WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

In our Strategic Apps group at Zapier, we've figured out a way to do standups in a timely manner, make them minimally disruptive, and not add a burden to anyone else. To cut to the chase, we delegated most of the work to a robot, and we do it all asynchronously.

Building the infrastructure to manage the lifecycle of machine learning models remains a challenge for most organizations. While we have seen tremendous advancements in machine/deep learning…

The next evolution of AWS Single Sign-On enables enterprises that use Azure AD to leverage their existing identity store with AWS Single Sign-On. Additionally, automatic synchronization of user identities, and groups, from Azure AD is also supported.

SDKs can serve a variety of purposes. There are SDKs for payment processing (such as Cardio, Paypal, Braintree, Stripe, Venmo) and SDKs for user login and authentication (such as Agilebits, Google SignIn, 1Password). Roughly half of the SDKs in apps are marketing and customer experience related, addressing needs such as analytics, attribution, A/B testing and user engagement. Marketing and customer experience services that are the focus of our Periodic Table.

Curious to know what technologies are used on your competitor’s website?

Common characteristics of microservice architectures that we saw in the field:
- Componentization via Services
- Organized around Business Capabilities
- Products not Projects
- Smart endpoints and dumb pipes
- Decentralized Governance
- Decentralized Data Management
- Infrastructure Automation
- Design for failure
- Evolutionary Design

We are in the midst of an open source renaissance. But how do you turn an open source project into a business? a16z's Peter Levine and Jennifer Li cover the complete go-to-market from community management to enterprise sales.

Although writing code once sounds like a great bargain, the associated overhead made the cost of this approach outweigh the benefits (which turned out to be smaller than expected anyway). In the end we no longer share mobile code via C++ (or any other non-standard way) and instead write code in the platform native languages.
In addition we want our engineers to have a delightful experience and to be able to contribute back to the community. This is why we made the decision to align our practices with industry standards.

(This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review )

AgileFall is an ironic term for program management where you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techniques. It often produces a result that’s like combining a floor wax and dessert topping.

Must-do's in order for your hires to reach their full potential you need to put a structure in place that encourages and nurtures their growth, both technically and as managers and leaders.

Inovation has always been part of the Amazon DNA, but about 20 years ago, we went through a radical transformation with the goal of making our iterative process—"invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again"—even faster. The changes we made affected both how we built applications and how we organized our company.

Succeeding is no longer just about who’s able to build the technology, or who’s first to market. It’s about who’s got the best experience.

Agile Practice Guide provides tools, situational guidelines, and an understanding of the various Agile approaches available to enable better results. It is especially useful for project managers accustomed to a more traditional environment to adapt to a more Agile approach. The Agile Practice Guide contains the following sections:
- An Introduction to Agile describes the Agile Manifesto mindset, values, and principles. It also covers the concepts of definable and high-uncertainty work, and the correlation between the Lean, Kanban, and Agile approaches.
- Life Cycle Selection introduces the various life cycles discussed in the practice guide and covers suitability filters, tailoring guidelines, and common combinations of approaches.
- Implementing Agile: Creating an Agile Environment talks about critical factors to consider when creating an Agile environment such as servant leadership and team composition.
- Implementing Agile: Delivering in an Agile Environment discusses how to organize a team and common practices the team can use for delivering value on a regular basis. It provides examples of empirical measurements for the team and for reporting status.
- Organizational Considerations for Project Agility explores organizational factors that impact the use of Agile practices, such as culture, readiness, business practices, and the role of a project management office (PMO).

In this article, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of coupled, decoupled, headless, and hybrid CMS architecture.

One of the many challenges with building or refreshing a website is the selection of a Content Management System (CMS). Despite our best efforts the CMS can often be a source of difficulty in a project, but there are alternatives. Read about the approach we took on www.thoughtworks.com to developing functionality to support content management in an incremental fashion.

CONCLUSION

This article has detailed an incremental approach to developing a content managed web application, in contrast to the adoption of a CMS at the outset. While there are the costs associated with developing functionality which you could get “off the shelf,” these are offset by some of the advantage of this approach – flexibility, simplicity, control, obviating the need to learn a bespoke framework and above all being able to move in small steps from a simple static web site to a managed one.

We applied the editing-publishing separation
pattern in building a two-stack CMS to support a global
readership while supporting complex coordination of legacy
editing tools. 

When content volume is low and only few trained people are responsible for content creation and maintenance, any added complexity of a two stack CMS isn't worthwhile. Such complexity makes it harder for content creators to learn how to use it and adds significant effort in system maintenance. (Although this may be mitigated by tools that are designed to work in this style.)

At LinkedIn, we use machine learning technology widely to optimize our products: for instance, ranking search results, advertisements, and updates in the news feed, or recommending people, jobs, articles, and learning opportunities to members. An important component of this technology stack is a knowledge graph that provides input signals to machine learning models and data insight pipelines to power LinkedIn products. This post gives an overview of how we build this knowledge graph.

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For the past five years, our Android project has maintained a similar package structure from when it was first created in 2012. 

We also want to keep our package structure clean. This rethought is about keeping the workspace that we interact with on a daily basis both tidy and organized.

So we set about to rethink the entire package structure of the Buffer Android app. I’m excited to share what our process looked like and all that we learned, and it’d be great to hear your thoughts and questions, too.