different backgrounds and levels of experience, but they both have great advice for engineers. Try to have a:15-minute rule (or 30) — Both Dan and Michelle have a time limit when it comes to solving problems, and after it expires, seek help from someone else.Beginner's mindset — Learning how other people approach a problem can expand your perspective. A goal in mind — With so much technology out there, it's easy to get overwhelmed, especially as a newbie. To avoid this, Michelle suggests always having a specific goal in mind. Increased communication — “Communication is so much more important to becoming a better developer, programmer, or software engineer than I thought it was when I was just starting out,” says Dan.Get your copy of 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know to learn more about modern cloud engineering from the experts.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Our guests today Rudy de Busscher, on the Payara Sales team, and Fabio Andres Turizo, a Payara Engineer, speak with us about the importance of standards, what Jakarta EE offers developers, and using Payara. Defining PayaraPayara is a cloud-native, open source middleware platform that's both Jakarta EE and MicroProfile compatible. It comes in two versions; community and enterprise. With the enterprise version, you get access to partners in the community, and very long-term support — 10 years! Payara supports on-premise, in the cloud, and hybrid Jakarta EE applications.Standards mean interoperability and sustainabilityBoth Rudy and Fabio are big on standards, especially when it comes to microservices development. Fabio says, “Standards are important for multiple reasons — but I think the main one is variety. Where there's a body for standards, there's room for anyone to develop an implementation of that standard. And you as a developer have the option to choose what it is.”There may be many reasons you can't continue using a specific technology. In those cases, Fabio says, “Following a set of standards guarantees that you can quickly migrate to another vendor, and that migration is easier because both vendors are following the same standard. The process becomes more pain-free.”Payara in the communityPayara is a successor to the now-defunct Glassfish. But Payara has some things Glassfish did not, according to our guests:Higher code qualityConsistent bug fixes, updates, and improvementCompatibility with MicroProfile and Jakarta EETooling for use in any development environment More comprehensive documentation lies ahead!One of Payara's goals for 2021 is to make their documentation even more inclusive and welcoming. Fabio says, “One of the main plans for the year is to integrate everything — make it easily readable and more intuitive. If you're just starting out, or you're a mid-level engineer trying to understand the nuances of how to operate Payara properly, then you will have all the tools you need in the documentation.”Try Payara on Platform.sh: https://platform.sh/marketplace/templ...Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Today we'll be talking about reactive programming, Quarkus and Mutiny with our experts, Clement Escoffier and Julien Ponge, both Principal Software Engineers at Red Hat.Why use reactive programmingReactive programming differs from the “traditional” imperative paradigm. Reactive is a programming approach that centers on events (and reacting to them!). It helps build robust, efficient, concurrent applications and systems, and it lets you handle more load while using resources more efficiently. As Clement points out, reactive also takes a different approach to failures. “Failures are inevitable. So we need to embrace them and be able to handle them gracefully.” He says.So, why go reactive? Clement sums it up admirably. “With reactive, we are trying to build more responsive, efficient, robust, distributed systems. It's about doing more with less.” Mutiny simplifies the development of reactive applicationsMutiny is a new reactive programming library built to bypass common issues with reactive programming. It is integrated — but not bound — into Quarkus, a  commonly used framework for building reactive applications. Mutiny helps developers by being:Event-drivenNavigableIntuitiveJulien adds that another of Mutiny's strengths is that it's built based on real-world scenarios. “We asked questions and got lots of feedback from real organizations on how Mutiny is going to be used.”Clement sums it up. “With Mutiny, what we really wanted to tackle is a better user experience, an effective way to write non-blocking code, and make composing asynchronous operations easy and understandable.”Get started with reactive programmingClement and Julien both recommend the Get Started Guides for Quarkus and Mutiny. Julien says, “The guides help explain the concepts and contain repositories you can follow along with.” Clement adds a caveat; “Don't write reactive just to write it; only do it if you have a need.”But if you do need it, “For reactive programming, Quarkus and Mutiny are complete ecosystems that have everything you need.” Clement says.Get started with Quarkus on Platform.sh.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Business automation has been used in other industries for years.  Now it's available for software development. Our Red Hat guests Karina Varela and Donato Marrazzo tell us how business automation can help bridge the gap between business and technical teams.What is business automation?According to Red Hat, “Business automation is the alignment of business process management (BPM) and business rules management (BRM) with modern application development to meet changing market demands.” Karina and Donato add their own definitions to the mix. Donato says, “Business automation is a bundle of two well-known technologies: one is the business process management (BPM) and the other one is digital management. When you contract these two, you are automating your business logic.” Karina adds, “When we are talking about automating business logic for decision processes, that's business automation.”The Kogito frameworkKogito, a cloud-native framework, is part of Red Hat's business automation stack. “Kogito is this initiative that's trying to modernize all our middleware, all of our processes, rules, and optimization, and make it even more lightweight, to make it run on top of a distributed environment instead of being in a monolith environment,” says Donato. Kogito appeals to developers for several reasons:Uses Quarkus to enable fast boot times and easier scaling Domain-specific flexibility Developer-centered experience with embeddable toolingMathematical optimization with OptaPlannerKarina and Donato tell us about a relative newcomer to the Red Hat business automation portfolio, OptaPlanner, which focuses on mathematical optimization. Some real-world use cases for OptaPlanner include:Assigning shifts at a busy hospitalConference scheduling Vehicle routing with planned stopsAny complex task with constraintsAs Donato says, “Finding the optimal solution is nearly impossible, but finding the near-optimal solution, that's what OptaPlanner is for. It's constraint solving with artificial intelligence.” Karina explains more on how OptaPlanner works and how to use it, “You have to design the model and the constraints, and the OptaPlanner engine is going to solve the problem for you. ”Try Quarkus on Platform.shPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Composer 2.0Jordi Boggiano and Nils Aderman are the original authors of Composer, a near-universal package and dependency manager for PHP, and it just hit a major milestone: Composer 2.0. The two join us in this episode to give us the download on Composer 2 improvements and updates. But first, Nils helpfully defines Composer for us. “Composer is a package manager, or as we sometimes refer to it, a dependency manager. It's responsible for installing and managing your project's different versions of dependent packages.”The Packagist-Composer relationship How does Packagist tie into Composer? Nils explains, “Composer is the command-line tool, or potentially the code inside it, that can be used as a library for integration into some web servers. And Packagist is the server, the registry, the repository for packages that you can download.”Composer's unique features and predictability Composer is not the first or the most recent language package manager on the market, but it does some things really well that other packages don't.Handles automatically releasing packages with tagsA predictable log file In addition to the log file, our guests say predictability is a very deliberate component of Composer. Nils says, “Overall, the tools behaving in as predictable a way as possible is something that we agree on. I don't want to have to sit there and think, “Why the hell did it do this? I don't understand.” And then I have to read the docs for a couple of hours just to understand what is going on.”Composer 2.0 improvementsThe most common issues in Composer 1 were memory and performance issues. The performance issue has definitely been resolved in Composer 2; as Jordi says, “In Composer 2, the performance is so much faster and uses so much less memory. The numbers vary a bit, but there is a huge reduction of runtime and memory usage.” In addition to the performance overhaul, upgrading to Composer 2.0, also comes with:Internally refactored dependency updates and automatic installsError reporting improvementsTry Packagist on Platform.shPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

What is the Platform.sh Partner ProgramFor digital agencies, Platform.sh offers a number of incentives and benefits that make our service more attractive and your business more profitable. The team behind the Digital Agency Partner Program, and our guests today, explain how this partner program includes exclusive pricing, co-selling, and special features. Revamping the partner programWe brought on Chantal Pastorek to revamp and relaunch the Platform.sh partner program. Now, as our Agency Partner Manager for North America, she explains the value proposition we're looking for, “We wanted to find a way to really identify the agency partners that were going to work with us to co-sell, and to achieve goals for both the agency and Platform.sh. We wanted to figure out who our actual partners were and clean that up across our systems.”Identifying and expanding the partner profileChantal touches on the diversity of our partner organizations, “The types of agencies we want to work with are people building websites, managing multiple projects, or building out different web applications.” Aaron Porter, Partner Program Global VP, credits the visionary architecture of the Partner Program toolset for not limiting our audience. “We don't have to be a tool or a program that's focused on one particular type of agency. We have the capabilities to take on partners that are still growing in complexity or are already a large agency.” The Partner Portal: your one-stop partnership hubChantal gives the lowdown on what's included in our partner portal. “The partner portal was created as a resource for partners, so they could access training, register and track their opportunities, but also access materials for co-selling, competitive intel, and marketing assets.” In the product dashboard, we share with partners what's being released, what's coming up, and opportunities to provide feedback, input, and ideas.Sell more, sell better: partner enablementFor Aaron, “enablement” is the key word. Every step of our partner program is about enabling partners to sell more and better to their clients. “Whether it's technical expertise training, a strategic kind of selling session, a pre-sales session, or co-selling live, each one of those pieces of enablement is what gets their project over the goal line and what drives the partner program. We want to powerfully aid our partners in their success.” Try the Platform.sh Partner Program to enable your agency's successPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

The OpenideaL origin storyOpenideaL is an ideas and innovation management software created by Linnovate. Based on Drupal, OpenideaL is the leading open source solution for running innovation and ideation campaigns through a community.Elroi, the CEO at Linnovate, explains the project's origins started, interestingly enough, with the Israeli government, before pivoting to enterprises. “Enterprises realized that it's a very good solution for them, and they adopted it, either to hear their consumers, or to hear their employees. It was very successful because at Linnovate we suddenly sold many downloads.”Discuss, promote, and rate ideas easilyZohar, Linnovate's Head of Product, explains OpenideaL's features. “Out of the box, you have all the tools for managing communities. This means you can have users, groups, comments, notifications, everything that allows a community of people who share the same interests to communicate and flourish together, to create things in a better and more efficient way.” OpenideaL's feature set includes different ways to:Add ideasDiscuss ideasVote on ideasTake an idea to a closed groupShare the idea with a group of expertsClearly defined workflows OpenideaL takes each idea through a defined workflow. Zohar breaks it down like this: “An idea goes from the draft, which is private, to the ideation phase, where it's open to the community. After that is the review phase, where experts come in and give their opinion, and there is a discussion between them and the authors. After the review phase, the idea either goes through acceptance, postponed, or rejected statuses.” What's next for OpenideaLElroi, Zohar, and Netanel have many plans for OpenideaL's future. For 2021, they are considering:Increasing engagement using AI text analysis Offering OpenideaL as a SaaS for more flexibilityWorking on a machine learning module which will help the administrators and users gain more insights No-code skins for clients who want the ability to change the way the platform looks and feelsSays Zohar, “Our goal in OpenideaL is not just social activity. It's about taking an idea from its very first form, like a grain, and watering and fertilizing it with the involvement of many people.”Participate in an innovation-forward community by trying out OpenideaL today.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Bearer: good tidings for developersPizzly is an open source, OAuth integration proxy created by Bearer. It handles dozens of pre-configured APIs like Asana, Basecamp, Salesforce, Slack, Google Sheets, and more, and lets you quickly add even more APIs with a generic JSON configuration schema. Says Guillaume, Co-Founder and CEO of Bearer, “Pizzly is all about being able to connect to APIs in very fast and simple ways.”How Pizzly does itPizzly's dashboard lets you enable and configure the APIs, then you “click a button and do the OAuth handshake”, and they are connected. Pizzly then stores this information for future use. Guillaume explains how it works. “In your own application you call the Slack API through the proxy with a magic Bearer token, basically, and that's it. You don't have to think about authentication or the token anymore. That's all done for you automatically.”Taking the pain out of APIsAs active members of the open source community, Bearer kept hearing from developers that they were wasting too much time authenticating and refreshing tokens when connecting to APIs. Says Guillaume, “This is really the biggest pain point we've discovered and discussed with developers. We're in 2021 now and we use APIs everyday, and if it takes 2-3 hours just to be able to test the endpoint of an API, that's 2-3 hours too many for us.” With Pizzly, Guillaume says, you can get down from 45 minutes to 5 minutes, a huge time-saving difference for developers, not to mention a big increase in ease and simplicity.Pizzly is open source all the wayPizzly is used by companies like Typeform and Pento, and the project has over 700 stars and counting on GitHub. Bearer has always been clear about their goal with Pizzly: to give it away to the community. Says Alice Warnier, Growth Marketing Lead at Bearer, “We believe the community is cleverer than all of us.”Deploy Pizzly on Platform.sh to connect to APIs quickly and easily.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Writing a TYPO3 Guidebook as a Collective EffortWith upwards of 600 features, writing about a fully featured, open source CMS like TYPO3 can be a challenge. In this episode, Felicity Brand, Heather McNamee, and Jeffrey A. McGuire talk about how they co-authored a TYPO3 guidebook in concert with the TYPO3 community.The need for this guidebook As Jeffrey A. McGuire tells it, TYPO3 wanted a book for a diverse audience, ranging from developers, newbies, project analysts, students, educators, integrators, and digital agencies. He explains that while getting the commission to write the book, “They told us there hasn't been a book for beginners for a while, and we've got this idea that our system is ready to get back out into the world.”Every huge task is made up of smaller stepsA book is an enormous project, and it can be hard to know where to start. But as Felicity Brand says, “Writing a book is just like any other writing task. We put a lot of effort into planning at the start. You create a guide, a framework, and then you start putting these building blocks in place.” Heather McNamee says at Open Strategy Partners, they try to approach every task, even big ones like this guidebook, “the same way you eat an elephant, one bite at a time.”The strength of the TYPO3 community contributed to their successAll three guests today acknowledge how much the strength of the TYPO3 community helped them in the creation of this guidebook. Large, well-established, active, and diverse. Heather says, “We really couldn't have done it without the subject-matter-experts, the incredible documentation team, and the people who blog about TYPO3.”Welcoming to newcomers. As Heather puts it, “The TYPO3 community is ready to scale,” and they actively reach out to help onboard beginners and stakeholders.Leadership is accessible and approachable. Despite being new to the TYPO3 community, Felicity was able to speak with leadership directly to research this guidebook. The community gives back. The TYPO3 community actively supports and contributes to other important projects that many of us rely on like PHP Unit, Symfony, and Composer. What's next for TYPO3 in 2021TYPO3 CMS has more big plans to start 2021 off right. Says Felicity, “For version 11 the big push is accessibility, usability, and improved developer experience with making sure upgrades are really smooth and easy.”Deploy TYPO3 on Platform.sh today or buy the TYPO3 Guidebook on Amazon today.Platform.shLearn more about usGet started with a free trialHave a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter: @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcastYouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently.

Website maintenance is a common challenge, especially for agencies running dozens or even hundreds of sites. Platform.sh uses an internally-developed feature, Source Operations, to effectively manage its “fleets” of web applications.Defining a fleetAugustin Delaporte, Director of Enterprise and Fleets at Platform.sh, defines a fleet like this.“As soon as you start having more than one web application that you're managing, you're running a fleet, basically. You're facing constraints, you're facing different programmatics that you have to solve, like how you maintain, upgrade, and implement new features to those applications.”The need for Source OperationsChris Yates, our other guest, makes the case that scaling is three-dimensional. And as he says, “The third dimension of scale is people.” When you scale up to a “fleet,” your DevOps team can quickly become overwhelmed with the various tasks of maintaining that fleet. As Chris explains, “The more people and the more organization structures you involve, the more complexity you get in terms of how you manage your fleet. Being able to coordinate responsibility for those who are actually actively maintaining an individual site is a challenge.”Managing a fleetOur guests say it doesn't take that long to gather enough applications to be called a “fleet”—as few as five will do. Platform.sh's Source Operations feature helps manage fleets by automating site maintenance, ensuring the web applications are secure, up-to-date, and appropriately customized for each instance.Augustin explains how Source Operations works. “First of all, the workflow that we are running is Git-based. So if you want to update a specific code base on a project, you will have to use Git. And we map the entire architecture of your application, including the services and everything else in Git. So you define the different services with their version and their configuration, and you use Git to deploy and upgrade your site. When you start having a lot of projects, you need a mechanism to update them all at once, with the guarantee that what you're deploying can be tested and checked before it actually goes to production. And that's the entire idea of Source Operations.”Maintenance, security, package upgrades, deployments, feature implementation, and user-facing content is a lot to handle, even for an experienced DevOps team. With Source Operations, you can automate with confidence.View the Platform.sh Source Operations documentation.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

GraphQL is an open source, declarative language that you can use to source data from your APIs. In a backend landscape with disparate APIs that all need to be tied together, GraphQL is like a middle layer interface between them. Josh Oppenheim, a software engineer and one of our guests today, adds to this definition. “GraphQL allows you to declaratively say, ‘Hey, I want this data to look like this,' and expect what you get back. So every time that call is made, it's always going to come back as that structure. You can also choose and add fields onto that.”GraphQL benefitsGraphQL has a wealth of features that can make developer's lives easier, including: Reduced under- and over-fetching of dataMakes it easier to write APIsSelf-documentingChoosing GraphQL or RESTGraphQL and REST both fetch data, but there are differences between the two. “REST is a bit different from GraphQL,” Josh explains, “REST allows you to grab one resource by ID, but you don't get to decide what fields they are going to be, to put them together, or describe your data.” So how do you know when to use REST vs. GraphQL? Josh says,“Generally speaking, I think they both have their place.” He goes on to describe the differences in how each works. “REST has an over-fetching problem, right? So GraphQL, I make one call, I describe my data, I get it back. REST, I make X amount of calls, I get my data, I structure it myself, I put it where it needs to go, and I discard the rest. So using REST in this example means wasted data, time, and developer effort.”Our other guest, Developer Advocate Lucas Santos, says that REST and GraphQL are complementary, not at odds. He often uses GraphQL for a very specific use case. “In my opinion, logs are the best use case for GraphQL.”Learn Graph QL While you might be tempted to jump in and implement GraphQL right away, our guests advise a different approach. GraphQL has many online “playgrounds” where you can experience GraphQL, with no consequences. Josh says, “Learn the queries first before you try to implement it.”Try GraphQL on Platform.sh with Gatsby or StrapiPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Introducing Oracle HelidonHelidon is an open source, microservice framework for writing applications. As our two Oracle guests today, Dmitry Kornilov and Dmitry Alexandrov explain, Helidon is named after the Greek symbol for a swallow, a bird that's extremely fast and maneuverable; just like Helidon. Helidon helps developers with two “flavors”Helidon has two development experiences, which our guests like to call “flavors”: Helidon SE and Helidon MP. While both are extremely fast, there are differences between the two.Helidon SE features three core APIs to create a microservice—a web server, configuration, and security—for building microservices-based applications.Helidon MP is an Eclipse MicroProfile implementation that allows the Java EE and Jakarta EE communities to run microservices in a portable way.Performance and support in one packageHelidon is a great choice if you are focused on a fully supported, performant application. Dmitry Alexandrov says, “Speed plus standards are the two key factors for us. That's my definition of Helidon.”Performance: Helidon is small and light, so the memory footprint, startup time, and disk usage are also small. “We're talking megabytes,” says Dmitry Alexandrov. The reactive APIs are what contribute to making Helidon so small and intuitive.Support: Helidon has full support for cloud native APIs, including health check metrics, tracing, and console availability. The tools you can use with Helidon include:DockerKubernetesPrometheusOpenTracingEtcdUse cases for HelidonDmitry Kornilov says the most common use cases they receive are organizations upgrading from monolithic applications to microservices, and are looking at different microservices frameworks. “Helidon is often their choice, mainly because of the strong standard support, so it's guaranteed to work the same way on your application server and in your Helidon micro container. It guarantees that the behavior you had will be the same,” he adds.For these use cases, what's the benefit of using Helidon over Spring Boot or Quarkus? For one thing, Helidon is not an application server, it's primarily focused on microservices. For another, Quarkus doesn't have the support compatibility that Helidon has, and it tends to be more affordable than Spring.Try Helidon on Platform.sh.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Elasticsearch: Easy, fast, and reliableElasticsearch is a highly scalable open source full-text search and analytics engine; it allows you to store, search, and analyze big volumes of data quickly and near real-time. As one of our guests, Jay Miller says, Elasticsearch is “the original idea of making search easy, fast, reliable.” Today with Jay Miller and Ricardo Ferreira, we'll discuss the success cases, tips, why you should use a search engine in your project, and where the project is headed in the future. Ingesting data into ElasticsearchThere's no one right way to ingest data into Elasticsearch; our guests say it depends on your architecture. Jay Miller asks us to consider these questions.What does the data look like?Does the data need to be worked on prior to ingesting it into Elasticsearch?Are you using it in some type of programming language?Jay Miller adds, “Decide what's going to be the easiest for you to maintain, whether you're controlling your ingestion from within your project, or if you're going to add a layer on to it to keep it separated from the rest of the project.”Elasticsearch supports database aggregationDatabase aggregation support in Elasticsearch is powerful because, as Ricardo says, “it allows us different contexts to request and execute aggregations.” He names different programming languages you can use, such as Java, Go, Python, C++, C Sharp, .Net, REST, and Kibana. Ricardo adds, “There's also built-in support for custom aggregations.”When not to use Elasticsearch“Just because Elasticsearch is scalable,” explains Ricardo Ferreira, “it doesn't mean that it will play well with every single use case.” Elasticsearch may not be the best choice when handling transactions, “If you're looking for a highly transactional system that relies on ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) you probably will miss one of those letters there. You will have atomicity, isolation, and durability, but not consistency.”Use Elasticsearch on Platform.shPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Guest Anjuan Simmons and host Robert Douglass explore the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) experience in the tech world.Facing additional burdens As a Black manager and leader with 25 years of experience in the technologist space, Anjuan carries more burdens than most. He lists:Being many people's first Black managerBeing looked at as a “token hire”Dealing with stereotypes others have about Black peopleAnjuan sums it up, “Really, I have to do two jobs: the job I was hired to do, and the job of carrying these burdens.” Assess your progress on diversity, equity, and inclusionDiversity can be a shallow statistic. Anjuan's goal is to reach beyond diversity and into true belonging. Everyone has a part in making this happen, but especially those in charge of hiring. Anjuan says, “If you have hiring responsibility at a technology company, hire Black women.” He suggests three questions as a litmus test for companies who want to know how they're doing in diversity, equity, and inclusion.How many Black women work here?Do you know who these Black women are?Do you think they could do your job?Anjuan explains his reasoning for asking these questions. “Black women are often the most disadvantaged when it comes to working in technology. So if you as a company can answer these questions well, that is the clearest indicator I've ever come across to really see how you're doing. If you can't answer those questions, especially as a manager, it's likely you have a long way to go.” H.E.L.P.Anjuan also provides an acronym he uses to illustrate how you can be a BIPOC ally in technology: H.E.L.P.History: Do the hard work of learning more about the history of racism.Empathy: Provide empathy, which says “I hurt with you,” instead of sympathy.Listen: Listen to BIPOC experiences in tech.Provide help: Where and how BIPOC tell you it's needed.Anjuan explains, “By understanding the history, by developing empathy, and by listening, you'll be able to provide help. And you'll be a part of what I think we can all do, which is exert that gravitational pull that will help us bend the arc of the moral universe closer to justice.”Change your hiring practices to embrace diversity and belonging by visiting Black Girls Code or Code 2040.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

MySQL is an open source, multi-user, and multi-threaded database management system. What's more, it's still growing, as our guests, Airton Lastori and Dave Stokes, longtime users of MySQL, emphasize.We asked Airton and Dave about the newest, most exciting, and lesser-known features of MySQL. They responded enthusiastically. All quotes in this list from Dave Stokes.Recursive CTE:  as Dave explains it, this is “...an easy, painless way to write subqueries. They're easier to comprehend than standard subqueries too.”Dual passwords: saves and discards secondary passwords, helping you avoid downtimeHash joins: make joins go much more quicklyContention Aware Transaction Scheduler (CATS) : “If you have columns and rows in your data at a certain load level, this automatically switches on and knows how to handle the very hot contention there.”Invisible indexes: “Now, you can make an index invisible to the optimizer, run your explain again, make the index visible again, all without having to go back and rebuild that index.” Histograms: “A histogram is a bunch of buckets that know where the range of your data is, and the optimizer knows how to get your data much faster.”And others, including:Materialized columnsJSON supportDedicated key value interfaceMySQL's futureWhile they are huge MySQL fans, Airton and Dave do have some wishes for its future, such as improved replication, analytics, and help for beginners. Dave says, “It's a steep learning curve to get someone to use a relational database. The more I look at the beginner stuff, we're not doing enough to help people get on their way to becoming database developers.”MySQL isn't going anywhereAs an extremely popular database management system, MySQL is embedded in the very fabric of the web, and it's here to stay. Dave says, “MySQL is used by Booking.com, Ticketmaster, Twitter, Facebook, local YMCAs, big government organizations, and flight operations for the US Navy. MySQL is everywhere.”Airton adds, “Our job is to make MySQL even easier to use and continue to be reliable. So we try to implement features that customers are looking for, that developers are looking for, and keep the roots for people that are already using MySQL as a database.”Try MySQL on Platform.shPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

We continue the Deploy Friday Language Spotlight series with the programming language Ruby. Our two guests, developers Emily Giurleo and Jason Charnes, talk about their love for Ruby and what to expect with the Ruby 3.0 release.The benefits of RubyRuby is a favorite to introduce newcomers to coding, along with Python and JavaScript. The father of the Ruby programming language, Yukihiro Maksumoto, likes to say, “Ruby sparks programming joy.” While he may be biased, Emily and Jason agree. “I think that's a really apt way to put it. It's really fun and satisfying to write Ruby. And I think it makes people want to program.” says Emily. Ruby sparks programming joy with its many benefits, such as:Straightforward syntax makes the language user-friendly and intuitive.Opinionated: Jason says the framework itself helped him “ramp up” more quickly.Community:  Creative, curious, fun, kind, supportive, friendly, and loves problem-solving, according to Emily and Jason. Surprising flexibility: Jason quotes David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, “Ruby gives you sharp knives. And if you're trained, you know how to use them. If not, you can cut your fingers off.”Jason goes into more detail, “Ruby was really easy to understand while I was learning new concepts. It simplified things for me because the syntax just doesn't get in your way. That really sparked my love of programming and took it to the next level. So for me, I think Ruby is special because of the joy I get writing it. It's syntactically very user-friendly.”What's new with Ruby 3.0With Ruby 3.0 coming down the pipeline, there's a lot for developers to get excited about. Emily and Jason tell us what they're ready for.New syntaxAutomatic memory compaction: Emily says, “In Ruby 3.0, memory compaction is going to be automatic, which should hopefully fix a lot of the issues that people are experiencing with memory bloat and memory leaks.”Pattern matchingFaster: The goal with Ruby 3.0 is to make it 3 times faster than Ruby 2.0, something Jason says the team has been working on incrementally over the past 5 years.New ways to declare methodsTry Ruby on Platform.sh to experience programming joy for yourself.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Today we continue our Language Spotlight series. PHP is the most-used server-side web development language in the world, and it's also one of the few to be purely open source. We speak with two PHP 8.0 Release Managers, Sara Golemon and Gabriel Caruso, about the current status of PHP and the PHP 8.0 release.Exciting PHP features and benefitsIt's hard to understate how important PHP is for the Internet. It has been in constant, evolving use online for 26 years — the Internet itself has only existed for 38.  Some of its most popular benefits are that it's easy to get started and easy to use (plus, its stellar documentation). But it also has exciting features and improvements that many people may not know about. Sara Golemon lists several of them for us. The type system:“Strict types really brought the type system to the forefront of people's minds, because they can actually use types that they pass around on a daily basis much better than they could before.”Composer:“Composer is a dependency management system at its core that allows you to pull in packages from other places. Composer makes code sharing and reuse across the Ruby / PHP ecosystem so much more solid and so much better.”Attributes: “Attributes are going to allow us to do much more interesting things in the future with user space classes and code, even internal code.”PHP has other, more abstract characteristics that our guests enjoy, such as its flexibility. As Sara puts it, “PHP allows you to shoot yourself in the foot. PHP is not built on guide rails. PHP is designed to say, ‘Here are a bunch of tools, do something with those tools, and build something with these tools.'”For Gabriel, he enjoys PHP's ability to wrangle complex projects. “I think that one of the advantages of PHP for the web is it's very easy to structure a large project, even if there are multiple different paradigms in each part of it.” Sara sums up PHP's importance and influence on the web well. “You should learn PHP if you're going to work on the web, period. PHP was born on the web, it was built for the web, it literally grew up with the web. It is part of the web's DNA, and it does the web really, really, really, really well.”To experience how PHP does the web, try PHP on Platform.shPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

We continue our Language Spotlight series with Java, an object-oriented programming language that has shaped the course of the internet in enormous ways. Today we speak with two Java champions, Monica Beckwith and Geertjan Wielenga, to discuss Java's impact so far as well as its course for the future.What is a Java Champion?Since we have two Java champions as guests today, let's start off with defining a Java champion. Monica and Geertjan describe the term as a collection of expert knowledge, a sign that you have contributed to and are committed to the Java community, and last but not least, a group of friends. Geertjan adds, “It's a badge of honor as well.”With their extensive Java experience, Monica and Geertjan are well-positioned to define what has made Java one of the top languages in the world throughout its 25-year history.Java's defining features and attributesJava is a mature language supported by a huge and vibrant community, with extensive information and documentation available to all levels of learners. Our two guests also emphasize that Java has evolved with the times, and that this adaptability is a defining characteristic of the language. They list others, like:PortabilityGarbage collectionMemory managementStatic typing Functional programming When not to use JavaWhile Java is a great choice for many instances, our guests acknowledge that there are cases where it's best to use another language. Geertjan says Java isn't great for front-end work, and smaller applications, “... in particular, if you're creating a shopping cart, or you're creating some hotel booking system, or some other relatively lightweight project, Java is probably the wrong language.” Our guests' final words on JavaJava is a mature, approachable, adaptable language that's been extremely influential to the world of development. Geertjan sums it up. “Java is a vibrant community of enthusiastic and friendly people all over the world. If you want to learn a language to get started in programming, Java is definitely a good choice to make.”Try Java on Platform.shPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

The digital accessibility umbrella is broadDigital accessibility means different things to different people. Most people, on hearing the term, think of people with disabilities, such as being deaf or blind. But our two experts, Nic Steenhout and Carie Fisher, make it clear the digital accessibility umbrella encapsulates much more. It also includes people who:Have ADHD or other cognitive issues — such as with memory, concentration or information processingAre accessing digital information via different technology — such as mobile, or older browsersMay be accessing the internet with slower connectionsAre colorblindAre non-native English speakersNic Steenhout sums it up, “Regardless of the format, digital accessibility all comes down to the same thing — making sure that what we're building is workable, perceivable, understandable, and operable by people with disabilities, and everybody else as well."Digital accessibility benefits everyone, including youOur experts also make the point that digital accessibility is not necessarily limited to the group it's intended for; what is beneficial for one group can benefit another. Nic gives an example, “Plain language and transcripts are easier to understand for people that have cognitive impairments, but they also benefit non-native English speakers.”Nic adds that by factoring accessibility into your site, you broaden your audience as well. “Are people accessing your site through a keyboard, a mouse, Speech Input, Alexa? You don't know. And because you don't know, you have to plan for all that.”Make your content more accessible on the frontend and backendMaking room for accessibility requires a dose of both imagination and empathy; as Nic points out, “We're all only temporarily abled.” On the frontend, our experts highlight suggestions for putting yourself in someone else's shoes and improving your site's accessibility. Use proper markup.Throttle down your bandwidth.Look at your site in an older version of a browser.Unplug your mouse, turn off your trackpad, and spend the day working only with your keyboard.They have suggestions for the backend too:Write clean, readable code Comment your code.Update and organize your documentation.Read the web content accessibility guidelines to find out how you can make your site more accessible for everyone.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

In our new mini-series, Language Spotlight, we'll take a tour of every language that Platform.sh supports. Today our focus is on JavaScript, as we delve into what's new and exciting in the space, asynchronous coding, and the advantages of Node.js with two JavaScript experts and Software Engineers, Jessica and Austin Keener.Understanding asynchronous JavaScriptJavaScript can be different from other asynchronous languages. As Austin Keener explains, “In JavaScript, you say, ‘Hey, make this request.' Whenever you're creating these contexts that need to be actually executed, they're all going into this queue that gets picked up and gets run back on that thread. So while it is single threaded, you still get all of the asynchronous aspects of it, because each piece is broken up, instead of being this one long, continuous thread of execution that needs to happen. And that can cause some question marks to pop up for people, because it's different than the majority of other language asynchronous models.”Exciting JavaScript developments Our other expert guest, Jessica, names the three things that excite her most about the JavaScript space right now. She includes:Adding query selectors and query select allImproved looping and selecting inside of arraysNative support for AjaxShe adds, “As JavaScript is moving further and further into platform jQuery, pushing yourself to learn more than just jQuery and starting to understand some of the underlying native stuff that is supported now is going to be a great advantage.”Node.js promotes consistencyAustin Keener shares what he thinks is the biggest advantage of using server-side language Node.js. “Developers are going to be able to understand, read, debug, and contribute to every single one of our repositories no matter where it is in the stack.” He adds that the large amount of available libraries helps, too, “It allows you to have consistency in your language or in your repositories, among your developers, and a shared understanding that you can speak to.”If you learned something new about JavaScript today, and you're excited to get started, try Node.js on Platform.sh.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

In this episode, we talk with our guest Mike Pirog about Lando, the free and open source local development tool. Mike is the Co-Founder of Tandem, a full service digital agency in the PHP space, and the maker of Lando. Lando offers a high degree of flexibility for common setups, and it's now fully integrated with Platform.sh. How to use LandoLando is based on Docker as the underlying engine, and it's primarily for PHP projects, but it can be used for any kind of project. As Mike defines Lando, “The general idea of Lando is I have a Git repository. And I've checked in a configuration file that tells Lando what kinds of things I need to run, develop, and test my project. And the idea is you should be able to sort of Git clone that repository down and run Lando start and end up with all the things that you need to run your project and develop your project locally on your computer.”The two main layers of LandoMike explains that Lando has two main layers.Docker compose wrapper — “... collapses the configuration to the most relevant things, but also sort of leaves some exposition for the Docker compose stuff. But it also allows you to do some other things like configuring proxy routes, which are essentially like nice URLs to access your services. That Docker out-of-the-box can't do.”Recipes — “Takes that Lando configuration and collapses it even further into specific development use cases, such as Drupal 8, Laravel, MEAN Stack, Joomla, and more.”Standout Lando featuresThere are alternatives to Lando in the local development space, and they have their merits. But Lando has something that makes it stand out to its 11,000 monthly users. Mike believes Lando's balance between ease of use and flexibility make the difference. “Lando's breadth and depth is what's allowed it to become especially popular,” says Mike. “If you want to just have a two line configuration file and have Lando manage everything, it'll do that. But if you have a complicated application that has very weird requirements, Lando can probably handle that as well.”Try Lando with Platform.sh documentation: https://docs.lando.dev/config/platfor...Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Adding more complexity to international privacy lawA recent ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidates the US EU Privacy Shield, which has many implications for data rules around the GDPR. More than 5,000 U.S. companies rely on Privacy Shield to conduct trans-Atlantic trade in compliance with the GDPR. We talk with a team of legal experts to clarify what this means for you and your international business.Comprehensive data protection for European residentsGDPR stands for “General Data Protection Regulation,” which governs how businesses that interact with and collect data of European residents can be managed. It regulates everything from:Why an organization collects dataHow much data organizations should collect when building platformsHow long organizations can store your dataHow organizations handle international transfersWhat happens in cases of misuse of data or privacy breachPrivacy Shield allowed for data flow between the EU and the USUnder the GDPR, for you to transfer the data, there's a determination of whether a particular country is “adequate” in terms of data protection.Brandi Bennet, one of our guests, helps us define adequacy. “Europe has high standards for data protection: your data protection rights are considered a human right. What adequacy really means is, when they transfer the data to another country, are those country's laws as good as our laws? Do they treat and protect data as robustly and as strong as we do?”The United States does not meet The EU's adequacy requirements. The Privacy Shield treaty provides a framework to nonetheless allow for data flow between the EU and the US. With the ruling, we're no longer legally allowed to use Privacy Shield, which leaves businesses wondering what practical measures can they take to protect their data? Some suggestions from our guests are:Data encryption and minimizationStorage minimizationRisk assessment of your vendorsPseudo-anonymization, where you're masking the identity of your users behind other identifiersGiving customers access, notice, and choiceYou can read more about international privacy law on the International Association of Privacy Professionals website.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack.

Defining and standardizing microservice architectureMicroservices break down application development into independent functional components. One of our guests, Emily Jiang of IBM, defines a microservice as “a piece of software that can do one thing and do one thing very well.” For building good microservice architecture, she recommends following the 12 Factor App methodology. The 12 principles in this methodology were created in an effort to guide development and help standardize Java microservices. Emily identifies some of them, such as:Externalize your configurationResilient and faster start upFaster shutdownAnother guest, Roberto Cortez of Red Hat, agrees with her definition, and also adds, “I believe that every team or company has their own definition of microservices. So when people sometimes say, ‘Whoa, how big should a microservice be? Should it be 10k bytes or this many lines of code?’ It doesn't really matter, right? What actually matters is what you do with it in your own organization.”The monolith to microservices “lift and shift” can be trickyRoberto makes it clear that moving from a monolithic architecture to microservices is more than just a technical change for organizations. “If you require microservices, it’s not only about the architectural design patterns that you have to implement, or all the technical aspects of microservices, it’s also a cultural change.” Instead of everyone working together on one thing, you’ll have teams working on separate pieces. They’ll need to communicate differently. “It's going to be a huge cultural impact for the company if your team is not used to working in that direction. And I've seen multiple companies fail, not because the technical aspect was not there, but because the company didn't have the culture to adopt that kind of methodology.”Moving into MicroProfileEclipse MicroProfile is a collaboration of several open source projects, like Red Hat, which aims for more effective delivery of microservices to enterprise Java applications. Emily Jiang defines MicroProfile as the established programming model for microservices and cloud native applications, which includes APIs to achieve quality services for your application. She adds, “That's why MicroProfile is a great framework for doing microservices, because they can manage the quality services for you.”Learn best practices and get started with Eclipse MicroProfile on Platform.sh Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack

What’s new with Typescript 4.0 Typescript is an Object-oriented, open source, scripting language, with static typing. With our guests, we discuss several exciting updates that come with the release of Typescript 4.0 , such as short-circuiting assignment operators, labeled tuple elements, and more. You can also follow along with this helpful slideshow about the release.Variadic tuple typesVariadic tuple types are of value when you don’t know the ordering of an array. Our guest Stefan Adolf, Developer Ambassador, says, “Variadic tuple types allow you to say the first three elements are of type string, and the last three elements will be of type number.” He explains further, “These little arrest operators allow you to spread arrays, so you can de-structure arrays or classes by using these three little dots. You can put them as type pins in parameters and return values. So you can be very sure that what you are hinting towards is actually typed the way you declared it.”Class property type inference from constructorsNormally, when you’ve got properties of a class, such as length, width, and area, you would give those types. But in TypeScript 4.0, this new inference feature allows you to skip giving properties a type, and it will infer the type by whatever you say the constructor is supposed to take. According to Stefan and Sarah, this feature can help developers save time and improve readability. Sarah Dayan, a Software Engineer at Algolia, explains further, “Type inference is very important, especially in TypeScript. You don’t actually want to clutter your JavaScript code with types, you want to infer as much as possible. The goal is not for you to define a type for everything, but to type what cannot be guessed by the program, and then let the logic of TypeScript decide, ‘Okay, you have a violation here or there.’ So inference is actually really interesting, because TypeScript is supposed to take the minimal amount of typing, and be smarter than you. Not having to repeat types makes a lot of sense.”Try Next.js on Platform.sh todayPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Open Social is a Drupal distribution and online community platform. We speak with the founders, Taco Potze and Bram ten Hove, in our episode today about how Open Social was born out of the idea to productize community building. Open Social origin storyTaco and Bram started Open Social after 14 years of Drupal agency experience. Taco says, “We stumbled upon this amazing use case of building a SaaS platform around social communities where we quickly host, maintain, and deploy your installations.”Features focused on communityOpen Social’s feature set is centered around community tools. Bram says out-of-the-box, Open Social gives users the ability to:Maintain a detailed user profileCreate events, and discussions around themProduce and publish activity streamsBuild landing pages Customize your community your use cases What sets Open Social apartThe idea of Drupal distributions is not new. Taco gives several reasons Open Social is different from other distros: “I think with Open Social, you get 80% of what you need, you only need to do the 20% yourself. So out of the box, it's just a super stable framework. We use the distribution very much for our own internal social internet. It has events and groups and the stream and progressive web app in core. So it's out-of-the-box, just a usable product that you can fine tune to your specific needs.”The (funded) future of Open SocialOpen Social raised 1.2 million Euros recently from investors keenly interested in Open Social’s success. Bram says they have a plan set in place for the capital. “We'll be using some of the funds we raised to really enhance that experience for site managers and content managers, to use Open Social out-of-the-box without having to read a manual.”In addition, Bram and Taco’s vision for the future is to give back to the Drupal community. Taco explains further, “So our focus is really on how we can build sustainable open source projects that are giving back to the community. And how we can build a model around that where we can actually maintain a healthy situation, attract good investors, hire great developers, and build a good product in the end. And I think we're finding that model.”Use Open Social on Platform.sh to build your community Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

The benefits of JamstackIn this episode, we speak with Cassidy Williams and Jason Lengstorf, both on the Developer Experience Team at Netlify, about deploying Jamstack (which stands for Javascript, APIs, and Markup) applications to Netlify. Jason clarifies the Jamstack, “It’s honestly not a stack at all, so it ends up being a silly name for an architecture. Jamstack is a way of organizing your code. The Jamstack architecture is where you're abstracting your front end to being a layer of static assets that can be deployed to a CDN.”Netlify helps host and maintain Jamstack applicationsCassidy explains how Netlify and Jamstack work together to maximize productivity, “The short way of saying what Netlify does is we host Jamstack applications. But the longer form is not only do we host them, but we also have a ton of different features that make it easy for the developer to maintain Jamstack applications.”These features include:Form management — Add a Netlify attribute to an HTML form, and it will automatically gather all of your responses for youSplit testing — Point different branches (whether production, staging, or QA) at different groups of users to test and compare the resultsDeploy previews — See what your deployment is going to look like on any given pull request before pushing it liveSnippet injection — Inject different snippets of code into your applications without having to include it in the code itselfNetlify can also connect with GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket repositories, increasing your productivity further. Jason adds,“You want to switch as few contexts as you can when you're trying to get things done. When you’re working in GitHub, you can push up changes and Netlify will show them to you in deploy preview. All the context you need is right there. You don't have to go to other places to do other parts of your job, you can consolidate that whole workflow.”You can try out Next.js on Platform.sh today by clicking the Deploy on Platform.sh button in our template's README: https://github.com/platformsh-templat…Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

The internet economy would not be what it is today without the influence and the value added by open source software. As software development in general has become more sophisticated, complex, and time-consuming, maintaining open source software has, too. Today we talk about the importance of funding open source software sustainably with Pia Mancini, Co-founder & CEO of Open Collective, and Luis Villa, Co-founder of Tidelift.Time vs. money in open sourceOpen source software is not exactly “free”. As Pia Mancini explains, “It's free in the sense that you do not have to pay for it in hard cash. But someone is paying for it with their time.”And as open source software has gotten more complex, it takes more time to develop and maintain it. Luis Villa adds, “When I first started, you could hack something useful and put it out there in a weekend. But now it can take decades or centuries of effort.”As Luis points out, having that time is also a function of privilege. “Part of why open source is even less diverse than software as a whole is because for a long time, it required a lot of economic privilege to get involved.”The current imbalance in the open source worldPia says the current ubiquitousness of open source is the result of a successful “battle” to convince companies of its value. But winning that battle has come with a cost. She explains, “There’s a huge imbalance between those who are using and profiting from open source software, and those who are creating but not profiting from it. And the lion’s share of the burden falls on the side of the maintainers.” Braiding sustainability into open source’s future Luis and Pia have a few ideas on how to remedy this imbalance and work towards a more sustainable open source future. For one, we can start thinking about sustainability more holistically. Pia says, “Sustainability is as much financial sustainability as it is sustainability of the community.” To make sure your project thrives as part of a sustainable community, Pia suggests:Good onboarding practices to make your project inviting to newbiesEngaging with others who regularly contribute and maintain open source projectsA well established core team to help you make decisions on governance of the projectTry Tidelift and Open Collective on Platform.sh today to bring sustainability and open source together.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Apache Camel is an open source Java framework that helps developers make integrations faster and easier. Our two guests, Christina Lina, a Java developer and software architect, and Hugo Guerrera, a software developer and open source advocate, speak about how Camel can help you implement inter-system Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP).Apache Camel helps developers with integrationIf you listen in the podcast, I define Apache Camel as integration between database web servers, Apache Kafka, and other message brokers. The communication Apache Camel does is crucial, because as Christina Lin points out, developers spend a lot of time connecting and integrating. Apache Camel holds many benefits for developers hoping to simplify and cut down on the duplication of effort in this processReduce manual labor with automated processes— Christina Lin talks about how integration often involves a great deal of duplication, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Apache Camel helps you save time, so you don’t have to write custom code. “When you’re doing integrations, Camel also helps by transforming your data automatically. You can specify how you want it to be transformed.”Save time with pre-created libraries — Christina says, “When we write a Java application, we need to set up and configure the Java libraries, and then write the integration code in between. Every time you write it you have to rewrite everything. So Camel keeps you from reinventing the wheel. Apache Camel provides Java developers with this library that’s pre-created for you.” Get technological freedom of choice — By having a variety of frameworks and languages available, like Bloco, YAML, Java, and Groovy, to name a few, Apache Camel lets you use the tools you are most comfortable and proficient in. Connect easily with components — Camel’s components allow developers to communicate externally by integrating with 200+ systems and protocols. As Hugo says, “One of the main things that Camel has is all these components that allow you to talk to almost anything.”Save time and reduce manual labor in your integrations with Apache Camel on Platform.sh Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Simplify and speed up cloud-native development with MicronautMicronaut is an open-source, JVM-based framework for building full-stack, modular, easily testable microservices and serverless applications. In this episode, we speak with Iván López Martín, a JVM Developer and Micronaut committer at Object Computing, and Rodrigo Graciano, a Java User Group leader, about how Micronaut can help developers build their cloud-native applications more simply and easily.Faster start time and lower memory usage One difference between Micronaut and other frameworks is it performs dependency injection at compile time instead of runtime, which helps developers greatly reduce startup time and memory usage. Iván says, “When you have more code it takes more time and memory to start your application because the framework needs to keep all that in memory to really know how your UI application behaves. What Micronaut does is compile ahead of time so when you start your application, the framework doesn't need to do much of anything, so you get really low memory consumption and really fast start time.”Build for cloud nativeOther JVM-based frameworks like Quarkus, Grails, and Spring Boot perform similar functions as Micronaut, but many of these frameworks are used with monolith migration in mind. Iván adds that because of how some of these frameworks are built and structured, “they still pay the performance penalty.” Micronaut, however, was designed for compatibility with cloud-native and microservices, and it has extensive cloud native support services to back it up.Go serverlessMicronaut can also be used for serverless applications more easily than other JVM-based frameworks. Iván explains why, “If I'm a JVM developer and want to go serverless, you probably don't want to write JavaScript or Python. With Micronaut, you can create your application and continue using the same framework, tools, and languages that you want to.”Save startup time, money, and memory by trying Micronaut on Platform.shPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

OpenAPI: Clarity and structure for API developmentThe OpenAPI specification (formerly known as Swagger) is a blueprint to help develop APIs and to make sure what’s in the API is clear and understandable, before development even starts. Lorna Mitchell, a Senior Development Advocate at Nexmo and one of our guests today, explains it like this, “OpenAPI is an API description standard. It's a way of explaining everything in your APIs. So think of when you would write documentation and the endpoints, the parameters, the responses you should expect, but it's in a machine-readable format. So you can generate documentation, but you can also generate mock servers, clients, feed into Postman and try out the requests. There's a bunch of possibilities.”OpenAPI, open standardBecause OpenAPI is an open standard, one of those possibilities (and advantages!) is being able to use a variety of tools with it. Lorna continues, “So OpenAPI, because it describes your API in its entirety, gives you a bunch of things that you can do out of the box, it's an open standard. So there's a lot of different tools, providing a lot of different features. When the machines basically read this detailed spec, you can use JSON, you can use YAML. The big advantage is that by sharing the standard, then we can also share the tools.”Postman, a leader in API testingAs the need for building APIs with a clear structure has risen, so has the need for testing them. This is where Postman comes in. Joyce Lin, a Senior Developer Advocate at Postman, describes Postman as a flexible, extensible API development platform that you can use for testing, deploying, as well as documenting your APIs. Joyce says the two primary use cases for OpenAPI and Postman are:Driving the design and development of your APIAutomatically generating documentationShe adds, “Postman is like a tool chain. And it’s opinionated, but it's not going to shame you because you've poorly designed your API. What Postman can help you do is interact with it a little bit more.”She reveals support for OpenAPI in Postman happened because of customer’s requests, “Last year, one of Postman’s most requested features was support for OpenAPI. So we finally launched that, and we've been making some improvements.” Other improvements in Postman’s future include improved JSON schema and Graph SQL support.Build and test your APIs more easily with OpenAPI and Postman on Platform.sh Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Defining KafkaApache Kafka is an open-source stream-processing software platform which aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. Anna McDonald, one of the Apache Kafka experts we speak with in this episode, describes it like this, “The easiest way to describe it is a durable log. And that makes it different from most all other messaging systems, where a message goes in, you have to broadcast it out. And as soon as it's consumed, it's gone. And Apache Kafka, it lives until your retention period, which is fantastic. ” Ricardo Ferreria, another expert on Apache Kafka, adds to this definition, “Kafka is not actually a messaging technology, it’s more of a data streaming technology.”How Kafka is different from other messaging brokersPull-based  — Kafka data consumers  fetch data when, how, and how fast they need it, without affecting performance. In push-based messaging technologies, the broker pushes messages to consumers, creating potential bottlenecks and scalability issues.Schema-free — Kafka is by nature schema-less, so you can use the format that you want, or the one that your producers and consumers are going to use to communicate.High volume — Anna says, “Nothing can handle volume like Kafka. That’s my favorite thing.” Backwards compatibility — Anna offers, “Kafka does a better job of having backwards compatibility than anything I've ever seen in my entire life, like in terms of the clients and not breaking stuff. It's fantastic.”The Kafka ecosystem — Kafka is integrated with APIs like Kafka Streams, Producer, Consumer, Admin, and Connect.Treat Kafka as your “single source of truth”Both of our experts today talk about treating Kafka as your “single source of truth,” your system of record. Ricardo explains further, “You can have multiple different consumers interested in the same data set, but each one of them are using the data set differently. So when you start using Kafka this way, you start building architectures that are not only super resilient and scalable, but also it is a very good replacement for very expensive end databases.”Try Apache Kafka on Platfporm.sh today to get your “single source of truth” Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Diversity and inclusion is a perennial challenge in the tech industry. In this episode, we have two guests from Witty Works to help us learn more about research-backed ways to be more inclusive in our hiring processes and everyday lives.Unconscious bias starts very early in lifeUnconscious bias is one important factor behind the underrepresentation of women and other marginalized groups we often see in certain fields and leadership positions. Our guests Lukas Smith and Nadia Fischer tell us unconscious bias due to early socialization is ubiquitous, though it can present differently across cultures.How unconscious bias can show up in the workplacePattern-based thinking is a useful survival strategy that can serve us well in other situations, such as making us jump back from an oncoming car — a task our rational brains would be too slow to handle. But when it shows up in the workplace, especially in the interview process, the impacts can be negative. Nadia says, “Typically, white males always get asked questions about where they can really show off their potential in interviews. Where marginalized communities are actually asked more questions about their past and defend what they've already achieved in their career.”How to make strides towards diversity and inclusionUnconscious bias doesn’t go away by itself. Everyone can, however, take steps to be more aware of it in themselves, and actively mitigate its impacts.Be aware of the impact of language — Using the term “culture add”, instead of “culture fit” is a simple but effective change. Lukas says, ask, “What does that person add to the organization that we don't have yet?”Change our ideas of what “leadership” looks like — Nadia says, “We still see a leader as somebody who is very extroverted, always sure of themselves, with command and control and always being right. I think that is really something we have to change. There are different styles of leadership, and it doesn't have to be that one.” Adapt your hiring practices and strategy to be more mindful and inclusiveAsk the same questions to every candidate in the same wayHiring should be done by teams, not individuals, who rate the candidate independently before sharingMake an effort to connect with networks of people with diverse backgrounds to broaden the talent poolWitty.Works can support your company to take practical steps towards diversity and inclusion.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Our two guests, Jeanne Boyarsky and Adam Bien, are both long-time Java developers. On today’s episode, we talk about what consists of “good” architecture in the changing world of software development, and where exactly Java fits in to the puzzle.Defining software architecturePinning down a solid definition of software architecture can be tricky these days. Our guest Jeanne Boyarsky agrees. ”Architecture feels a little like a vocabulary word because it means so many different things to different people. But to me, it feels like the high level, what-are-you-going-to-put-together so that things make sense. Similarly, you don't want every application you have to be different, that makes it hard to work on anything. Architecture also includes non-functional requirements. If my app works, but takes a year to get back to you, it's useless. So I think all those things together.” Timeless principles of quality software developmentIt’s easy to feel overwhelmed or distracted by software trends, concepts, and developments, such as microservices, cloud-native, or serverless. But Adam and Jean say some key principles about what makes “good” software development will never “go out of fashion.”Stay flexible — Adam Bien says, “I think it is really important just to suggest things, and not to say, this is the absolute rule. Because nothing is absolute in software development, not even architecture, you always have exceptions. I think this is the most important thing.”Be curious and seek to understand — Both Adam and Jeanne emphasize the importance of asking questions and understanding the logic behind decisions. Jeanne suggests “Continually ask why things happen.” And Adam, like many of us, needs to understand, “For me, it's just important to know why.”Write simple code — Adam talks about how developers can think code is too “boring” and so they seek to improve it. But, according to him, that’s the opposite of what they should do. “Because whatever you do, you'll make your code base more complex, which will cause trouble in a few years. Write simple code.”Adam’s final words of advice? “Just build stuff”. And he adds, half-jokingly, “And don’t forget how to code once you become an architect.”Try Quarkus on Platform.sh: https://bit.ly/3bBUmNsPlatform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and fun

Branding is just as much a part of your product as its code, but it can be hard to nail down a definition: branding means different things to different people. For some, you say “brand” and they think “logo”. But for the Platform.sh team, branding goes a lot deeper than that.Savannah Bergeron, Communications Designer at Platform.sh, defines their branding process this way. “We really wanted to build something that helps express that emotional reaction someone has to our product when they understand it for the first time. So branding is more than just colors, it's really how do we translate and facilitate that conversation, about all of the things that our product means to different people, in a visual way.”What is your brand’s Personality Statement?It can be hard to sift through many contributing factors to grasp a cohesive idea of what your brand is. Savannah, together with Allison Simmons, VP of Product & Design at Plaform.sh, suggest interviewing both your customers and your internal team. Throughout their cross-examination, “We found these repeats that really resonated with people, it was a string of about five or six, maybe seven words. So we kind of took those words and wrapped them into this personality statement. Before anyone writes or designs anything, I like to refresh myself with our personality statement to just kind of get in the mode of who we actually are.” Keep going until you find your “Aha!” moment Savannah explains how customers pulling all the pieces together is critical for laying the building blocks of your brand, “One thing that's universal is this ‘Aha!’ moment. It’s this revelation our customers have when they understand our product and what it delivers. It really became a base in trying to figure out our brand and how to move it forward.”Branding is dynamicBoth Savannah and Allison agree that your brand should evolve over time. Says Savannah, “Approach your brand from a human perspective, and know that your brand is a living entity. It's not a one-size-fits-all, and it's not a statue, you need to be able to change it and adjust it and kind of go with the flow.”Talk to Platform.sh to help uncover your brand voice. Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

Meilisearch is an open source search engine meant for small-to-medium size applications that are just getting off the ground. With a simpler, more elastic experience than many of the market leaders, Meilisearch aims to provide an executable, fast, and easily customizable search engine to fit more common use cases.Meilisearch deeply values its open source rootsMeilisearch has been open source from its beginning. In fact, the three founders, Clément Renault, Thomas Payet, and Quentin de Quelen, never had a strategy for making it commercial. Instead, they aimed for Meilisearch to adhere to the values of open source as much as possible. Erlend Sogge Heggen, of Meilisearch Developer Relations emphasized, “When you have an open source product that you want to drive forward, you want to make it sustainable, make sure people can actually get paid to work on this thing, while at the same time maintaining your open source values and not doing something that feels like it goes against the open source ethos.” Meilisearch appeals to the developer experience In addition to their open source origins, Meilisearch aims to appeal to developers in other ways. As Thomas Payet, Meilisearch COO, says, “We are really sensitive when it comes to developer experience. And we know that not all developers work in the same ways.” The use of Rust as the language of choice for Meilisearch is another example. Thomas calls it a “no-brainer” and cites a few advantages of Rust for developers, such as:The ability to maintain a big codebase easilyA very modern ecosystemA new, young, friendly, and active community Meilisearch provides speed in multiple areasOther commonly used search engines, like Elasticsearch, have a lot of power, but they can take so long to set up and configure that it wastes everyone’s time. In a small or medium size company, time is an especially precious resource. Meilisearch aims to be fast to set up, configure, and to use. Thomas refers to Meilisearch’s instant “as-you-type” search results, saying, “We know that the person that will use our search engine, they will just type the beginning of the word and they want to find the document as fast as possible.”Try Meilisearch in action https://docs.platform.sh/Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating f

Spring’s wide ecosystem of modules simplifies the development processSpring is the most popular Java-based framework for application development for many reasons. One of them is its wide ecosystem of modules and integrations, which you can use to:Develop REST APIsConnect to a database through a JPA or a JDBC templateCreate batch jobsUse Aspect Oriented ProgrammingCreate reactive APIsIntegrate with microservicesJosh Long, a Spring Developer Advocate, says Spring’s variety of integrations “makes it as easy as possible to do anything you want.”Spring has investment from the open source community and big companies alike“Spring is a very vibrant open source project,” according to Josh, “There's all the small contributors and all the people that submit pull requests. So it's a very active project, all the different projects are active on GitHub, but there's also huge organizations that are invested in it.” He ticks off, among others, Spring Cloud for Alibaba, Google Cloud, Amazon, Microsoft, and Kubernetes. Josh sums it up, “Everybody converges on Spring because it's a very natural place to build apps. And so as a result, today it’s the most ubiquitous Java technology on the JVM except for Java itself.”Spring Boot’s auto-configuration grants developers flexibility Loiane Groner, a Citibank software engineer, defines Spring Boot as “what people use nowadays to create the applications. It's just a way to abstract all the configuration, what's going to be your main file, like your index, JSP, index, HTML.” Josh adds that when Spring Boot starts up, it looks at cues in the environment and “auto-configures,” granting developers almost total flexibility. Spring boosts application development productivityLoiane says, “I believe most Java developers started using Spring because it makes it easier for you to develop your applications.” Josh Long adds to this. “The reason I have enjoyed some measure of success is not because of me, it's because of Spring. Spring is just super productive.” Try Spring with MongoDB on Platform.sh to be super productive building your applications.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.

The pandemic has accelerated the use of e-learning With the world moving suddenly-online, training and education has had to change and adapt rapidly. Today we discuss what qualifies as e-learning, its benefits, and other tools and strategies new e-learners can employ with two experts in the field, Olivia Lidde, Technical Curriculum Developer at AWS, and James Aparaicio, a Developer with Opigno.The benefits of e-learningWhile the pandemic may have pushed us all into understanding the intricacies of e-learning whether we like it or not, it also has its benefits. The three top reasons Olivia says companies want to embrace e-learning are: Improve consistency across training offeringsIncrease reach from dozens to thousandsLeverage new technologies as they appearAnd speaking of new technologies…Opigno: offering comprehensive support for learners and teachers alikeOpigno, a learning management system (LMS) based on the open source Drupal content management system (CMS), can be great for organizations or for individual learners. It comes with:Learning paths that can be customized to learner’s interests to keep them engaged Out-of-the-box functionality with pre-packaged content like lessons, modules, and quizzesBuilt-in anti-cheating measures such as identity verification and the use of webcams to monitor learners Supports integrations with other 3rd party systems, like Maxtra for live meetings, giving teachers more options to create content as they see fit Opigno differentiatorsWhen asked why people should use Opigno in particular, James responds, “I think people should be looking at Opigno because, first of all, it’s a great product. And it’s open source, so there are no license fees involved, so even if you are a one-person company, or a big company, or a big or small school, there are no license fees involved. It’s based on Drupal, so there’s a huge community behind it for modules, so it’s very easy to extend. And because of all that, I think it’s a very good solution.”Try Opigno LMS on Platform.sh.Platform.shLearn more about us.Get started with a free trial.Have a question? Get in touch!Platform.sh on social mediaTwitter @platformshTwitter (France): @platformsh_frLinkedIn: Platform.shLinkedIn (France): Platform.shFacebook: Platform.shWatch, listen, and subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast:YouTubeApple PodcastsBuzzsproutPlatform.sh is a robust, reliable hosting platform that gives development teams the tools to build and scale applications efficiently. Whether you run one or one thousand websites, you can focus on creating features and functionality with your favorite tech stack and leave managing infrastructure and processes to us.