Tech Time Podcast

In this podcast, Matt Toigo and John Mann discuss the pros and cons of different enterprise CMS platforms and some of the strategies on deciding which platform and when.

In this podcast, we discuss the future of conversational UI, specifically regarding voice communication with devices like Alexa and Google Home.

In this podcast we discuss Terraform a tool that allows you to manage your infrastructure as code. It helps build out and tear down environments on several cloud platforms. We go into a brief overview of what Terraform is the concepts of PaaS vs IaaS and how Terraform helps automate deployment of not just code but of entire environments. Link to the powerpoint mentioned at the end is here: http://bit.ly/2yiTjji

Interview with John Mann about the future of agile, the processes, and some hiccups along the way. Venue: Huge, Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Contact: techpodcast@aol.com Guest: John Mann Twitter: @lotekmedia Blog: http://lotekmedia.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/lotekcodemonkey

Atish Narlawar talks to Tan Quach about HeadLess CMS. Decoupled CMS aka “headless” has rising popularity in the CMS development world. It interacts with display/glass only through API, allows breakthrough user experiences. It gives developers the immense flexibility to innovate, and for the site owners to future-proof their builds by enabling them to refresh the design without touching the CMS. HeadLess CMS made its considerable mark in 2016 and looked like it's going to influence the norm in 2017 CMS development. With this regard, Atish Narlawar talks about HeadLess CMS, its features and best practices to Tan Quach. Tan is Director of Engineering at @Huge and recently lead a development project built using Headless CMS. In this podcast, Tan shared valuable insights about HeadLess architecture, learnings, best practices, hosting options, development, fundamental challenges and overall experience. They start the conversation by going through the evolution of CMS since late 1990’s, and how CMS has shaped from static site generator to more intuitive, omnichannel, the author focused serving the purpose of storing data, CRUD UI and data display. Most CMS got developed with complex monolithic systems and these monolithic applications results to a cumbersome development pain where display logic and backend sits next to each other, tightly integrated, and that's where the inception of HeadLess came into the picture. Tan shares the common architecture patterns of HeadLess CMS based end to end project, and how it speeds up the development process, giving free hands to UI and UX teams for more alienated environments and freedom to use latest isomorphic libraries like Angular/React. He also explains about CMS administration, hosting and scalability. About the development practice, Tan explains how components built for publishing the site, can be re-used for the authoring view and the team can end up having a light weight middle layer between Frontend and CMS for managing third party integrations. Finally, Tan shares his opinion for the teams aiming to introduce Headless CMS into their existing CMS ecosystem with some use cases. Venue: Huge, Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Contact: techpodcast@aol.com Guest: Tan Quach@tantastik

As of 2016 AWS has more than 70 services, estimated 2 Million servers and 31 percent cloud market share. The recent Yearly AWS Summit is one of a good place to feel the excitement with 32000 engineers gathering, collaborate with boot camps, and see how things are getting put in reality and what others think about Cloud in general. Atish Narlawar talks about recent AWS Con 2016 to Stanley TSO, DevOps Engineer at @Huge. They start the conversation with the most major topic of the year AWS Lambdas. Stanley talk about Serverless Architecture and architecture patterns emerged from it AWS Serverless API w/ API Gateway, Mobile, and Live Video Stream Processing. Cost is one of the biggest factors for switching from current cloud-based servers to AWS Lambda serverless architecture, and Stanley thinks these savings are going to be the game changer. In one survey it was noted on actual production servers savings goes up to 50-90% of total current cloud expenses. Second, they talk about Alexa, and the concept of Voice user interfaces (VUIs). AWS hosted a workshop to develop Alexa skills using Raspberry PI. User Conversation is the design paradigm and interactions with the application services with little straightforward and natural way going to be a big thing in the upcoming year. Stanley thinks Amazon is pushing hard to make this transition sooner than later. He also speaks cover about AI, Machine learning presentations he attended, and how dev teams can use AWS AI services to build AI functionalities from scratch. Third, they talk about "How DevOps Culture getting evolved" across worldwide since its inception in 2009. Stanley finds DevOps became the necessary for agility; moving towards the direction of "Infrastructure as a Code" and gets into the Continous Integration workflows along with application code. Finally, He talks about Security Automation, and how Automation in the security has taken overall security to the next level. He shares the "Psychology of Security Automation," its placement from day one in the project. And how tools from NetFlix like Lemur and Repoman automates SSL creations and User permissions and facilitates development team a pace of “Move and Fast Break the things, ” and fulfills testing and security compliance. Venue: Huge, Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Contact: techpodcast@aol.com Guest: Stanley Tso@stso

WhatsApp Messenger is an instant messaging client for smartphones. It's intended to send text, audio, video messages to the contacts and family/friend groups. But surprisingly in Brazil, this direct messaging app turned to be one of the most popular platforms for digital marketing and eCommerce and virtually replacing traditional CRM platforms. In this podcast, Atish Narlawar talks to Fernanda Saboia, Digital Strategist at Huge about her research in the Brazilian Digital Marketing space “The Rise of WhatsApp in Brazil Is About More than Just Messaging." Fernanda starts the conversation with the brief introduction to the research, and what made her work on this topic. She gives the figures stating how WhatsApp is so close to Brazilian and it's already trumped the other social media(Facebook/Twitter/Instagram) with user engagement, and the most significant user "Open and Read rate." She states, read rates for organic search is 7%, email is 22% while direct messaging is impressive 98%. She introduces some real-time use cases, where business owners use WhatsApp to connect to the segmented audiences, and discuss the implementation, economics behind it with types of issues owners face and how they overcome with smaller adjustments. Although WhatsApp hasn’t facilitated any services(aka. API) to leverage it as a CRM tool, she thinks it's definitely on their radar. With much discussion happening in the digital space about Conversational UI, AI bots, data-driven engagements, Fernanda believes WhatsApp will come up with a new groundbreaking product, to leverage the power of direct messaging and Facebook expertise and will compete with top CRM products in the market. She observes the issues of privacy, spamming and other types of noise in this system and sees the adverse impact on the businesses in case they try to use it as a platform to push the content. She also finds a social aspect in this engagement, where business owners are trying to make social groups and feel their customers together to share some interests, and that's a good plus point. Fernanda thinks this phenomenon will replicate in other continents like Asia and Europe and very optimistic about WhatsApp as a niche player to serve this market better. Venue: Huge, Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Contact: techpodcast@aol.com Guest: Fernanda Saboia@saboia

VueJs is one of the 2016 top front runner frameworks for developing and creating modern and sleek web interfaces. Vue.js is a very modest javascript based ‘library, that carries the best of Angular and React. It gets easily combined with other tools to convert into a fully functional framework. Its design emphasized the "Ease of Use" and adopts the Model–view–viewmodel (MVVM) design paradigm which helps in the simplification of conception. In this podcast, Atish Narlawar talks with Wes Hatch, Senior Web Engineer at Huge about VueJs. Wes goes through an overview of last decade spectrum of Javascript world and gives the background behind the inception of VueJs. He explains the high-level architecture and the types of problems Vue Js tries to solve for the various context. Wes details about the Vue components, two-way data flow, and data binding model, state managements, Veux and the tools interacts as a part of the full blown ecosystem such as Vue Router, Chrome plugin, Vue-CLI, Vueify, Vue SSR. In the end, He tries to compare Vue with React and Angular, presents the strengths Vue possess with its simplicity, lean learning curve, very active developer community and its influence and adoption in the current market. He discusses, how Alibaba is getting attracted to its development and the progress towards Vue-Native Weex for the native bridge similar to React-Native. Wes also helps to understand, How Vue can be fit into Elm, Meteor ecosystem and can scale to production level grade app if needed. Venue: Huge, Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Contact: techpodcast@aol.com Guest: Wes Hatch

With the introduction of iterative development, frequent releases, a cross-discipline team, continuous integration, demos and retrospections, Agile development methodology has scored huge in the project execution as compared to traditional waterfall. It’s all going to be rainbows and sunshine, and everything will be smooth and perfect! Not surprised, many digital projects committed to Agile from the beginning. But in reality, Agile is not a silver bullet. It can go wrong in various places. In this podcast, Atish Narlawar talks to Matt Toigo, Technical Architect at Huge, things that generally go out of the way in Agile and ways to address it. Venue: Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Guest: Matt Toigo @Toigo Contact: techpodcast@aol.com

Show Notes: In this episode, Tech Talk Podcast Host Atish Narlawar talks to Kate Falanga, an organizer of New York City Testers Meetup about "The Evolving Role of QA" in Software Engineering. Kate gives an overview of how the role of QA has shaped in the software development since the era of GeoCities. With the aspects of processes, engineering practices, automation, and culture the role of QA has indeed gone far from waiting for testable code rather start to offer inputs at the beginning of requirement gathering. Kate explains, the difference between QA Engineer and QA Analyst, and how both roles are very different and efficient in the software development. She insists although Automation is imperative, but it has to go through the lenses of usefulness, what make sense and what doesn't. "The days of QA are getting numbered." Recently one of the group from Yahoo got rid of QA Team altogether, stating testing is a part of culture, and, in fact, it's a shared responsibility. Kate answers QA is not dead, and it will never be dead. She think QA going through transformations, and the expectations have changed with this the role itself in validating requirements upfront, managing automation, release planning and recognizing what make sense and what doesn't. As next generation gadgets evolve with Augment & Virtual Reality, Driverless cars, Internet of Things the domain of QA is expanding fast and the ways to measure and manage quality is becoming quite challenging as certain rules need to get defined in these areas. Related Links: Podcast: Tech Time Podcast Venue: Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Guest: Kate Falanga https://twitter.com/Squidish_QA Meetup NYC Tester: http://www.meetup.com/NYC-Testers/ Blog: http://www.hugeinc.com/ideas/perspective/evolving-qa

Agile development has imprinted solid mark in the software development in last 5-6 years. There is a jump from fringe to the mainstream, and the claim of "We are Agile!" is truer at this time in the teams while it wasn't back in 2010. The Agile Manifesto was written by a group of software developers for their use. Many of the underlying principles of a framework like Scrum assume the existence of an in-house team and working for the business that employs them. There is a strong argument for "Agile Methodology is easier in the settings where you have all the control. Adhering to agile frameworks such as Scrum is more difficult within an agency/consulting structure than it is for an in-house development team especially with the client who understands fixed costs, fixed deadlines, and fixed bid contracts." On this notion, Atish Narlawar speaks with Christopher Cunningham, a Group Technology Director at Huge, to understands "Does Agile works in the client engagements?" and what are the factors which play a significant role to make it happen. They start the discussion by going through the factors which have changed in the engagement following Agile process. Chris mentions the importance of a shared language which plays a significant role to create a shift where agencies and client services pushing Agile with their customers. This change has worked with a positive note as agencies started to spend more time delivering excellent products, and less time arguing over out-of-date functional specs. Infact he thinks clients are also requesting and even demanding agile practices from their agencies. Chris mentions even though some contracts bound with a deadline and fixed costs but there are better ways to get overcome with this, and the best way is to get rid of the fear of uncontrolled cost with the clients. With the combination of informed decisions, tangible results, waste reduction, risk transparency and time to market Agile can certainly give enough ammunition to influence customers and build the trust. With delivering a fully-working product at every milestone, Chris mentions agile expects more involvement from the clients at every step, and corporate companies responded to this need with the positive note. On the reporting side, Agile driven burn down charts, sprint velocity and points breakdown offers the better way of tracking the progress, identifying the impediments than traditional metrics. Christopher also notes that within an enterprise environment, Agile methodology is restricted to the software development teams. Other parts of an engagement like business, approval workflows and delivery management still go through traditional way, and that's one of the main reason the clients are not able to leverage the full Agile potential. He predicts there will be a positive change in upcoming days and companies will experience company-wide adoption. Podcast: Tech Time Podcast Venue: Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Guest: Christopher Cunningham

React Native is a framework for building native apps using Javascript and React js. Since the announcement which came on early 2015 from Facebook React has been one of the hot topics has ever discussed in Mobile community. With this notion, Atish Narlawar speaks with Nicholas Brown, Founder of React Native NYC meetup. They start the conversation by jumping to the React JS component based framework and then natural progression of extending the web framework to mobile platforms through React Native. Nicholas briefs the Architecture and introduces the feature of converting Javascript functionality into native platform code. Nicholas clarifies how React Native differs entirely from existing Javascript based mobile frameworks like Cordova and Appcelerator Titanium. He mentions within a year, the number of contribution to React Native exceeds that to the Cordova. He explains the performance impact of using React Native compared to directly developing with Native code, especially during the transition of Javascript to Native code. But to address this concern, better features and tools has been evolved like live reload and Microsoft CodePush. He also goes through various use cases where developing a mobile solution using React Native turns to be better as compared to native ios/android code. He thinks once the solution gets developed on one platform, for example, iOS then the same solution can be used for Android with the minimal efforts around of 10% of the total. The discussion then goes through the current adoption of React Native in the tech industry and how most of the company are gearing up themselves meanwhile taking the cautious approach to be ready for next real change. He also shares the Google's attempt to enter into this domain with Flutter. The discussion winds up with the recommendations for the beginners, with Facebook own tutorial and plugin repository named as React Parts for Native and Web plugins. Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/techtime Venue: Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Guest: Nicholas Brown Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/React-Native-NYC Links: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/ https://react.parts/native https://adtmag.com/blogs/dev-watch/2015/11/google-unveils-flutter.aspx

Atish Narlawar talks to David Sosnowski, a technologist, SEO Analyst, Group Director of Marketing, Inbound and SEO at Huge. They start the discussion by discussing about ever changing landscape of SEO. David explains fundamental principles which has remain same even in 2015 and explains the importance of the user signals like bounce rate, ATOS (average time on site), ATOP (average time on page), conversion rate, click throughs which should be using to guide SEO strategies. David also shares the insights about how to keep and stay ahead in SEO Learning curve. He also clears the misconception evolves around redirects 401, add notes to the security and keyword selections. He understand the importance of Machine learning through the introduction of Google ‘RankBrain’ and explains SEO is turning to be a team work with co-ordination with other disciplines like UX and Products. David concludes the discussion with the mantra of SEO is no different, and definitley its not a rocket science. He recommends to come up with roadmap of “Do, Report, Understand, Do.” Venue: Huge, Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Contact: techpodcast@aol.com Guest: David Sosnowski Twitter: @SEO_Raptor

Since the age of Geocities Era, CSS has been evolved a lot. It has seen the transition from plain CSS to emerging development framework such as such as OOCSS (Object Oriented CSS), SMACSS and now BEM. BEM – stands for block, element, modifier. By definition, it is a CSS development methodology specifically designed for flexibility and ease of modification in the mind. In the given podcast episode, Atish Narlawar talks to William Anderson about the BEM. William is a die hard Technologist, Software Engineer and part time Professor at The New School University New York. The conversation gets a start by going through high-level CSS evolution since the 1990s. William shares the fascinating things in the CSS in 2015 like logical integration, media queries, and animations. Along with he also explains how CSS development became quite complicated down the line due to cascade, responsive design and the javascript itself. One of the biggest challenges gets added to the newfound complexity includes messy CMS, broken semantics and SEO refactor, and BEM emerged as one of the possible solutions to address these challenges. With the example of feature card, William explains how BEM tries to fix the issues mentioned, such as complexity, semantics, and decoupling. Using zero specificity, he shares how seamlessly his team were able to integrate SEO tag change in the active project. William also shares his valuable insight regarding how BEM works with other CSS methodologies such as OOCSS (Object oriented CSS) or SMACSS (smacks). He tries to clarify the lingering haunting doubts about BEM such as BEM is too verbose, and it pollutes the DOM with Blocks, Elements, and Modifiers all cooked in class names. He shares what could be the best strategy for initiating the adoption of BEM into existing projects, and entirely possible barriers team may face during the transitionary switch. In the end, he also shares valuable resources where someone should start digging about BEM methodology and its related practices. Venue: Brooklyn, NY. Host: Atish Narlawar Guest: William Anderson @TheWAAnderson