Deploy Friday

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 history Though 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 symptom Impostor 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 code There are many other touchpoints to enter the tech industry that aren’t coding. Our guests name several: Project or product managementHuman ResourcesMarketingTechnical writingFinance/accountingDesigners But 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 diversity In 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 shift The 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 success When 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 leader Some 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 cybersecurity All 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 cybersecurity Jane 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 level As 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 over Our 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 needs As 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 backend What differentiates EZContent Two 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 content The 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-market Kamalpreet, 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 Network The 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 deplatforming If 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 GraphQL GraphQL 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 layer Shruti 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 Apollo The 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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-commerce Strapi 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 quickly Centarro + headless e-commerce Centarro (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 business Try Strapi or Centarro for your move to a faster, e-commerce experience with an improved customer experience. Platform.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 infrastructure We 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 customers Sardina 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’t Platform.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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 tech Elina 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 Foundation Julia 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/CD The OIF origin story The 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 Opens The 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 JDK Simon 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 Zing The 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 contributions Simon 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 Fission Fission 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 authorization Fission offers great developer and user experiences Developer-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 addressed For users, Fission offers: Private and encrypted user dataData can be shared between appsRuns in all browsers, including mobile browsers, and offline Fission and identity authorization features The 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 gap Brooklyn 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 deployment Code 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 risks The 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 confidence Deploying 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 safely Deploy your technology on Friday on Platform.sh Platform.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 deployments What’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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 engineer Dan 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 Payara Payara 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 sustainability Both 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 community Payara 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 programming Reactive 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 applications Mutiny 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-drivenNavigableIntuitive Julien 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 programming Clement 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.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 framework Kogito, 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 tooling Mathematical optimization with OptaPlanner Karina 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 constraints As 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.sh Platform.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 2.0 Jordi 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 improvements The 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 improvements Try Packagist on Platform.sh Platform.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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 Program For 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 program We 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 profile Chantal 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 hub Chantal 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 enablement For 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 success Platform.sh Learn more about us. Get started with a free trial. Have a question? Get in touch! Platform.sh on social media Twitter @platformsh Twitter (France): @platformsh_fr LinkedIn: Platform.sh LinkedIn (France): Platform.sh Facebook: Platform.sh Watch, listen, subscribe to the Platform.sh Deploy Friday podcast: YouTube Apple Podcasts Buzzsprout Platform.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.