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App Developer Magazine April 2017
App Developer Magazine April 2017
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App Developer Magazine April 2017
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App Developer Magazine April 2017
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Wait, the CIA can compromise my iPhone or Android? In the largest leak of C.I.A. documents, Wikileaks disclosed the tools that C.I.A. uses to hack computers, phones and smart TVs around the world. The C.I.A.’s ability to compromise Apple and Android smartphones is especially troubling, since spies can access private information through these devices, including photos, emails, texts and videos. Further, a program called Weeping Angel even uses Samsung smart TVs as secret listening devices that operate even when TV is turned off, recording the conversations and sending them on Internet to a covert C.I.A. server. While it’s understandable that governments do take advantage of the new technologies in their operations, it’s also possible that newly disclosed C.I.A.’s hacking methods will cause more harm than benefit. The cyberweapons described include programs that crash a targeted computer or steal passwords, or malware that can record keystrokes on a mobile device without breaking encryption.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
Unfortunately, the decline of digital freedom and government surveillance is not an Is it still possible to stay isolated incident, but a rising trend. private online? According to Freedom House, Internet freedom has been on decline for six straight private online?The good news is that even years, and there’s no sign of it stopping. though C.I.A. can access and tinker with Recently, there have been huge Internet people’s devices, encryption is out of reach liberty crackdowns around the world - such even for government spies. It is highly as the introduction of strict data retention recommended to use secure privacy tools, laws (i.e. in the UK, Poland, etc.) and laws such as VPNs, which help hide the user’s attacking communications apps such as true location (IP address) and encrypt all WhatsApp and Viber, as well as blocking the information that is being transferred certain social media sites. These through the Internet. Such a user becomes crackdowns on communications apps and impossible to track. VPNs helps anonymize social media sites goes hand-in-hand with browsing the Internet with its modern security protocols and no logs policy. attempts to limit citizen privacy and increase mass surveillance. For example, Americans fear that the new administration WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram still remain encrypted communication apps, and for might “erode cyber privacy,” and UK now has an unprecedented surveillance law that safe emailing there are such encrypted email service providers as ProtonMail. allows for mass hacking, among other things - which could lead to massive data It is likely that C.I.A. will not change its breaches. hacking policies, and that everyone’s privacy will be even more challenged in the future. The only solution for private citizens seems to be taking their online privacy into their own hands. NordVPN (a VPN solution provider) believes that by taking the right precautions, people can still guard their privacy online. In addition to using encryption and safe communication apps, Internet users need to be careful not to click on strange emailed links, not to download from unofficial app marketplaces, to always have strong passwords, and to be generally cautious when sharing information online.
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deepstreamHub launches real-time apps platform The Berlin-based startup deepstreamHub officially launches its platform for developing real-time apps. The platform gives app developers access to all the necessary functions to build reliable and scalable apps with real-time functionality from the ground up. These features include - among others - collaboration, chat and messaging tools; VR, IoT and location tracking ability. The possible applications for real-time features stretch from gaming to the financial trading markets. Based on a fundamentally new infrastructure, deepstreamHub allows apps to operate more reliably, even during large traffic surges. Last April, the startup secured $1 million USD in seed funding from BlueYard Capital to develop the platform. While the demand for real-time applications has been rising steadily, the technology to develop these capabilities is still in its infancy, and poses complex problems for app developers. With the aid of deepstreamHub’s easily integrated SDK, this effort is now much smaller. deepstreamHub is a cloud based platform, which automates the synchronization of data from the client and backend in the cloud, so that changes are instantaneously transferred to all connected devices. deepstreamHub has not only created the foundation for developing next-generation apps, but also simplified the work of today’s app developers. programmers in London at HSBC Global and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), who came together to solve the industry real-time infrastructure problem with a mobile-first platform. Wolfram Hempel, CEO and co-founder, deepstreamHub explains: “Apps without real-time features are rare nowadays. Whether that be push notifications, news feeds or shared documents. Users expect their data to be transferred from screen to screen in real-time. This gives rise to large volumes of data which can quickly lead to
App Developer Magazine April 2017
overloading in the backend. Current solutions are hard to scale and not fast or reliable enough to transfer data instantaneously. Real-time features are going to be a norm in tomorrow’s apps. Because of this, we have developed a fundamentally different infrastructure and SDK that enable developers to create realtime apps that transfer information in less than 16.6 milliseconds. This is faster than the screen reacts.” Yasser Fadl, CTO and co-founder, deepstreamHub adds: “It’s also important for us to be transparent and open, so we’ve made our software open-core. Any developer can access our real-time software and develop the source code with us.”
applications really is for the market. The server capacities were simply not reactive and scalable enough to manage location tracking during the huge traffic surges. This problem can further be seen in the finance industry, in particular in investment banking. Having reliable and scalable realtime trading software is critical to ensure that transactions are shown live on all devices. deepstreamHub’s founders were previously real-time trading software
When Pokémon Go launched last summer, the servers quickly overloaded with the volume of users pinging the app in real-time, causing outages and mass user complaints. This shows how important a mobile infrastructure for realtime
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What's happening at IBM Interconnect 2017 At IBM Interconnect, IBM’s largest cloud computing event of the year, they have announced a whole laundry list of new news items - like client adoption, tech breakthroughs and work they are doing to arm the next gen of cognitive developers. Here's a brief overview on what you might be missing at their latest event:
IBM Cloud announcements New software and services designed to solve the integration challenge of bringing together enterprise data and applications across on-premises, private and public cloud environments. IBM Cloud Integration allows clients to access and use actionable business data from any source including cloud services, messaging platforms or, application software regardless of the environment in which they reside using easy to discover APIs. New additions to their family of Cloud Object Storage offerings. IBM Cloud Object Storage Cold Vault give clients new choices for archival data and IBM Cloud Object Storage Flex offers a new pricing model to more easily apply intelligence to unpredictable data patterns using analytics and cognitive tools. Additionally, a partnership with NetApp that connects NetApp’s cloud storage solution with their cloud platform to improve backup storage. MaaS360 Advisor, a new cognitive assistant delivered through the IBM Cloud, that leverages the capabilities of Watson to aid IT analysts who manage networks of smartphones, tablets, laptops, IoT devices and other endpoints.
Blockchain announcements The release of the first enterprise-ready blockchain service based on the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric version 1.0. The service will enable developers to quickly build and host highly secure production blockchain networks on the IBM Cloud, and underpinned by IBM LinuxONE, the world’s most secure Linux-only server.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
IBM Bluemix Container Service to fuel the speed and simplicity at which developers can build and manage more secure and cognitive apps. Available on their cloud platform, this service uses Kubernetes, an Beijing Energy-Blockchain Labs Limited and open-source container orchestration system leveraging a Docker engine. IBM announce work together on the first blockchain-based green asset management New cognitive, cloud and data science platform based on the open source, openly training initiatives with Galvanize, which will governed Hyperledger Fabric. aim to increase the talent pool of cognitive developers and data scientists. A collaboration with SecureKey Technologies to enable a new digitalidentity and attribute sharing network based on IBM Blockchain.
Developer announcements
The launch of the IBM Cloud for Financial Services to offer developers the essential building blocks for the creation of financial services apps on the their cloud platform. A joint initiative with PlayFab to provide game developers with deeper insights into their players’ behavior. By pairing the Watson Data Platform on IBM Cloud with PlayFab’s backend services for games, developers can utilize the industry’s fastest data ingestion engine with cognitive powered decision support to help improve player experiences and boost engagement.
New and expanded capabilities with the Watson Discovery Service. By expanding Watson Discovery Service with new functionality and introducing Watson Company Profiler, an experimental platform solution built with Watson Discovery.
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FFTF to expose Senators who are voting to allow ISP's sell your information
“Congress should know by now that when you come for the Internet, the Internet comes for you,” said Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, “these billboards are just the beginning. People from across the political spectrum are outraged, and every lawmaker who votes to take away our privacy will regret it come election day.” Digital rights group Fight for the Future, known for organizing massive protests against SOPA and for net neutrality, has announced that - if the bill passes - they will unleash billboards with the names of every member of Congress who votes to gut the FCC’s Internet privacy rules that prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Comcast and Verizon from selling their customer’s personal information to advertisers without their consent. The group released a draft mock-up of what the initial billboard - which will be unveiled in Washington, DC and in select districts - will look like, with the names of the 50 Senators who voted for the bill last week. They plan to launch a crowdfunding campaign to place additional in-district billboards in key lawmakers back yards, which will also include information about how much money in campaign contributions key lawmakers took from the telecom industry.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
The House of Representatives is expected to vote on the measure as soon as tomorrow.
By using the CRA to gut the FCC broadband privacy rules, lawmakers are voting to allow ISPs to: - Monitor and sell customer’s location data, search history, app usage, and browsing habits to advertisers without your permission - Hijack customer’s search results, redirecting their traffic to paying third parties - Insert ads into web pages that would otherwise not have them
Fight for the Future was instrumental in the massive grassroots campaign that successfully pushed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to enact the strongest net neutrality protections in US. history last year. They built the page BattleForTheNet.com, which was responsible for more than one-fourth of all the net neutrality comments received by the FCC during its feedback process, and were behind the Internet Slowdown protest. The group also helped take the fight for net neutrality into the streets with creative protest campaigns like Occupy the FCC and the nationwide Internet Emergency protests. Fight for the Future is best known for their role in the massive online protests against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and continues to organize many of the largest protests in the history of the Internet. Over the summer, they organized the high profile Rock Against the TPP tour featuring many celebrities and well known musicians.
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Cut the Rope creator ZeptoLab transforms into a mobile app publisher ZeptoLab, the app gaming company behind Cut the Rope franchise and the mobile multiplayer hit King of Thieves, announced that they have officially entered the publishing business by opening a website where mobile game developers from all over the world can now leave their submissions. ZeptoLab has been “soft-launching” their publishing activities for about a year by participating in publishing conferences and accepting small numbers of submissions by email, but now the company is ready to go full speed with their program by opening a dedicated In return, ZeptoLab will guide creators through the final
stages of development and help their game become a market-ready product. The company is offering the assistance of its top specialists: from product managers and game designers to analysts and our user acquisition team. As a publisher, ZeptoLab also takes on all marketing and promotional activities, including playtests, localization, PR materials and community engagement. Once the game is launched, the company will make sure it stays on top by managing player feedback and effectively announcing forthcoming updates. website.
“We offer a very personalized approach to each game,” says Mike Sviblov, ZeptoLab’s Head of Publishing. “First of all, no submission is left ignored. We try to review every game, even if it doesn’t quite meet the criteria, and help developers identify problems and potential hidden strengths. Which criteria should the game meet to be published by ZeptoLab? Well, we are looking for the projects that have been designed specifically for mobile devices, since our key platforms are iOS, Google Play and Amazon. The stage of development is also important: the more finished the game is, the more chances it has of being published. The final (and probably the most important) aspect we’re looking at is innovation. We want to publish games that we can be proud of later on and that offer a unique and compelling player experience. If you believe that your game fits the bill - just drop us a line!” App Developer Magazine April 2017
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It's getting cheaper to buy installs but users don't stick around says Fiksu January indexes from Fiksu DSP have revealed decreasing costs to drive installs across both iOS and Android devices, and increasing costs to acquire a user that makes a purchase. The data from Fiksu DSP tracks more than 38 trillion marketing events including impressions, clicks, downloads, registrations, purchases and other loyal user actions across 4.1 billion devices.
Smartphone users increasingly willing to download apps - Costs of media inventory - measured by the cost-per-thousand (CPM) - fell across both iOS and Android during January, continuing a trend dating back more than three months. - In January, CPM on iOS fell to $4.03 while Android dropped to $2.49. - During October of 2016, CPM on iOS was $6.74, with CPM on Android sitting at $4.16, the highest prices across both platforms in over a year. - This represents a slight year-over-year increase (1%) in media costs on Android, but a 16% lower cost on iOS when compared to 2016.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
With the cost of media going down, apps across both Android and iOS are having an easier time driving new installs. Fiksu DSP’s findings correspond with rising iPhone 7 adoption rates, which may correlate with Apple raising the minimum iPhone storage from 16GB to 32GB. With more space, users are more likely to download additional apps.
Android & iOS driving more installs, less loyalty
“The rise in CPP across the board indicates that while apps are driving installs, there’s an ongoing struggle to find the right loyal users who will make a purchase or take another high-value action,” said Tom Cummings, vice president, new market development at Fiksu DSP. This could be a result of poor targeting methodology on the part of brands. A recent Fiksu study found that 50 percent of consumers see ads that are almost never relevant to their needs and preferences.
While consumers continue to be willing to try new apps, they take in-app actions quite selectively. The same study revealed that 79 percent of smartphone users add at During the month of December, cost per purchasing user (CPP) on iOS dropped by least one new app when they get a new device, but 87 percent use less than ten 23 percent. January exhibited a course apps on a daily basis. “Most Apple users are correction, with CPP rising 21 percent, back to the approximate costs experienced on their third or fourth iPhone by now,” said Cummings. “They might try out a few new during the fall of 2016. From a year over apps but they probably already know what year perspective, it was slightly more they’ll be using on a daily basis. Meanwhile, expensive to earn a purchasing user in January 2017 than it was in January 2016. Android marketers are having better luck CPP on Android also dropped considerably finding users willing to invest more time in the last month of 2016, but only rose by with their apps.” 4 percent in January. Meanwhile, Android’s year-over-year increase in CPP mimicked iOS, rising 11 percent. Overall, during the month of January it was less expensive to acquire a purchasing user on Android than on iOS, a long-standing trend that had briefly flipped leading up to the 2016 holiday season.
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Unity 5.6 is coming, what you need to know Unity Technologies has announced at GDC that Unity 5.6 will release on March 31, 2017, marking the final installment of Unity 5. The company also provided an early look at Unity 2017, the next generation of Unity with version 2017.
Key features in Unity 5.6:
- Progressive Lightmapper speeds up iteration and testing of lighting scenarios and reduces baking times. - Navigation Mesh system adds AI and path-finding to more easily control character navigation through giant game worlds. - New Video Player supports smooth 4K playback to provide immersive video and enable the creation of 360 video experiences. - Native support for Vulkan graphics API provides better performance across Windows, Tizen, and Android platforms, while consuming less device power. - TextMesh Pro provides improved control of text formatting and layout through Advanced Text Rendering and is now available for free to users of 5.3+, with native Unity integration coming in Unity 2017. Also at GDC, two of their partners announced new opportunities for thier creators seeking global distribution and discovery:
App Developer Magazine April 2017
- Xiaomi, one of the top handset manufacturers and Android app stores in China, is now offering Western developers direct access to the Chinese market; interested developers can learn more in the new Xiaomi-Unity Developer Portal. - Facebook announced Facebook Gameroom Premium support, inviting developers of premium games - like The Eyes of Ara and Skyhill - to bring their content to the PC gaming platform’s growing portfolio. For developers using Unity IAP to implement payments, the company also announced that Facebook payment support will be available in Unity 5.6. Lastly, Unity 2017, their next generation, will get new features and improvements across graphics, performance, stability, efficiency and platforms as well as a new dedicated focus area: artists and designers. To improve team productivity and collaboration for non-programmers, Unity 2017 will bring the start of a series of features designed specifically for artists and designers across disciplines, from technical artists, to lighting artists, animators and more. Beta signups will be available in April.
“The Unity 5 cycle culminating in 5.6 represents great progress in our key focus areas: graphics, performance, stability, efficiency and platform growth. I’m really proud of what our engineering teams delivered,” said John Riccitiello, CEO, Unity Technologies. “Features like Physically Based Rendering, Global Illumination, and Codeless IAP are just a few of the advancements that have helped make Unity 5, and the community it powers, so successful.”
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Game Developers Choice Awards game of the year goes to... Blizzard Entertainment’s popular and stylish multiplayer shooter, Overwatch, was honored with the prize for Game of the Year at this year's 17th annual Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA) ceremony during the 2017 Game Developers Conference (GDC) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Overwatch’s carefully calibrated balance and polished gameplay mechanics also earned the game the award for Best Design. Developer Playdead’s beautifully macabre and engrossing platformer, Inside, also earned two awards in total, for Best Audio and Best Visual Art. The awards reflect the strong artistry of the title, which depicts a dark conspiracy using a stark visual motif with foreboding lighting and haunting animation. Developer Campo Santo’s compelling first-person adventure game, Firewatch, was the final double awardwinner of the night, earning the team the awards for Best Debut and Best Narrative. The game, which features the voice talent of Mad Men’s Rich Sommer, portrays a deeply engrossing tale that enwraps the player in a branching script filled with mystery, suspense, humor and longing. The full slate of winners at tonight’s ceremony also includes the augmented reality (AR) game Pokemon Go by Niantic, which became a worldwide sensation and earned the award for Best Mobile/Handheld Game. The massively ambitious, procedurally-generated universe of No Man’s Sky earned developer Hello Games the Innovation Award, while the grandiose production and graphics in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End earned that title the award for Best Technology. The charmingly off-kilter virtual reality (VR) game, Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives, received the award for Best VR/ AR Game. The Audience Award is chosen among the entire selection of GDCA finalists using a public online voting process, and was presented to developer EA DICE for Battlefield 1. The Game Developers Choice Awards honor the very best games of the year, and was created for and voted on by developers. Winners are selected by the
App Developer Magazine April 2017
Game Developers Choice Awards-specific International Choice Awards Network (ICAN), which is an invitation-only group comprised of leading game creators from all parts of the industry.
Congrats to all of the winners and nominees for following their visions and thanks to all developers who strive to make amazing games for us day in and day out.”
Every year, the Game Developers Choice The Game Developers Awards also recognize developers who have Choice Awards winners made significant contributions to the art, science and craft of video games with three are: special awards. This year, the Pioneer Award was given to Jordan Mechner, the game designer, programmer and Best Audio screenwriter best known for creating the Inside (Playdead) landmark series, Prince of Persia. The Ambassador Award, which recognizes those whose actions have helped video games to “advance to a better place,” went to Mark DeLoura, for dedicating his life to the education and the productive use of technology within academia, the media and videogames, holding roles that include Senior Advisor for Digital Media during the Obama administration. The Lifetime Achievement award was given to Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games, and the creator of seminal game/creation tool ZZT and the influential Unreal Engine. Following the 1998 PC game Unreal, which Sweeney co-created, the game's engine became the underpinning for a slew of acclaimed games, including Epic's own Gears of War and Unreal franchises, as well as the BioShock series, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, and the Batman: Arkham series of games. “This year’s amazing slate of winners is a testament to the diversity of experiences in games. Pokemon Go took gaming outdoors using AR, while Job Simulator showed how lo-fi aesthetics could meet cutting edge tech for a winning VR experience. Overwatch once again proved Blizzard’s uncanny ability to make a perfectly balanced multiplayer game, and Inside delved deep into our dark psyches to unearth our scariest nightmares,” said Meggan Scavio, General Manager of the Game Developers Conference. “These nominees speak to the strength of games as a medium, but also show the various textures and possible creative outlets that interactive entertainment can provide.
Best Debut Campo Santo (Firewatch) Best Design Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment) Best Mobile/Handheld Game Pokemon Go (Niantic) Innovation Award No Man’s Sky (Hello Games) Best Narrative Firewatch (Campo Santo) Best Technology Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (Naughty Dog) Best Visual Art Inside (Playdead)
Best VR/AR Game Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives (Owlchemy Labs) Audience Award Battlefield 1 (EA DICE) Game of the Year Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment) Pioneer Award Jordan Mechner Ambassador Award Mark DeLoura Lifetime Achievement Award Tim Sweeney
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GameMaker Studio platform begins closed beta Game developers on Mac will soon receive access to the powerful GameMaker Studio platform for the first time as YoYo Games begins the closed beta period of the long-awaited Mac OS version of GameMaker Studio 2.
Key features:
- Level editing features: New layer-based level editing with level inheritance to create multiple stages at once and an advanced tiling system for developers to create more The Mac IDE closed beta for GameMaker Studio 2 will bring enhancements since the complex visuals. release of GameMaker for Mac in 2011. - Cross-platform export: GameMaker GameMaker Studio 2 features rich functionality that take the 2D game development environment to a new level. Beginners with limited to no coding experience will rest assured as the trademarked Drag and Drop system (DnD) translates into actual code, while professional developers retain access to a powerful programming language and comprehensive set of tools for advance exporting and rapid deployment across all leading platforms including mobile, console and desktop.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
powerful new editors with real-time updates from one editor to another, a completely redesigned user interface and cross platform source level debugging GameMaker Studio 2 for Windows PC is currently available for purchase through YoYo Games’ website and Steam starting at $99.99.
Studio 2 on Windows PC and Mac OS X is capable of game development across multiple platforms including Windows Desktop, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, iOS, Android, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and more;
- Native extensions: Game Maker Language (GML) supports all native targets to simplify the cross-platform development. - Workflow enhancements: Other enhancements to GameMaker Studio 2 on Mac OS include a seamless path from DnD to actual code,
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What we learned at GDC 2017, and dates for GDC 2018 announced
The 2017 Game Developers Conference (GDC), the world’s largest and longestrunning event serving professionals dedicated to the art and science of making games, concluded a successful week of networking, learning and inspiration. In total, the conference hosted more than 26,000 professional attendees, 500 lectures, panels, tutorials and roundtable discussions, and 570 companies exhibiting in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. GDC 2017 marked a return of the Virtual Reality Developers Conference, which debuted at GDC 2016. That event, which runs concurrent to GDC, again fostered key learnings and insights into the flourishing field of virtual and augmented reality. GDC and VRDC will be returning to the Moscone Center in San Francisco from Monday, March 19 to Friday, March 23, 2018. This year, developers of some of the industry’s most acclaimed new titles took to the stage to present an inside look into the making of their games. Pokemon GO’s development team, Niantic, took a rare opportunity to describe turning their landmark augmented reality title into a worldwide phenomenon. Nintendo put their expertly-honed design skills on display with their session, “Change and Constant: Breaking Conventions with 'The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild'.” In it, they showed off simple 2D prototypes they created to test out the new gameplay mechanics, these experiments ultimately yielded one of the most acclaimed games of all time. 2017 marked a year of transition for an industry adjusting to mid-cycle hardware releases, with the recent release of the portable Nintendo Switch, the PlayStation 4 Pro, and the first year of VR hardware availability to consumers. As always, GDC 2017 featured essential speaking sessions
App Developer Magazine April 2017
that illuminated the way for developers learning the ins and outs of the new platforms. Among the esteemed roster of speakers were developers from Nintendo, Electronic Arts/DICE, and multiplatform VR developer Owlchemy Labs. GDC 2017 was also an opportunity for legendary game designers to host retrospectives of their influential titles with the Classic Game Postmortems sessions for Seaman presented by creator Yutaka “Yoot” Saito, Oregon Trail presented by co-inventor Don Rawitsch, Sid Meier’s Civilization presented by creators Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, and Deus Ex, presented by game director Warren Spector.
The Moscone North Hall housed the IGF Pavilion which featured all of the finalists for the IGF Awards, and the playable alt.ctrl.GDC demos which showcased games using unconventional controllers and alternative control schemes. Returning this year were the GDC Play Pavilions which are special areas for emerging developers, allowing them display their games to key distributors, publishers, press and investors in attendance.
In addition to the Expo Floors, GDC hosted a variety of Interactive Spaces throughout the week. Independent developers and some of the latest indie games were featured in the GDC Train Jam and Mild The annual Independent Games Festival Rumpus areas, a special edition of Double (IGF) Awards and Game Developers Fine’s “Day of the Devs,” and the Indie Choice Awards (GDCA) took place on the MEGABOOTH showcase. For fans of night of Wednesday, March 1. The 2017 tabletop board games, ”Shut Up and Sit IGF Awards honored some of the best Down” hosted a selection of the best board independent games of the year, with Blendo games of the year for all attendees to enjoy. Games’ Quadrilateral Cowboy earning this This year also introduced Art Boss from year’s Seumas McNally Grand Prize and iam8bit, which served as a showcase for all accompanying $30,000 award. The title forms of art created during the production of a videogame. also earned the Excellence in Design Award and its $3,000 award. “Every GDC gives us a deeper appreciation Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch took of the hard work that goes into every aspect home the award for Game of the Year at of game production, and every role requires the 17th annual Game Developers Choice attention and deserves respect. With GDC, Awards (GDCA). The multiplayer shooter we aim to honor the commitment, passion also received the award for Best Design. and love that all game creators put into An archive of the IGF and GDCA each project, I’d like to think we’ve done that ceremonies can be viewed this year,” said Meggan Scavio, general at http://twitch.tv/gdc. manager of the Game Developers Conference. “Games can be scary, exciting, The bustling Expo Floor in Moscone’s South funny, and above all else, fun. They run the Hall featured a diverse roster of more than gamut of emotions and themes, and there’s 570 companies exhibiting their hottest a game out there for everyone. GDC products, services, technologies and embraces this spirit, and we welcome talents. From industry giants like Google, developers of all backgrounds. The last few Sony, Microsoft and Amazon, to influential months have seen lots of challenges and game developers like Epic Games, changes, but also some truly amazing Insomniac Games, Hi-Rez Studios, Oculus, gameplay and VR experiences. If GDC Valve, Unity Technologies, and hundreds of 2017 is any indication, we should be in for others. a hell of a year for games.”
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Open Source
A real-time, open source commerce platform launched by Reaction Commerce Reaction Commerce has announced the general availability (GA) release of its breakthrough, real-time and completely open source commerce platform, designed to build, run and scale modern digital stores. Offering the simplicity that businesses expect, along with the reliability, customization and scalability that larger retailers and brands require, Reaction Commerce enables designers, developers and entrepreneurs to create transformative ecommerce experiences. “Ecommerce technology is still in the first inning and has a long way to go - we know because our team has spent decades building shops on platforms that we outgrew or broke all together,” said Sara Hicks, co-founder and CEO of Reaction Commerce. “We’ve spent the past few years honing Reaction Commerce and turning it into a platform that both evolves with the industry and inspires further change. After more than 14,000 signups for our alpha and beta versions, we’re excited to share our much anticipated general availability release with the world.” Many commerce platforms were introduced before the first iPhone launched, and since that time, the ways that consumers shop and the technologies that developers use to build have dramatically changed. Retailers have struggled with legacy systems that are not able to keep up with the pace of technological evolution and, in fact, more than 70 percent say that they are looking to switch ecommerce platforms in the next two years. Gartner estimates that the digital commerce platform market will continue to grow, with a forecast compound annual growth rate of over 15 percent from 2015 through 2020, which includes revenue from SaaS, licenses and maintenance, according to Gartner’s May 2016 “The Gartner Digital Commerce Vendor Guide, 2016” report. At the same time, there’s a dearth of developer talent willing or available to build for these outdated systems, increasing staffing costs and slowing growth. More than 50 percent of retailers identify developing and
App Developer Magazine April 2017
In addition, unlike legacy platforms built on old code and closed platforms, Reaction uses modern, leading frameworks and “We evaluated all of the current market-leading technologies, including JavaScript (the world’s most commonly used programming platforms as we planned a huge migration language), Node.js, npm, React, HTML, from our legacy web stack to a new, open CSS and MongoDB. This attracts a talent source platform. After the initial meeting pool of developers equipped with the skills with Reaction Commerce, seeing their JavaScript stack and discussing their vision necessary to build on the platform, making it easier for ecommerce agencies and of the future for commerce, we knew that retailers to keep staff and evolve as we had to start fresh with Reaction,” said technology evolves. Anthony Hoang, CIO of Evereve. “No one else is operating at the same cadence as Reaction Commerce. We know their The Reaction Commerce platform will be able to support our product roadmap for years to come and help deliver Community the phenomenal customer experience we’re seeking.” Reaction Commerce is a large open source JavaScript commerce platform on GitHub, a popular software development platform. The community comprises over 3,400 members from around the world. Hundreds of developers have contributed to the Reaction source code, which undergoes a test-driven, rigorous and robust approvals process. Reaction offers a Development Partner Program to attract and reward ecommerce developers and agencies, and has received over 700 inquiries to date. Members of the Development Partner Program have access to the Reaction core Reaction Commerce is fast, scalable and development team, marketing materials to the only platform that is real-time reactive. help educate clients, a partner newsletter This means that it is the only platform with and blog, platform data and analytics, and a listing in its partner directory. the ability to see all shop changes in real time on all browsers or native apps, without page reloads or app updates. managing digital talent as a top-five business challenge.
Features include: Catalog and variant management Drag-and-drop merchandising Inline editing Order processing Payments Shipping Taxes Discounts Mobile-ready themes Integrated analytics A growing gallery of integrated third-party applications for launching an online shop or marketplace.
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“When we founded Reaction Commerce, we knew where technology was heading and that nothing on the market was ready to address the challenges facing retail,” said Aaron SingmasterJudd, co-founder and CTO of Reaction Commerce. “All of the trends, both from a customer experience and development perspective, were pointing to the need for a platform that was real-time reactive, JavaScript-based and built on open source technology. We’ve architected Reaction Commerce with that in mind and the general availability release of our platform is the culmination of that vision.”
App Developer Magazine April 2017
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Cloud Services
IBM is building a quantum computing system IBM announced an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computing systems. “IBM Q” quantum systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform. While technologies that currently run on classical computers, such as Watson, can help find patterns and insights buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers. IBM Quantum Computing Scientists Hanhee Paik and Sarah Sheldon examine the hardware inside an open dilution fridge at the IBM Q Lab at their T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, NY. On Monday, March 6, they announced that it will build commercially available universal quantum computing systems. IBM Q quantum systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform and will be designed to tackle problems that are too complex and exponential in nature for classical computing systems to handle. One of the first and most promising applications for quantum computing will be in the area of chemistry and could lead to the discovery of new medicines and materials. IBM aims at constructing commercial Q systems with ~50 qubits in the next few years to demonstrate capabilities beyond today’s classical systems, and plans to collaborate with key industry partners to develop applications that exploit the quantum speedup of the systems.
IBM also announced: The release of a new API (Application Program Interface) for the IBM Quantum Experience that enables developers and programmers to begin building interfaces between its existing five quantum bit (qubit) cloud-based quantum computer and classical computers, without needing a deep background in quantum physics.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
The release of an upgraded simulator on the IBM Quantum Experience that can model circuits with up to 20 qubits. In the first half of 2017, IBM plans to release a full SDK (Software Development Kit) on the Quantum Experience for users to build simple quantum applications and software programs. The Quantum Experience enables anyone to connect to their quantum processor via the IBM Cloud, to run algorithms and experiments, work with the individual quantum bits, and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing. “IBM has invested over decades to growing the field of quantum computing and we are committed to expanding access to quantum systems and their powerful capabilities for the science and business communities,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud and director for IBM Research. “Following Watson and blockchain, we believe that quantum computing will provide the next powerful set of services delivered via the IBM Cloud platform, and promises to be the next major technology that has the potential to drive a new era of innovation across industries.” IBM intends to build their Q systems to expand the application domain of quantum computing. A key metric will be the power of a quantum computer expressed by the “Quantum Volume”, which includes the number of qubits, quality of quantum operations, qubit connectivity and parallelism. As a first step to increase Quantum Volume, IBM aims at constructing commercial Q systems with ~50 qubits in the next few years to demonstrate capabilities beyond today’s classical systems, and plans to collaborate with key industry partners to develop applications that exploit the quantum speedup of the systems.
in the area of chemistry. Even for simple molecules like caffeine, the number of quantum states in the molecule can be astoundingly large - so large that all the conventional computing memory and processing power scientists could ever build could not handle the problem. IBM’s scientists have developed techniques to efficiently explore the simulation of chemistry problems on quantum processors and experimental demonstrations of various molecules are in progress. In the future, the goal will be to scale to even more complex molecules and try to predict chemical properties with higher precision than possible with classical computers.
Future applications of quantum computing may include: - Drug and Materials Discovery: Untangling the complexity of molecular and chemical interactions leading to the discovery of new medicines and materials; - Supply Chain & Logistics: Finding the optimal path across global systems of systems for ultra-efficient logistics and supply chains, such as optimizing fleet operations for deliveries during the holiday season. - Financial Services: Finding new ways to model financial data and isolating key global risk factors to make better investments. - Artificial Intelligence: Making facets of artificial intelligence such as machine learning much more powerful when data sets can be too big such as searching images or video.
IBM Q systems will be designed to tackle - Cloud Security: Making cloud computing problems that are currently seen as too more secure by using the laws of quantum complex and exponential in nature for classical computing systems to handle. One physics to enhance private data safety. of the first and most promising applications for quantum computing will be
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“Classical computers are extraordinarily powerful and will continue to advance and underpin everything we do in business and society. But there are many problems that will never be penetrated by a classical computer. To create knowledge from much greater depths of complexity, we need a quantum computer,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems. “We envision IBM Q systems working in concert with our portfolio of classical high-performance systems to address problems that are currently unsolvable, but hold tremendous untapped value.” IBM’s roadmap to scale to practical quantum computers is based on a holistic
App Developer Magazine April 2017
approach to advancing all parts of the system. They will leverage its deep expertise in superconducting qubits, complex high performance system integration, and scalable nano-fabrication processes from the semiconductor industry to help advance the quantum mechanical capabilities. Also, the developed software tools and environment will leverage IBM’s world-class mathematicians, computer scientists, and software and system engineers. "As Richard Feynman said in 1981, ‘…if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical,
and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.’ This breakthrough technology has the potential to achieve transformational advancements in basic science, materials development, environmental and energy research, which are central to the missions of the Department of Energy (DOE),” said Steve Binkley, deputy director of science, US Department of Energy. “The DOE National Labs have always been at the forefront of new innovation, and we look forward to working with IBM to explore applications of their new quantum systems."
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Security
Webscale launches new WAF to thwart attacks on eCommerce sites Webscale has announced the launch of their Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF), the first of a new line of a-la-carte solutions designed to address the pain points many businesses face with regards to the security, availability and performance of their critical web applications. While the market is flush with WAF solutions that combat malicious attacks at the edge of a web application, closest to the end user, Cloud WAF focus on critical e-commerce platforms and integrate application awareness by building out robust protection for both data traffic at the browser level, and the complete backend application infrastructure, in a single as-aService solution. Attacks at the application layer can be catastrophic, with erroneous code being deployed, site content being altered or user data, such as credit card information, being extracted through vulnerable backdoors. Webscale's decentralized and software-defined application delivery architecture allows the
data plane to reside in close proximity to the application, giving it unprecedented, real-time insight into all activity, while its control plane is able to make changes and deploy safeguards if issues are detected.
Shield Mode, instantly blocking bad traffic and validating genuine users, keeping the website fast and available protecting both potential revenue and maintaining brand reputation.
The Cloud WAF has strong blacklisting and whitelisting capabilities and can block or allow requests or sessions by IP address, device type or geographic location. The WAF also allows for blocking against the OWASP top 10 threats as well as any application specific or custom rulesets. With the recent roll out of its HTTP/2 support and Service Provider-grade PCI-DSS certification, Webscale also adds protection for sensitive customer information, along with the latest web technology, to deliver strong security and increased performance. Through real-time traffic analysis, their platform works to quickly detect problems and identify solutions so it can then apply fixes. In the event of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, Webscale enables
"Security is a major concern for our customers, so the development and release of Webscale's Cloud WAF has been a top priority. With its deep visibility into the underlying infrastructure, Webscale is completely application aware, enabling it to identify anomalies and issue resolutions before disruption is caused, whether they be at the browser level, or at the application backend," said Sonal Puri, CEO of Webscale. "As a true cloud-based solution, Webscale is also able to learn across our customers, allowing for any fixes applied to address customer security issues to be immediately distributed across our entire base. That is the beauty of a SaaS platform versus an appliance."
Messaging
Insights on push alert frequency to improve new app user retention Mobile growth company Urban Airship detailed industry findings from its mobile app retention study, spanning new users’ first 90-days of app usage within retail, media, sports & recreation and utility/productivity. By analyzing the frequency of messaging users received and their corresponding retention rates, Urban Airship provides a deeper understanding that dispels common push notification myths and misconceptions and offers practical guidance to app publishers seeking to improve new user retention.
Retail took the top spot for the lowest share of zero-send users at 18 percent of all opt-in users, followed by Media at 22 percent, Sports & Recreation at 24 percent and Utility & Productivity at 25 percent. For Android apps, zero-send users are the single biggest cohort in every vertical analyzed.
may have opted out of notifications or deleted apps at different frequency levels, and more importantly, the last time they opened the app. The trend of greater retention with greater messaging frequency is unmistakable. For retail, moving from zero notifications
Opt-in audiences don’t have greater affinity for apps. They have greater expectations. A long-held belief, especially for iOS apps where opting in to notifications requires explicit permission, is that opt-in users are simply more inclined to be retained longer. Data based on averages certainly backs this up. Retail apps see opt-in users retained 40 percent longer than opt-out audiences on iOS and 90 percent longer on Android - some of the biggest gains for any vertical. However, users who have made the effort to opt in and receive no messages have lower 90-day retention rates than opt-out audiences across both platforms and all verticals - the one exception is iOS Utility & Productivity where opt-outs retain one percentage point lower. For most verticals this difference is significant, like in Retail where opt-out users’ 90-day retention rates are 50 percent higher on Android and 36 percent higher on iOS than opt-in users who receive no messages. Further, these zero-send users represent a large share of every vertical’s opt-in audience.
Percent of Opt-in Users Receiving Zero Push Notifications App Developer Magazine April 2017
More than one-quarter of the 47 million new app users who were opted in to receive push notifications, received none in their first 90-days of app usage and had lower retention rates than opt-out users.
Taking into consideration average retention rates of opt-out and zero-send audiences, app users who receive any amount of notifications in their first 90-days have an average retention rate that’s nearly 3X higher (190 percent). Within the four verticals, this retention gain is highest for retail at 212 percent more on Android and 110 percent more on iOS.
sent to weekly notifications is a 5X multiplier on 90-day retention rates for Android, and 2.5X greater on iOS retail. Retailers moving from zero notifications to a greater than daily frequency improve 90day retention rates 3.5X on iOS and 6X on Android.
For retail apps, both Android and iOS show two strong groupings for 90-day retention levels that point to the need to move to Concerns about sending weekly, daily and daily+ messaging. In media apps don’t see significant too many notifications are contrast, retention gains until moving to daily or greater frequency. Media app users who unfounded received one notification in 90-days had higher retention rates than weekly and 2X/ The general trend shows a very strong month frequency cohorts, suggesting that correlation between greater notification frequency and greater mobile app retention while a welcome message is appreciated, media users expect as-it-happens rates. Across all verticals and mobile platforms, users who received messaging at information and sporadic or even weekly messaging doesn’t meet this need. daily+ frequency also had the highest 90day retention levels. While it’s true the longer and more frequently someone uses an app the more notifications they are likely to receive, the data accounts for users that
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The balance of app publishers’ attention must shift from user acquisition to retention
mobile app user acquisition, as well as the loss of future potential customer value, this “APPathy” becomes expensive and unsustainable very quickly. Even at a daily+ messaging frequency, retail apps see 50 percent of new iOS users churn 90-days after first app open, while for Android it’s 62 percent of new users. Marketers now have a solution to help identify users that are at risk of churning with Urban Airship’s Predictive Churn Analytics. Based on a proprietary machine-learning model, Predictive Churn Analytics analyses user patterns for each app and classifies users into three risk profiles - Low, Medium and High - making it easy to take action in Urban Airship or any other business system.
The zero-send issue, where apps ignore new users raising their hands for communication and as a result see the “Our data study findings clearly show that lowest retention rates nearly without many apps are missing out on the single exception, is a clear sign that apps are biggest opportunity to improve user more focused on user acquisition than retention by not messaging users that have user engagement and retention. As it stands now, overall results show marketers opted in, which is incredibly easy to address,” said Erin Hintz, CMO, Urban lose 95 percent of new users within 90 days when they fail to message those who Airship. “Once the basics are tackled, apps have opted in. Considering the high cost of can zero in on customer-centric engagement strategies that produce
App Developer Magazine April 2017
optimal messaging frequencies for their industry to multiply retention rates. In addition, new machine-learning predictive capabilities can identify users at risk of churning while there’s still time to drive pre-emptive action.” Visit Urban Airship’s Shoptalk booth #1225 for demonstrations of new solutions, including an Urban Airship Reach integration with Apple Pay for automatic rewards enrollment at checkout and ongoing customer engagement.
Methodology Urban Airship analyzed customer data in aggregate to identify apps with at least 5,000 downloads that had sent at least 1,000 cumulative push notifications in one month. Analysis focused on 63 million app users that first opened an app in September 2016, tracking their notification opt-in status, app open behaviour and volume of notifications received through December 2016.
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Big Data
A progress report on big data initiatives "Having experienced this firsthand at Facebook, delivering on the promise of selfservice access to data and analytics across the enterprise is extremely difficult and goes way beyond technology, involving rethinking processes, company culture and the operational model of the data team," said Qubole founder and CEO, Ashish Thusoo. "Until IT teams adopt a DataOps approach versus a more traditional command-andcontrol model, they'll remain a primary bottleneck to insights and their big data initiatives will continue to struggle. But there is a path - some companies have successfully made the transformation, and others can learn from their experiences." Qubole, the big data-as-a-service company, has released the results of its State of DataOps report, a survey of IT and data professionals on the progress of their big data initiatives. The survey revealed a clear reality gap: while data teams have high confidence they can enable self-service insights to meet growing demands across the enterprise, few have delivered on that promise. According to the survey, 76 percent of respondents said their company currently has a big data initiative, and another 20 percent said they plan to soon. In addition, 93 percent of respondents said business demand for big data analysis is growing. Sixty-five percent of IT teams recognize that to get to ubiquitous access to data and analytics, they need to enable a self-service DataOps approach. And most respondents - 87 percent - felt confident to extremely confident that they could deliver self-service analytics. Yet, respondents characterized their big data processes as still in the earliest stages of maturity: only 8 percent of respondents consider their big data initiatives to be fully mature.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
A deeper dive reveals that IT is besieged by operational and technological challenges that interfere with improving big data maturity: - Only 12 percent of respondents said they have multiple big data projects running - 98 percent said they face numerous challenges with their big data initiatives - 78 percent still support data requests on a project-by-project basis - 45 percent can't satisfy business needs and expectations - 61 percent rely on third-parties for big data expertise
Additional findings:
Data analytics is moving rapidly to the cloud: Nearly six in 10 companies are currently using at least some cloud resources for big data processing: 14 percent are running all big data processing in the cloud and 41 percent are running at least some data processing in the cloud
Another 30 percent of respondents say that while they are currently running big data processes on-premises, they are considering cloud as a future option. Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the pack, with 32 percent of respondents saying they use Amazon's cloud platform for big data processing. Microsoft Azure, however, is not far behind, with 26 percent of respondents using it for big data projects. Google Cloud Platform is used by 12 percent of respondents and Oracle Cloud is used by 11 percent. Businesses are in need of big data expertise: 83 percent of respondents said their data teams are growing 36 percent of respondents said they are having difficulty finding people with expertise in big data projects 31 percent said there aren't enough technical resources to run big data operations effectively 61 percent of respondents reported that their organization uses third-party consultants with big data expertise
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Big Data
AtScale 5.0 brings order to the big data chaos
AtScale announced the general availability of AtScale 5.0. Supported by a newly granted patent on the platform’s ability to run its powerful calculation engine against any BI visualization tool, AtScale 5.0 brings order to the big data chaos. AtScale 5.0 packs new features including a scalable dimensional calculation engine, a machine learning performance optimizer, a universal data abstraction layer and enterprise-grade security, governance and metadata management capabilities. The company will be showcasing this innovation at the Gartner Conference this week and the Strata+Hadoop World Conference next week. This announcement comes on the heels of 10X company growth and an impressive list of new enterprise customers using its products across the globe and in major industries.
Bringing Order to the Big Data Chaos BI Platforms have traditionally been defined as ‘closed stacks’ that integrate definitions, query logic and visualization capabilities into one product suite. These suites were most appropriate for an era when IT managed BI, employees’ reporting needs were simple and data volumes small.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
Despite years of efforts by enterprises to encourage standardization, business users are routinely using multiple visualization tools (Tableau, Microsoft Excel, etc) and asking bigger and broader questions of data stored across traditional databases like Teradata, modern platforms like Hadoop and next-generation analytics services like Google BigQuery. They need consistent speed, scale and security, regardless of which BI visualization tool they use and regardless of the data they query. AtScale 5.0 enables that.
“The development approach that the business intelligence software industry hastaken over the last two decades has not led to standardization in terms of presentation or analytics methodology. On the contrary, there are many more analytics and business intelligence tools today than there were five years ago,” said John L Myers, Managing Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a Boulder, CO based industry analysis firm. “With the growth of big data and data management options in recent years, there promises to be many more options five years from now.” Page 26
Big Data
NVIDIA releases GPU accelerator to improve AI “cloud services and computing power As innovation progresses, more and more needed for advanced and emerging cloud processing is being offloaded to the cloud to do the heavy lifting. But how much cloud workloads such as big data analytics, machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence usage is too much for cloud providers to (AI).” handle efficiently? That is the answer that many companies hope never to have to Project Olympus is the next generation of answer as they ramp up their cloud usage cloud hardware and a “new model for open exponentially. That’s where NVIDIA and source hardware development.” Built upon Microsoft look to make big changes in the a solid foundation of an open source way cloud computing operates. hardware development model, the project has “created a vibrant industry ecosystem Microsoft's newest project, code named for datacenter deployments across the Project Olympus, is making a big buzz in the Silicon Valley community as it hopes to globe in both cloud and enterprise.” address these computing stumbling blocks in the way of many companies’ growing successes. In a blog post by Microsoft, NVIDIA's new GPU Kushagra Vaid, general manager and engineer at Azure Hardware Infrastructure, accelerator said that the project was made to improve In concurrence with Project Olympus, NVIDIA has unveiled blueprints for a new hyperscale GPU accelerator to drive AI cloud computing. The projects hyperscale GPU accelerator chassis for AI, also referred to as HGX-1, is designed to support eight of the latest “Pascal” generation NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA’s NVLink high speed multi-GPU interconnect technology, and provides high bandwidth interconnectivity for up to 32 GPUs by connecting four HGX-1 together.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
In a press release by NVIDIA, they said that “HGX-1 does for cloud-based AI workloads what ATX - Advanced Technology eXtended - did for PC motherboards when it was introduced more than two decades ago. It establishes an industry standard that can be rapidly and efficiently embraced to help meet surging market demand.” They later went on saying that, “Cloud workloads are more diverse and complex than ever. AI training, inferencing and HPC workloads run optimally on different system configurations, with a CPU attached to a varying number of GPUs. The highly modular design of the HGX-1 allows for optimal performance no matter the workload. It provides up to 100x faster deep learning performance compared with legacy CPU-based servers, and is estimated at one-fifth the cost for conducting AI training and one-tenth the cost for AI inferencing.” It is important to note that this is the first (Open Compute Project)OCP server design to offer a broad choice of microprocessor options fully compliant with the Universal Motherboard specification to address virtually any type of cloud computing workload.
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Big Data
IBM speech recognition becoming as accurate us humans words that are unrecognizable by the software in any given conversation. IBM achieved a major milestone in this area last year: a computer system that reached a word error rate of 6.9%. But it was by using the SWITCHBOARD linguistic corpus, that IBM was able to achieve their newest record. This brings them closer than ever before to what they consider to be the human error rate, 5.1%. “To reach this 5.5 percent breakthrough, IBM researchers focused on extending our application of deep learning technologies. On average, according to IBM, humans We combined LSTM (Long Short Term tend to misunderstand or mishear up to 5 Memory) and WaveNet language models to 10% of all words they hear from other with three strong acoustic models. Within human beings in a typical conversation. the acoustic models used, the first two Although that might seem like a lot, our were six-layer bidirectional LSTMs. One of minds can compensate for this quite well these has multiple feature inputs, while the and so we don’t tend to even notice that other is trained with speaker-adversarial much. But just like humans, computers multi-task learning. The unique thing about also have similar issues with mishearing the last model is that it not only learns from words. This makes a computer’s job much positive examples but also takes advantage more complex; having to piece together of negative examples - so it gets smarter sentences without our well adjusted brains. as it goes and performs better where similar speech patterns are repeated.” said IBM has just released a blog post outlining the blog post by George Saon, Principal their latest achievement in their quest for Research Scientist at IBM. perfect conversational speech recognition. They have created a machine that has “The ability to recognize speech as well as “reached a new industry record of 5.5 humans do is a continuing challenge, since percent,” when it comes to percent of human speech, especially during
App Developer Magazine April 2017
spontaneous conversation, is extremely complex. It’s also difficult to define human performance, since humans also vary in their ability to understand the speech of others. When we compare automatic recognition to human performance it’s extremely important to take both these things into account: the performance of the recognizer and the way human performance on the same speech is estimated,” said Julia Hirschberg, a professor and Chair at the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. They worked to reproduce human-level results with there partner Appen, and determined human performance is still a bit better than a machine’s, at 5.1%. Along with others in the industry, they’ve been chasing this milestone for a while and some have recently even claimed to have reached it - claiming it to be 5.9%. However, while our breakthrough of 5.5% is a big one, this shows us that there is much more ground to cover before anyone can truly say the technology is on par with humans. Finding a standard measurement for human parity across the industry is more complex than it seems, and we must remain accountable to the highest standards of accuracy when measuring for it.
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App Developer Magazine April 2017
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Radicle new flexible screen devices coming in a rush Smartphones which unfold to become tablets, adjustable curved TVs and pop-up presentation screens are just some of a radical new wave of product concepts made possible by advances in flexible display technology, highlighted in the latest research report from Futuresource Consulting. Currently, the industry is in a phase of ‘limited flexibility’, commonly referred to as ‘conformed displays’. Displays may be shaped and are normally supported features, but with limited, if any, manipulation available to the end-user. However, ‘fully flexible’ devices will be viable within the next 1-2 years, allowing repeatedly foldable or rollable screens. New materials and design processes will drive innovation and, in some cases, completely new usage models. The CE market is likely to lead the way with over a quarter of all new smartphones by 2026 featuring flexible screens, which among other attributes, will render them unbreakable. As manufacturing costs reduce, the potential for bespoke signage and pull-down whiteboards are some of several commercial B2B applications to be realized.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
“The value of products involving flexible displays will surge to over $200 billion within five years and approach $300 billion within a decade. This strong growth is anticipated due to range of product benefits it creates from increased robustness, design differentiation and ease of display manufacturing customization through to new applications such as e-paper, e-fashion and home appliances,” comments David Tett, Market Analyst at Futuresource Consulting. “‘Unbreakable’ products will become a reality, reducing the need for manufacturers to handle returns and service, while bespoke signage will be easier to produce and could offer users the added benefits of adjustability and reuse." “Technology is advancing from first generation displays which have been flexed during the manufacturing process to be curved but are not able to have their shape manipulated by the end-user, toward a second-generation product,” adds Tett. Current examples of products within this category include curved TVs and Samsung’s ‘Edge’ mobile devices. These are often referred to as ‘conformed’ displays. “Futuresource define second generation displays as ‘truly flexible’. These displays
can be folded, rolled, bent or otherwise have their shape manipulated and altered by the end-user. “It remains to be seen which designs enabled by flexible displays will appeal to the market, but attributes like increased robustness and ease of customized manufacturing will drive vendor adoption regardless,” says Tett. Futuresource’s ‘The Opportunity for Flexible Displays in the CE & B2B Markets’ market report outlines the use case scenarios that flexible displays can bring to various products, together with the opportunities and inhibitors that exist in both consumer and B2B categories. The report identifies the key growth areas of flexible displays, e-paper, flexible sensors, flexible batteries and stretchable electronics. It quantifies the worldwide market opportunity in terms of volume and value through to 2022 and provides evidence for the cannibalization of devices that traditionally feature larger screens, such as tablets, by smaller devices with foldout or rollable screens. Technologies including OLED, LCD and others are assessed for their competitive position, cost benefits and likely further development in the flexible display market.
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What's really behind your database bottleneck BY BARON SCHWARTZ Databases are critical to business success in e-commerce websites and mobile apps. Database bottlenecks, outages, and performance problems can put your digital business at risk. When we talk about database performance we tend to think of indexes, SQL design, lock contention, and the like. But a lot of the most serious bottlenecks - the ones that make you miss release deadlines, crash the site, and lose your best team members after repeated all-nighters - are actually cultural, not technical. They’re driven by the siloed responsibilities often created around the database. And they have far-reaching effects that are more costly than outages alone. This is because your database's ultimate performance, and its impact on your engineering productivity overall, goes hand-in-hand with the way you structure your engineering team. One way to think about this is that teams are systems too. Not in the de-humanizing, “automate everything” kind of way, but in the way you think about how dependencies and variability in your processes can limit team performance.
It’s Not Just About Downtime Any time you have a system performance discussion, the cost of downtime inevitably comes up - mostly by vendors making claims about lost revenue that may or may not be supportable. The issue is not whether reducing downtime per year by five minutes is essential to the business. It’s more about expanding the conversation beyond avoiding a bad outcome, to achieving good outcomes. It’s about the upside of a better performing engineering team. After all, fixing the bad outcome is limited to the size of the potential downside - how much better than five-nines can you get? The real value you can create is focusing on things like making developers more productive, increasing time-todelivery of major IT initiatives, or reducing cycle time for continuous delivery shipmeasure-iterate cycles.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
By understanding the flow of work and communications in your organizations and teams, you can have this kind of impact. It’s not about tools, it’s about people and how they work together toward a common goal. It’s not about just making the DBA more productive, it’s about making 80 developers more productive because the DBA isn’t in the critical path for all of them. What gets in the way are organizational cultures that create silos and more specialization within teams, which stifles knowledge sharing, and ultimately leads to more bottlenecks.
Siloed Cultures and Specialization A team can be more productive when it creates and cultivates specialization, as tasks are grouped and handled by those best equipped to execute them flawlessly. DBAs are a great example, as they have specific knowledge and experience that others on the team don’t have: designing, building, and maintaining scalable database servers. However, the problem is that by encouraging specialization, you have now created a dependency on that specialist that, as you scale, can create bottlenecks and drive down productivity.
ratio of developers to DBAs increases, the problem becomes worse, as developer requests queue up and DBA backlog grows. At this point, DBAs have become one of the critical bottlenecks in the process. But you can avoid this scenario with better knowledge sharing and understanding other constraints.
Tight Feedback Loops Shatter Silos Knowledge sharing needs to move beyond simply sharing best practices or after-action reviews, to include access to the same systems, tools, and data across the team. It needs to involve real-time collaboration using detailed data available to everyone, such that there is a clear understanding of the nature and scope of an issue. And when a team shares information and successfully collaborates, a database issue can reach a quick, painless resolution.
Because DBAs occupy multiple positions of hand-off, interaction, and information sharing between different teams, they present a nice test case for how improved knowledge sharing can make a difference. Their duties and knowledge are specialized, DBAs - as most organizations' single go-to which makes it tempting to centralize the specialist - often become increasingly burden on them instead of sharing or reactive. Developers constantly interrupt offloading it with developers. Using the them with requests for help with, say, earlier example of query optimization, by optimizing a query. If the DBA helps, a allowing developers access to production potentially bad query doesn’t get shipped; databases equipped with performance but if the DBA is busy fixing an already-bad monitoring, they can test and fix their own query in production, the developer might go queries, and remove the dependency on ahead and deploy, potentially introducing the the DBA. next production problem and guaranteeing the DBA will be more reactive tomorrow This doesn’t absolve the DBA of the than today. responsibility for database server performance, but simply creates joint As a result, DBAs spend more time accountability between the developer and resolving today’s problems than planning for the DBA. It’s no longer just a database issue, (and avoiding) issues in the future. Not only it’s a system performance issue, for which the team is collectively responsible. The key does this impact productivity across the is making sure all parties are clear on the development team, it introduces risk of process to follow, and that they have system failure in the future as the DBAs’ access to the tools and data they need more forward-looking tasks (e.g. planning storage, monitoring performance, creating disaster recovery plans, etc.) are usurped by the tyrannical immediate issue. As the
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when they need it. By doing this across your engineering team, you shrink feedback loop time and accelerate your delivery cycles.
Identify Your Constraints Eliyahu Goldratt’s seminal work on the Theory of Constraints, provides a good framework for thinking about engineering
App Developer Magazine April 2017
team performance. His novel, The Goal, about business process optimization, is centered around a factory that’s always losing money and missing deadlines and is analogous to how the development process works. His discussion of dependencies or dependent events and statistical variations (in start times, stop times, durations) offers a helpful way to think about and identify constraints within your process that are causing bottlenecks. A siloed culture, specialization, and lack of knowledge
sharing are just a few examples. Other common constraints include the lack of democratized access to production performance data, and the way you’re reacting to outages and other system problems. All of which reduce the effectiveness of every single person on your team and hampers overall business performance. Spotting and breaking down silos in your team or organization is a great starting point to eliminate your bottlenecks.
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Intent-based mobile app security: It's harder than you think BY JOHN MORELLO Recently, intent-based security has become a buzzword and a commonly used phrase in the developer community. However, this new wave of security is much more than just a catchphrase. The concept of intent-based security adds a new level of protection to applications in containerized environments, specifically by understanding what the app is intended to do and looking for any anomalies outside of what is designed to occur. Companies who are adopting this trend find that the information coming from the developer is the key to creating a more predictable and secure environment. Today, there is more information than ever before flowing from the developer but that wasn’t always the case. Historically, when developers were ready to deploy their app, they’d have to work with a security team member to manually describe how the app worked (i.e. what processes it runs, what ports it uses, etc. The security team would then go into multiple tools to create rules for allowing these app behaviors. Now, when developers work on a container-based application, the artifacts they create have much of this information built in automatically. Even more can be learned through observing how the app behaves once deployed. The increase of technical information provides the automation needed to create the perfect environment for intent-based security to take place.
monitoring in many orgs still requires human diagnostics and heavy insight from IT teams. If IT teams are unable to automate the monitoring apps sufficiently, then they can’t determine what the ‘normal’ baseline is, thus determining if there is a sign of a security problem. To combat this problem, automation and monitoring should be a top priority for any CIO and CTO - and building their teams with employees who have the same ideals and standards. High rate of change: Many companies decide to integrate DevOps into their
organization to shorten development cycles and increase efficiency. Build cycles used to But even with an abundance of useful take up to six months, but now take only information, realizing the vision of hours when the development and intent-based security isn’t easy. operations teams work cohesively. This continuous integration means that the code and applications are constantly changing Here’s why: and being updated. Apps are no longer deployed and expected to run unaltered for Lack of automation: IT departments in all months or years - they may be updated multiple times a day. Constant change is industries should be more automated usually seen as a benefit for DevOps, yet when it comes to app monitoring, but it’s when it comes to intent-based security, it not as easy as it sounds. Despite popular can be tricky to correlate intent to each app belief, iteration due to
App Developer Magazine April 2017
frequent updates. It’s crucial that dev and security teams have tooling that monitors the application throughout its lifecycle to ensure it’s doing exactly what it’s intended to do. Broad dimensions to look across: Analyzing and monitoring an application’s process activity is important to understanding intent, but developers shouldn’t just stop there. In order to build a strong line of defense, developers should also be able to describe how the app works across multiple dimensions including
system calls, networking and storage. Deciphering the intent in all of these categories is important, but having more areas to monitor makes it harder for dev teams to be successful. Intent-based security can be a great thing for companies who want to add a new level of protection to applications in containerized environments. Of course, with every technology there can be roadblocks. But being aware and having a clear understanding of them will make each security, IT or dev team that much more successful.
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Creating customizable apps without a single line of code BY MIKE GUNDLING When TerraGo came into being, field data collection typically meant printing paper maps and forms. After binding them for crews to take into the field, they would be used to perform and record asset inspections, preventive maintenance, site surveys, engineering reports and all types of field work in nearly every industry. Notes were taken with pen and pencil in massive 3-ring binders. At the end of the day, completed notebooks went back to the office where the data was keyed manually into a computer - a time-wasting, tedious, error-prone and expensive regimen. Office personnel complained about illegible “chicken scratch,” nonsensical or missing information from field crews, who were consistently forced to return to the site, no matter how remote or expensive, to correct errors or fill missing gaps in the data. While paper tools and manual back-office data entry posed logistical nightmares, the transition from paper to digital was slowed by the complexity of software development itself. Building field applications tailored to a company’s processes, procedures, workflow and data was a daunting task for many. Updating them over time was even more challenging. Meanwhile, COTS software was far too rigid to adapt to a company’s field operations. Ironically, the emergence of mobile apps hasn’t made that any easier for industrial firms that were already behind the technology curve. Mobile app development seems even more unattainable for these organizations. And cookie-cutter apps for the masses can’t be customized to meet their unique and ever-evolving requirements. For the past few years, TerraGo has been meeting that challenge “head on” with Edge, a mobile platform that enables end users to customize what their field workers see in the app. Office workers create custom maps, forms and workflows from a web portal; then share it all with mobile crews on iOS and Android devices. With TerraGo Edge, massive paper
App Developer Magazine April 2017
notebooks are replaced by digital ones. Field users download notebooks that contain the day’s work onto their smartphones or tablets. From the notebooks, they complete the tasks assigned to them, fill out custom forms and record location-based data of all kinds including geo-indexed photos and video – and then synchronize it with the same offices that used to be inundated with paper.
issues because it doesn’t require professional developers and it doesn’t consume any IT resources. First, apps can be built in minutes, rather than months, by end users with no coding skills. Once the app is published, Magic offers a one hundred percent hands-off managed platform-as-a-service that encompasses server operations, application maintenance, new feature development, bug fixes, app updates, distribution and well, everything.
The office gets the right data with the highest quality in real-time, along with a birds-eye view of all field crew locations and activity. Mobile workers can exchange data and collaborate with one another across job sites. Best of all, the app is custom-built for their requirements and easily modified as their needs change, which of course they always do.
The apps are customized both to the company that develops them and to the jobs of their field users, with a click - not code - selection of features from menus, then published to iTunes and Google Play app stores.
Zero-code, the concept on which Magic is built, seems to be the logical extension of low-code predecessors such as Business Customization without code was the driving Performance Management (BPM) and principle behind the TerraGo Edge product Rapid Application Development (RAD). But design from the very beginning, but so was the truth is it’s an entirely different the “holy grail” of zero-code app approach. development, thus last year’s release of TerraGo Magic, a zero-code system for With low-code tools, you can build literally generating apps that can be fullyanything. But the ultimate goal of code-free customized without a single line of code. development isn’t achievable when you address an unlimited feature scope. Numbers define problems that products like TerraGo Magic can’t be used to build Magic are solving. Field workers, already any app imaginable. Because Magic uses used to working with menus of already coded workflows location-based apps in their personal lives, accessed with a click, it cannot do demand apps that help them do their jobs everything that a low-code app can do -yet. more efficiently. That growing demand is But TerraGo has never claimed to be all turning organizations’ IT departments into things to all people. bottlenecks that are fomenting worker unrest. What it does claim is that the wheel does not have to be invented every time an app is needed. With hundreds of field-tested and operationally-proven features available, Consider: the argument can be made you should buy not build an app that’s already available for you to customize. With new features added - In January, mobile app developer was at every 4-6 weeks, the capabilities are far the top of CNN’s list of best jobs for 2017. from limited. With a component-based Scarce skills have generated top-dollar framework that supports custom feature salaries. development, it offers the best of both worlds. - Gartner reported that the demand for mobile apps is five times greater than It’s said that IT departments often get current IT capacity to deliver them. “religion” when user organizations want to develop apps, citing concerns that mean TerraGo Magic offers an answer to both
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anything not built by IT is a threat. This is the culture shift and thought process that needs to change. Otherwise IT backlog and bottlenecks are here to stay. IT can use zero-code apps to complement
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their low-code tools and integrate with their traditional platforms, while maintaining control over the enterprise architecture. Organizations on the sideline, watching wealthier competitors using expensive low-code tools gain an advantage, now get
into the game with zero code. Time and money saved is reflected in ROI contributions to the bottom line, the return for thinking differently about app development.
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The work-for-equity model as expounded by Loom Critics of companies offering the “workfor-equity” model accuse them of being exploitative; in their minds, “workfor-equity” = work for free. Supporters of the model point to its opportunities for developers to gain a more significant business stake in something they believe in. No matter where you stand, there’s something everyone can agree on: the issue is polarizing. But the work-for-equity model isn’t for everyone, so that's why we sat down with Chase White, CEO of Loom, the first work-for-equity platform that connects entrepreneurs with freelancers, to examine why the work-for-equity model works, any notable challenges with the model and his take on the future.
ADM: What are the benefits of a work-forequity model? White: Although relatively new, it's becoming more common. Working for equity can be a very unique and beneficial compensation method if structured the right way. That said, I don't recommend it for all people on all projects. If you’re not in a financial position that lends you the flexibility to work for equity, then you should limit your freelance work to cash compensation. However, if you are able, then freelancing for equity (or a combination of cash and equity) can provide unique project opportunities in areas that you’re particularly passionate about, high-potential to become a full-time part of the team, and of course the possibility of a larger payday. Ultimately, in the same vein of working for cash and equity at a more traditional full-time job, working for equity compensation drives passion and ensures motivation to have a high standard of quality in your work.
ADM: What do critics of App Developer Magazine April 2017
the work-for-equity model argue - do they make any valid points? White: The most common misconception is that this hiring for equity is a way to get freelancers to work for free - which couldn’t be further from the truth. At Loom, we are staunch advocates for fair compensation in the forms of both cash and equity. As we have created a two-sided marketplace for freelancers and entrepreneurs, we tend to fall on the side of protecting and advocating for freelancers to ensure timely, proper compensation. To that effect, we’re big fans of the work that's recently been done in New York City with the Freelancing Isn’t Free Act, designed to protect freelance workers against nonpayment. The Freelance Isn't Free Act mandates contracts for gigs paying over $800, and increases penalties for clients found guilty of late or nonpayment. We need more support for freelancers like this, and our goal at Loom is to be a part of the solution.
ADM: What is the average pay for developers seeking freelance work? How does this change with a work-for-equity model?
exchange for 3% of the company.” That said, there are other ways to structure equity compensation with freelancers that create a more variable structure. An example of that might be, “For 200 hours of work, I will pay you half of your hourly rate in equity proportionate to our current valuation, and the other half in cash.” You can get creative with equity compensation, as long as both parties are comfortable with it, which can lead to a win-win scenario.
ADM: What are the biggest pain points expressed by freelance developers you meet with? White: We hear a lot about the unique complexities of freelancers and we’re working hard to support them - especially developers. Really, most of these pain points fall into one of two categories: tools and protection. Freelancers need solid, industry-standard tools at their disposal like work discovery tools, contracts, invoicing templates, and even their own HR tools to provide themselves with affordable care that they would similarly receive working at a larger company.
Freelancers also need to be protected against people who may want to take advantage of them. The reality is, those bad apples - although rare - do exist. The best protection freelancers can provide against them is clear communication, White: Average pay for freelancing legally binding tools, solid platforms, as developers depends on a number of well as a healthy amount of skepticism. factors, including but not limited to the Developers need to make sure their hard amount of work, the nature of the work, work is protected, and to never fully give experience level, demand for the skill, that work over in its entirety until the timing, and more. With a work-for-equity agreed-upon payment is fulfilled. When structure, your hourly rate becomes less of you get too casual about those things, a factor, and your judgement becomes a that’s when it can create unfortunate bigger factor. What are you willing to do situations. However, when you stay on your that work for? Typically, equity compensation is associated with fixed-price toes, chances are, you’ll be treated fairly while dodging the bad apples. projects. For example, “I need this mobile app built to these specs by this date in
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financial and legal counterparts; they often work remotely, they spend more time with their families and they also have a hand in building the future of technology. I think together, that's a very rewarding lifestyle.
ADM: What are the current challenges with the work-for-equity model?
Chase White, CEO of Loom
ADM: What do developers say when asked about the work-for-equity model? What are the biggest concerns they share? What are they most excited about? White: I think the biggest concern with the work-for-equity model on early-stage startups is that the likelihood of that equity turning out to be worth something significant isn’t guaranteed, which is understandable. With the amount of exciting technology being created every day, all over the world, many developers are truly excited about the financial potential that comes with working for equity. On the other side, I think there are a good amount of developers that are becoming frustrated when they are creating immense amounts of wealth for other people, without getting a proportionate piece of the pie for their work. I personally know many developers (especially in our home city of Austin that are earning comparable incomes to financial managers and lawyers. And a big part of that for them has been a result of exercising stock options that are earned from both full-time and part-time projects. It’s worth noting that, for the most part, these are young people with a much healthier work-life balance than their
App Developer Magazine April 2017
White: I think the biggest challenges today with the work-for-equity model are in creating standards of compensation. No one really knows what is an appropriate amount of equity to give away for building an app or a mobile-responsive website. It all varies so greatly, and every startup is so different, that it creates variability even beyond what you would charge in cash for your work. The best advice I can give for a starting point here is to use the freelancer’s standard rate, along with your startup's valuation to work backwards in finding an appropriate level of equity as compensation ((200 hours of work x $100 hourly rate)(/ $1mm valuation) = 2% equity). I also recommend padding the equity offer with a bit more than you normally would to account for the risk that this developer is taking in working for equity, especially if they are working only for equity compensation. In short, be generous with developers who are willing to take a risk on working on your project for equity. Chances are, they deserve it.
ADM: How do you expect the work-for-equity model to evolve in the future? What needs to happen in the industry to get us there? White: With this trend, we’re seeing the creators - the early-stage builders of the world - becoming the new early-stage investors. No longer do you need to have wealthy people back your idea. What you can now do, instead of trading equity for
money then paying that equity to developers, is pay that equity directly to developers who are willing, able and passionate about your cause to bring your idea to life. The reality is, most of these contracts are a combination of cash and equity, and the beauty there is that we’re seeing young, ambitious developers create portfolios of equity holdings for themselves, while also paying their bills as they go. As we see these start to pay off more and more, developers are becoming bigger influencers in the economy, and they need to be treated as such. These are essentially the new early-stage investors, and they will have a big part in shaping the technology industry as a whole to create standards, support independent workers and bring back more flexibility into the workplace. It’s a pretty cool time to be a part of this developer movement that seems to only be gaining even more momentum.
ADM: What’s the number one lesson you’d give to developers seeking to go freelance? White: Cover your personal bases with things like health insurance and proper financial management tools, and cover your profession with freelance toolkits to streamline your business. One I highly recommend is AND CO. The AND CO team is doing great work to equip freelancers with top-notch tools for their arsenal. Another thing I recommend is to do a lot of research on your specific niche of the industry and seek to always become a better businessperson. You are going to be your own HR department, sales department, marketing, etc., so the more you can do to learn about making your personal business run smoothly to ensure you have a solid pipeline of new work coming in, and successful projects going out, the better off you’ll be. And have confidence in yourself - you no longer have to share a cut of your earnings with anyone else, and that’s something to be proud of.
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Cloud native apps: Perspectives from Navisite There is much to be considered in the complex IT ecosystems that support modern enterprises. Just like a clock, each little cog and gear plays a critical role in making sure everything is on time and in working order. Unlike a clock, however, IT environments are far less predictable and must be built with more flexible, scalable parts and pieces to function at an optimal level. The relationship between an IT infrastructure and application is particularly important as they must “communicate” with one another in order to scale and react to changing demand.
Vertical and Horizontal Scaling Autoscaling is a cloud computing service feature that automatically adds or removes compute resources depending upon actual usage and continues to be considered as a viable approach to deal with these challenges. Microsoft recently outlined the two typical forms of vertical and horizontal scaling currently in use for application aware infrastructures, including: 1. “Vertical Scaling (often referred to as scaling up) requires that you redeploy the solution using different hardware. In a cloud environment the hardware platform is typically a virtualized environment, and vertical scaling involves provisioning more powerful resources for this environment and moving the system onto these new resources. Vertical scaling is often a disruptive process that requires making the system temporarily unavailable while it is being redeployed. It may be possible to keep the original system running while the new hardware is provisioned and brought online, but there will likely be some interruption while the processing transitions from the old environment to the new one.” 2. “Horizontal Scaling (often referred to as scaling out) requires deploying the system on additional resources. The
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system can continue running without interruption while these resources are provisioned. When the provisioning process is complete, copies of the elements that comprise the system can be deployed on these additional resources and made available. If demand drops, the additional resources can be reclaimed after the elements using them have been shut down cleanly.”
Application Aware Infrastructure
Infrastructure Aware Applications While the application aware infrastructure model may have less of an impact on the app (aka the app continues to run, while the infrastructure does all the magic behind the scenes), I believe there are limitations to the autoscaling capabilities of infrastructure -particularly when servicing a variety of applications or the nuances of a new application.
As an alternative, I propose infrastructure aware applications. In this model, developers build an application in a way that the app is actually aware of the Regardless of whether you choose vertical or horizontal scaling, the truth today is that infrastructure that it’s running on and the world we live in is highly virtualized. And recognizes that the infrastructure is with many new applications being designed virtualized and has accessible APIs. The application can look at things that aren’t as cloud native, there is an opportunity to necessarily infrastructure-centric and can build these apps so they have an focus on metrics about the application awareness of how they will need to be itself. From there, the app can take action scaled or adapted from the onset. The most on the infrastructure based on its analysis innovative developers need to think about of the environment. This moves the burden building and architecting apps that can be of autoscaling from the infrastructure used in both the horizontal and vertical owner to the developers who need to scenarios to cater to this “application aware infrastructure.” Meaning, understand the notion that this application the infrastructure should be made aware of will run in this cloud-enabled infrastructure. the context of the application and the “rules” it should watch through the tooling we refer to as autoscaling. Gaining Control This “grow forward” model is effective, but there is still a tremendous footprint of legacy applications in use and there is a shortage of development talent that can build in this new world. When I say “legacy,” I don’t just mean older applications that are still in use, but also new apps being designed in a more traditional way. Simply put, autoscaling does not always fit the application, so it may not be able to scale in the ways that the application aware infrastructure enables.
The application infrastructure aware model is still a very viable option - especially as it can provide a quick path to autoscaling -but there are several key limitations with this model. With an infrastructure aware approach, you can purpose-build an application and gain greater control. While this application-centric approach is still fairly new, savvy developers are able to recognize the significant benefits in the long run. As with any new approach, it will take time to see this shift take place. Just like a clock – it will all happen in good time!
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App Camp For Girls looks to train the next generation App Camp For Girls, a non-profit organization aimed at correcting the gender imbalance in the software industry, has opened 2017 registration for its popular summer program that teaches girls how to make mobile apps in one week. The program launches its first Chicago camp in 2017, in addition to Portland, Seattle, and Phoenix. This year, the aspiring developers will use Apple's new educational tool, Swift Playgrounds, a new app for iPad that teaches Swift code in a fun and interactive way. Portland, Oregon - App Camp For Girls, a non-profit organization aimed at correcting the gender imbalance in the software industry, has opened registration for 2017, the fifth year of its popular summer program that teaches girls how to make mobile apps in one week. At App Camp for Girls, aspiring software developers receive a broad introduction to the process of iOS app development, from brainstorming and designing ideas to building and pitching their apps. The participants use Mac(R) computers and Apple's suite of developer tools to build their apps and run them on iPod touch(R) devices. This year, the girls will also work with Apple's new educational tool, Swift Playgrounds, a new app for iPad(R) that teaches Swift code in a fun and interactive way. By building an app in one week, girls get a
sense of accomplishment that can spark their enthusiasm to pursue further tech education. Past participants have enthusiastically recommended the transformative experience of App Camp for Girls: - "A camp where it's only girls so you can be yourself. No experience needed." - "It is a place where girls become the future." - "It opened up a world that I loved learning about." - "It was so fun and helped girls be confident that they can do anything they believe in."
Camp session dates are as follows: - Portland, OR: July 10-14, 2017 - Phoenix, AZ: July 17-21, 2017 - Seattle, WA: July 17-21, 2017 - Chicago, IL: July 24-28, 2017 Camp tuition is $400 (USD) for the week. In addition to launching a new location in Chicago, the program will again take place in Portland, Seattle, and Phoenix. Parents can register for 2017 sessions on the App Camp For Girls website. All sessions will be held in July 2017. Space is very limited; early registration is highly recommended.
About App Camp For Girls: App Camp For Girls seeks to address the gender imbalance in technology professions by inspiring middle-school age girls with a broad introduction to the process of app development, from brainstorming and designing ideas to building and pitching their apps. They believe that the experience of creating an app that runs on a device in one week can spark the enthusiasm that will propel girls to pursue further tech education. In addition, App Camp For Girls is a place for women in the tech community to come together, network, and provide mutual support in their endeavors to advance in the field of software development. They encourage and support their volunteers to continue their own education in programming and design.
Making IT professionals play nice with low-code developers With the Department of Labor predicting a shortage of professional developers by 2020, more citizen developers are taking matters into their own hands, building sophisticated enterprise apps with capabilities ranging from task management to automating workflows.
Beckley: IT first has to deliver a low-code platform that citizen developers want to use. IT eliminated rogue Wi-Fi access points by delivering good Wi-Fi. The same is true with citizen developers - give them what they want and then IT gets to set the standards, control access, and rationalize DevOps by platform rather than one-by-one across hundreds and thousands of apps.
enterprise low-code platform to mitigate risks.
In today’s world, every company needs to become a software company and achieve digital transformation so they can create new digital customer experiences and ensure a consistently good customer experience. In addition, they also need to A recent survey from Appian fielded over show agility. Citizen developers have risen 500 Information Technology Decision because IT simply can’t respond fast Makers to understand challenges enough to demand while IT budgets shrink associated with citizen development and Our survey findings backed this notion the need for a seamless and sustainable through very powerful stats. It revealed that and expertise gets outsourced. solution. The survey findings revealed that more than 71% wished their company had while the growing citizen developer an effective technology platform to manage movement is a concern for IT decision citizen developers, with more than three ADM: What’s behind the makers, many are looking towards out of four IT leaders seeing technology platforms to manage application enterprise-grade low-code platforms as the growth of the citizen development and maintain governance. solution.
developer movement?
We spoke with Appian CTO and low-code expert, Mike Beckley, to understand these pain points and how to bridge the gap between developers and IT.
ADM: What are the top concerns among IT leaders about citizen developers today? Beckley: CIOs are worried about application sprawl. Apps built without a unifying platform to govern them confront IT with new security risks, higher maintenance costs, and inconsistent data. Will IT be responsible for rewriting and testing all these apps for every new release of iOS and Android? CIOs are also skeptical that citizen developers are relevant to enterprise digital transformation.
ADM: How can IT manage the risks associated with citizen developers?
App Developer Magazine April 2017
ADM: What's your definition of a “low-code” platform? Beckley: A low-code platform provides a visual design environment that allows developers and users to collaborate to build sophisticated, mission-critical applications in minutes. Low-code platforms are built for agile, business and IT to iterate together on a live view of an app instead of burying business rules in requirements docs nobody understands that IT must translate into compiled code in lengthy dev cycles.
ADM: Why do survey respondents believe that having a “low-code” platform is critical for the enterprise?
Beckley: Simply stated, IT and traditional developers can no longer keep up with the demand. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor is predicting a shortage of professional developers by 2020, creating a growing need to citizen developers who can build sophisticated enterprise apps.
ADM: How are companies using “low-code” platforms for the enterprise? Beckley: Companies are using low-code platforms to implement agile methodologies and marry up their software development practices with constantly changing business requirements. It is critical in engaging business users early and often to empower their ability to help create new business lines and orchestrate new digital customer experiences. In my experience, companies see low-code platforms as a critical capability to ensure they can deliver consistent results.
Beckley: According to our recent survey, more than three in four (76%) IT leaders believe citizen developers should utilize an
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Beckley: With a low-code enterprise platform, IT can also take citizendeveloped apps built on the platform and easily add more power and sophistication, working closely with linesof-business throughout the enterprise. Low-code platforms enable developers to focus on creating code only where it’s differentiated and fun instead of boring and routine.
ADM: What role does a “low-code� platform play in a larger digital business transformation plan?
App Developer Magazine April 2017
As a result, low-code enterprise platforms become the strategic enabler for digital transformation. They get business and IT on the same page, allowing companies to move from idea to product quickly.
Beckley: It reveals a call to action that citizen developers are here and you need a low-code enterprise platform to govern their work and make them more efficient and effective. Low-code enterprise platforms ensure that humans will continue to have an important role to play in an increasingly algorithmic and data-driven world. Low-code platforms provide a foundation for technologies like machine learning and AI to be creatively directed by humans instead of burying their power into code to control us.
ADM: What do these survey findings reveal about the future of work?
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Explaining what AIOps is and why it matters to developers We recently spoke with Phil Tee, CEO of Moogsoft to learn more Algorithmic Intelligence, (the “AI” in AIOps). What is AIOps you say? It's a new category defined by Gartner research that is an evolution of what the industry previously referred to as ITOA (IT Operations and Analytics). It seems we have reached a point where data science and algorithms are being successfully applied to automate traditionally manual tasks and processes in IT Operations. Now, algorithmics are incorporated into tools that allow organizations to streamline operations even further by liberating humans from time-consuming and error prone processes, such as defining and managing an endless sprawl of rules and filters in legacy IT Management systems. The technologies introduced to the market over the past several years, utilizing data science and machine learning in response to the increasing complexities of enterprises undergoing digital transformations, have led to the birth of the term ‘AIOps’ (Algorithmic IT Operations).
ADM: What problems for IT does AIOps solve? Tee: With the technological advancements of AIOps, what typically takes humans hours to accomplish can now be done in just seconds in an automated manner and with much better results. Traditional IT Ops teams manage high alert volumes, leading to major distractions and time spent doing mundane work instead of innovating. These problems are solved when IT teams start using AIOps to supplement operators as they sort through seas of alerts and noise. The benefits of AIOps adoption are being recognized by leading Fortune 500 enterprises, who are rapidly on-boarding these technologies to improve their customers’ digital experience across industries - including banking, entertainment, transportation, retail and even government.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
ADM: Give us a real world example of AIOps in use?
allows them to spend more time focused on proactive, meaningful work rather than fixing the same problems repeatedly or spending time managing rules and filters.
Tee: HCL Technologies, for example, is one of the premiere global providers of managed services, and is known for transformational outsourcing, focusing on innovation and adding value to large enterprises. To assure the best service for their clients, HCL uses Moogsoft’s AIOps technology to help their clients maintain proactive, real-time insight across their entire infrastructure; and collaborative, team-based workflows to quickly and efficiently remediate issues as they arise. Since HCL started recommending AIOps to their customers, they have told us that by ingesting data from over 30 different IT tools, Moogsoft AIOps effectively correlates and contextualizes large volumes of information. It also helps HCL achieve a 62 percent reduction in trouble ticket ADM: How can AIOps generation and a 33 percent reduction in MTTR (Mean Time to Remediate). This help developers? massively impacts efficiency and cost savings, never mind the amount of groundbreaking, innovative projects these teams can achieve now that they have been Tee: With the widespread adoption of DevOps in the enterprise, we’ve seen a freed up from the misery of traditional IT decentralization of the Operations function operations. and a distribution of the responsibility to development teams. DevOps is all about automation and being agile so that the ADM: How does it make business can move faster. Over the years, companies have spent billions automating things better in an IT server provisioning, release management environment for DevOps and the configuration of monitoring tools. With AIOps we see automation within the administrators? troubleshooting of applications using algorithms and data science. DevOps teams are finding that AIOps technology is Tee: Modern IT environments are incredibly the key to managing the complexity, scale (and increasingly) complex and everand change of the applications they not changing, leading to large amounts of time only develop, but now support. and resources devoted to monitoring, troubleshooting and course correcting. It’s a reactive position for most companies, but when teams use AIOps technology they can leverage change-tolerant algorithms and access indexed information. This
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ADM: Tell us about Moogsoft and what you offer? Tee: Moogsoft was founded by myself, Phil Tee, and my co-founder, Mike Silvey, in 2011 as we were frustrated by a lack of innovation in the space. This technology was born out of research being conducted at the University of Sussex around data science, machine learning, natural language processing and other academic subjects. We saw early on how this science could be applied to IT operations management and to improve service assurance, so we developed a product out of it. Since the beginning, our mission has been to help modern operations - whether that be IT Operations or DevOps teams become smarter, faster and more effective, by providing technological supplementation that automates mundane tasks, enables scalability and frees up humans to do what they do best - ideate, create and innovate.
How to integrate business priorities into the DevOps process BY ANAUD GANPAUL The business case for enterprise mobile applications is in crisis. Enterprises increased their spend on mobile application development to more than 10% of their overall budgets in 2016, yet fewer than 1% of mobile apps are successful, according to research firm, Gartner.
Success requires business and technical stakeholders to work together throughout the app planning, delivery, deployment, and promotion stages. To achieve this alignment, DevOps processes and toolchains need to be extended to include business stakeholders.
To address this disturbing trend,enterprises are re-envisioning their mobile application development and implementing DevOps processes to increase velocity and reduce the cost of mobile app development and publishing.
Increasing App Success with BizDevOps
But this is a mistake. DevOps alone will not address the root causes of why most mobile applications fail to achieve their business objectives.
The Dangerous Assumption of DevOps The disconnect between business impact and DevOps success can be traced back to a single, dangerous assumption that by delivering releases faster and closely monitoring defects and customer feedback, DevOps will implicitly deliver business value. However, while this approach makes it easier and cheaper to “fail fast,” it doesn’t do anything to align app development to customer and business value in upfront planning. The missing link in current practices is an explicit connection between the DevOps pipeline and business initiatives. This gap between development and business and market requirements is all the more critical in the ruthless mobile app market - where failure to meet user needs the first time can doom the application to failure. And it’s not just app success that is impacted -overall brand reputation is also at stake. Users (as many as 37% of app users according to Dimensional Research) quickly form a negative perception of the corporate brand if an app fails to have compelling features, or fails to meet their non-functional expectations like performance, stability, security, privacy, and compliance.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
Successful app launches depend on embedding the customer value, and the business, in a closed-loop cycle of continuous innovation. Agile promises this, but large enterprises have struggled to scale it. DevOps enables continuous delivery of these innovations, but doesn’t explicitly tie the products or features delivered to the business value. BizDevOps brings it all together. BizDevOps is an extension of DevOps that automates the front end of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to incorporate business goals and measures. It is about orchestrating and automating business activities and information into the DevOps lifecycle. This aligns downstream efforts with enterprise objectives and enables organizations to measure whether their DevOps pipeline is effectively addressing the business needs.
Extending the DevOps Toolchain DevOps practices of continuous collaboration, automation, and measurement need to be extended to include the business aspects of solution delivery. These additional stages include:
experience, legacy modernization, compliance and risk mitigation are defined at this stage as well as opportunities to define re-use and dependencies across initiatives. - Definition: Initiatives are broken down to the feature and user story level and explicitly traced back to business objectives. - Approval: Stakeholders review and approve initiatives. Development and test artifacts are automatically generated to initiate downstream processes. Once these stages have been addressed, organizations can break down the silos between the business and IT to achieve continuous alignment. Unified teams can deliver solutions driven by business goals and requirements, regardless of how frequently they change. Customer expectations can be exceeded and drive real business results as quickly as possible. Success can also be measured based on business outcomes, not by vanity metrics of on-time or on-budget delivery.
Successful App Delivery Needs More Automation BizDevOps relies on technology to deliver better software faster. This is an emerging segment of the Agile ALM tool market, but as toolsets mature, the most important capabilities to look for include: - Value stream and process mapping: Organizations need to visualize as-is and to-be processes and how they feed higherlevel value streams. These capabilities should be designed for use by business stakeholders without the need for training.
- Collaboration: IT and business stakeholders must work together to define business initiatives and strategy roadmaps. - Alignment: Teams align on a shared model of what must be delivered. Critical business objectives such as customer
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- Goals and business needs: BizDevOps automation needs to define and manage business needs and measurable, quantitative outcomes. This information should be integrated with value stream and process mapping capabilities to provide a holistic view of what the business needs. - Automatic generation of downstream artifacts: Automatic generation of user stories, acceptance criteria, and tests to feed the DevOps toolchain is necessary to accelerate delivery and improve quality. It enables business stakeholders to define their needs with little technical knowledge, and continuously feeds development and testing tools with the needed information. - Collaboration: In a large enterprise, collaboration is more difficult but essential. Automation and digitization can support individual stakeholders across the organization as they review, provide input, and approve goals and requirements.
be reused - like those for compliance, security, and performance. Defining them once for reuse across projects, teams, and systems accelerates delivery, reduces cost, - Artificial intelligence (AI): An AI engine and improves quality and consistency. analyzes data flowing through the BizDevOps toolchain and identifies patterns to suggest standard building Jumpstart App Success blocks for reuse and automation. This enables accelerated delivery while reducing with BizDevOps costs, and ensuring compliance. Real-time engagement and a record of collaborative discussions help to ensure clarity.
- Traceability and impact analysis: These are table stakes for large enterprises in regulated environments to ensure compliance and support audit. Users should be able to trace the path from a business goal through detailed requirements to development and test results. That traceability should be supported by impact analysis to help teams understand the impact of change. - Reuse: Many types of requirements can
BizDevOps is here. Organizations that have been slow to implement DevOps in their mobile app development can now leapfrog first generation practices by directly implementing BizDevOps. It is the key to unlocking the desperately needed value from the investments enterprises are making in mobile application development. The success of organizational digital transformation efforts and omni-channel customer experiences depends on it.
Anaud Ganpaul is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Blueprint Software. He delivers products that help enterprises deliver better software applications using scalable Agile and DevOps processes. He has been developing, managing and marketing enterprise software for over 20 years.
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The biggest delays in digital transformation initiatives We recently caught up with Robert Reeves, co-founder and CTO of Datical, a provider of database release automation solutions, on the findings of a recent survey - conducted by IDG and commissioned by Datical - that reveal the biggest delays in digital transformation initiatives.
ADM: When on the road to digital transformation, what causes the biggest speed bumps? Reeves: A recent survey of IT managers conducted by IDG Research and commissioned by Datical shows how old ways of updating databases causes speed bumps on the road to digital transformation. The survey results show broad agreement: The process of updating databases is constraining innovation in application development. For example, 91 percent of database administrators (DBAs) report that the process of updating and changing databases delays application release time. Nearly the same number (90 percent) of app development managers report the same. Across the spectrum of respondents, nearly 60 percent of all of those surveyed also agreed that the database release process used by their organizations delays application releases. What’s more, the problem is worsening as the pace of change increases. Three quarters (75 percent) of database administrators, for example, report an uptick in change requests in the last 12 months as well as in the frequency of those requests. The survey also shows that the database release process is the single biggest contributor to application release delays.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
ADM: What are the top challenges in the database release process? Reeves: As the rate of change to applications increases, so does the rate of changes to the databases that the applications rely on. Sixty-seven percent of database administrators stated the length of time needed to complete a change request has increased in the last 12 months. At the same time, the growing hectic pace of database releases seems to have led to an increase in database errors. Almost one third of IT executives note seeing an increase over the last 12 months in error rates in production caused by bad database changes. The challenges posed by the rising volume and frequency of changes are growing. And all of these challenges increase the potential of delayed application releases. In fact, database releases were cited in the survey as the single biggest factor contributing to release delays. Tellingly, survey respondents who report using little or no automation in database releases are most likely to also report database changes as the major contributor to delayed release dates.
ADM: What does Datical do? Reeves: Datical’s mission is to radically improve and simplify the application release process by modernizing and automating the database release process. Datical solutions deliver the automation capabilities technology executives need to remove database deployments as a barrier to delivering new application innovation. With Datical, enterprises can shorten the time it takes to bring application innovation to market while eliminating the security vulnerabilities, costly errors, data loss and downtime often associated with current database deployment methods. Datical
delivers results for some of the world’s most admired companies including: Sony, GE Transportation, Unum and NBCUniversal.
ADM: Who are Datical's competitors, and how does Datical differentiate? Reeves: Datical has two types of competitors. The first are commercial vendors like Redgate Software, which is really more of a SQL IDE tool offering individual DBA productivity centered around SQL deltas and eventually generating a SQL script. Since Redgate does not have database change simulation or standards enforcement capabilities, customers often have Datical to consume the SQL scripts and automate deployment execution through the SDLC. Datical functionality allows speed and safety so that you can have true hands-off continuous deployment without wrecking your database. Our biggest competitor by far is the status quo. Data teams have decades-old processes for deploying database changes. There are still plenty of data teams that are not aware of the automation capabilities Datical provides. Thus, helping DBAs understand that you can have both speed and safety is our focus. At the end of the day, DBAs want their company to be successful and are learning that accelerating the pace of database deployments through automation is where they need to focus their efforts.
ADM: How does Datical solve these issues?
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Reeves: Datical finally brings the efficiency, speed and risk mitigation capabilities often associated with application build and release automation -to the database. Datical database release automation eliminates the typical back-and-forth waiting game experienced by developers and testers as they wait for the database team to review each change script and each change. The entire database change management and deployment process is made even simpler by Datical’s ability to work within an organization’s existing DevOps automation tool suite. Organizations using Datical are able to have database changes travel alongside application code changes with the push of a button. Application updates to the database that used to take days now take only minutes.
percent of app developer managers Unfortunately, these legacy applications reported the same. When do you ever have are brittle and were architected to see DBAs and app dev managers agree on the updates every six months, quarterly at same thing? They appreciate each other, most. This is very similar to the limits we but app dev managers are paid to change had with 32 bit architecture and it’s 4GB things, while DBAs are paid to maintain RAM limit. At the time, we never imagined stability. In other words, on a typical work wanting more than 4GB of RAM! So, day, DBAs and app dev managers duke it companies find themselves reaching a out, but in this instance, they agree. “plateau of frustration” where they are aware of the value of digital transformation but getting legacy applications to adopt DevOps to drive it is very difficult.
Along with Datical’s ability to help organizations respond faster is the ability to keep data safe and secure. With Datical, enterprises do not have to sacrifice safety for speed. This means each and every database change is validated against an organization's business and technical rules before each and every deployment, and errors are found earlier in the change ADM: What's next in terms management process and do not make their way into production. In addition, every of DevOps and Digital change is automatically tracked, creating an audit trail that is easily accessible. Making it Transformation? no longer necessary to assemble armies of skilled DBAs that have to spend days or Reeves: Companies adopting digital weeks troubleshooting or proving a database change was not the root cause of transformation today are seeing huge value for the initial wave of applications they have an issue. built. Typically, these are siloed applications that do not depend on other applications or, ADM: What was most perhaps, they consume a web service or two. They use little existing infrastructure surprising to you about and are born in the cloud. We call this the data received from Digital Transformation 1.0. Once those applications are up and running in Digital this survey? Transformation 1.0, companies then attempt to duplicate that success for legacy applications that are currently generating Reeves: The biggest takeaway from this the vast majority of revenue or cost survey was that 91 percent of database savings. We call this next phase Digital administrators said that database scheme Transformation 2.0. updates slow down releases and 90
App Developer Magazine April 2017
Companies are seemingly left with the choice of abandoning those legacy applications in their datacenter and rewriting them with newer technology. But, there is a way to have both: move the legacy application to the cloud and benefit from new technology to drive Digital Transformation 2.0. Instead of rewriting the application completely, the cloud will allow flexibility to support agile development so companies can build the airplane while it is taxiing down the runway. Thus, applying DevOps to all existing applications, new and old, companies will find digital transformation providing consistent and expanding value. DevOps will enable digital transformation without demanding a complete halt to improvement and innovation.
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Game developers and crunchtime Lets admit it, game development (for most of us) is far more exciting than working out some business logic problem with databases and custom views - right? But it's not all fun and "games". As with every avenue of programming and design, there are deadlines, and things that keep you at the office late. But crunchtime and game development seem to be joined at the hip, especially in these days of continuous release cycles and never being really "finished". So we recently sat down with Patric Palm, CEO of Favro and Hansoft to talk about it all, and what - if anything, you can do to prevent crunchtime.
ADM: Do you think 'crunchtime' is still a problem in the game industry? Why or why not? Palm: It’s still a problem but less than before. Before it was long death marches at small pay. Still some of the most creative smart people around signed up for it willingly because game development is just so much more interesting, challenging and fun than most other jobs. Today many studios are more professionally managed and the pay is also relatively better. You might work crazy hours, but at least your
It's an always-on environment. Do you agree? How do you think ADM: Do have a sense of mobile gaming will impact whether managers are the 'crunchtime'? ones who restrain their employees from doing Palm: I actually think mobile and Gamingas-a-Service reduces crunch time. In this crunch? Do employees environment you simply have to manage want to crunch without continuous delivery to survive and you realizing the cost to their don't have the option to solve problems created by poor production management health and well-being? Or with a 6 month death march. are people being forced to crunch when they’d rather ADM: What can companies do today to not? prevent 'crunchtime' from becoming a problem Palm: It's no single ones fault. Everyone wants to make fantastic games and every within their organization? pay is more on par with other crazy hour industries.
amazing game created has been a heroic journey with plenty pain along the road. Teams want it, managers want it, investors want it. The real winners are the gamers that can sit back and enjoy the results.
ADM: With mobile, it seems like crunchtime could become even more of a problem as updates are happening all the time.
Palm: If you look at the amount of time being wasted and work that needs to be redone because of teams being out of sync you find what to fix. The difference between an organization with teams out of sync, and a studio where development teams are empowered an efficient and aligned with each other is massive.
Patric Palm, CEO of Favro and Hansoft, a project management software company App Developer Magazine April 2017
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Marketing & Promotion
Lucktastic helps Hooked On Phonics with user engagement Hooked on Phonics believes that reading is the gateway to all learning and they focus on nurturing that thirst for knowledge with products that are fun, effective, and easy to use. That’s why they’ve brought together a dedicated team of parents, leading educators, interactive designers, writers, and artists. Through collaboration, research, and testing, they continually develop innovative products and systems that teach children not only to learn, but also to love learning. A few months ago, Austin Field, Director of User Acquisition, started marketing the new Hooked on Phonics Android app. Having heard about Lucktastic’s highly engaged audience and targeting capabilities he turned to the team to help drive user acquisition and installs. Lucktastic is a pure play, free app and entertainment destination that is reimagining discovery winning experiences and rewards. The company was recently ranked by Singular as one of the top 20 publishers to advertise with by return on investment. The app consistently reaches 12MM unique US-consumers each month with fans that play on an average of 3.8 days per week. Lucktastic also helps to drive more than 60MM engagement moments for gaming apps, brands and e-commerce players primarily through native video.
The Need Austin was in search of quality traffic sources that would be willing to test out the free trial and then sign up for a monthly subscription. “For us, trial to conversion is very high and well above the industry average,” said Austin. “If we can get people into the door to test out the app, they will more than likely become paying customers.” Austin turned to Lucktastic to take advantage of the company’s unique data sets and ad units. Video is one of the hero formats on the app and native to the game experience. Players must watch video before they gain access to one of the Lucktastic mini games. Lucktastic also harnesses first party data (e.g., gender, age, psychographics, etc.) to deliver the right video to the right audience, which in this case consisted of “tech savvy moms”. This level of first party data targeting helps to generate high video completion rates in the 80%+ range.
The Results Hooked on Phonics is always looking for savvy moms whose children are just
learning to read, or need some extra help outside of school. Working together with the team from Lucktastic they were able to identify the key target customer and develop video and display creative to really help tell the story. Austin gravitated to video, because he felt it would help to showcase how expansive and effective the learning tools can be. He also felt that video assets would help to evolve the overall brand perception. The Hooked on Phonics of 30 years ago is much different from today and video along with the app really helps to lend credibility to the product. The campaign has resulted in 2X more free trials and installs than traditional ad networks and organic search. With the success of the current campaign Hooked on Phonics is working directly with the app company to further scale the campaign for broader reach. “In the app market, everyone is driving users to an app install and while this is an important metric, focusing on a higher LTV per user is also significant,” said Vincent Meyer, CRO of Lucktastic. “We have created a platform that ensures that our users are getting the right ad at the right time as well as call-to-actions that drive toward key performance metrics beyond the install to maximize ROI. This is what we have been able to accomplish with the team from Hooked On Phonics, in a unique way and with creative that delivers on their core objectives.”
Enterprise mobility is a team sport Sports teams - from youth to the pros - are comprised of many individuals with various skill sets and talents. Yet when you hear championship teams and elite caliber athletes talk about success, their stories always boil down to a single commonality: the importance of the team. As Michael Jordan once famously said, “talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships."
What do you do if everyone in your organization is on board for implementing mobility, but no one can agree on how to do it or what to mobilize first? The business users have multiple demands for the workflows and capabilities they need, but they also do not want to be hindered by device type or a poor user experience.
eliminating the barriers of communication and generating ideas in an open forum, encouraging the sharing of compelling thoughts and discussing how new technology can help solve problems.
Equally as important as collaboration, is delineation. Like any good sports team, players have specific roles that they are held accountable to each and every game. The management team just wants the mobile apps to be secure, perform well and The need to separate pieces of the mobility Today’s enterprise shares a lot of have insights into adoption and usage. IT is development puzzle is no different. similarities with sports teams in that each expected to incorporate all their needs and Forrester Research, in a recent report organization employs many individuals with do so quickly, while strapped on resources titled, “Build Mobile Experiences That Drive various skill sets and talents. Furthermore, and budget. Engagement,” suggests that by separating it is the companies that can unite the development of front-end user individuals of dispersed business groups experiences from back-end service and With so many different requests and into collaborative, high-functioning teams data enablement, IT & LOB can thrive needs, barriers are being built between that are likely to exceed their goals more departments. Business units have become without being tactically dependent on each often than not. other. dissatisfied with IT’s inability to quickly meet their needs and as a result, turn to Currently, enterprise mobility is perhaps the their own solutions to improve workforce Collaboration and delineation is proven to best example of a corporate priority that mobility. However, these “shadow apps” are help streamline processes among the has not yet reached championship caliber various groups, resulting in reduced usually not approved by the organization performance. That’s because business friction, improved efficiency and greater and are not always secure, putting units, operations teams, and IT corporate data at risk. When data is lost or collaboration among soiled departments. departments have mostly failed to operate there is a breach, IT is left to clean up the as a team; more frequently butting heads mess, further delaying the likelihood of than shaking hands. An example of IT-LOB business requests being met and mobile The right tools for the dysfunction can be seen in the results of a apps being deployed. recent study of 1,000 U.S. business team employees, of which, 58 percent have In order to eliminate these barriers, taking abandoned their corporate mobile apps a bimodal approach, or the practice of they should have been using for managing two separate but coherent styles A great team needs the right equipment to work-related tasks and 64 percent that of work, is an effective way to bring IT and spur victory. In NASCAR, winning is often have downloaded apps of their choice from Lines of Business together. By working dependent on the tires that the team public app stores to use at work, putting together to optimize for a digital workspace, selected; in lacrosse, players and teams corporate security at risk. both IT and LOB have equal power to solve choose their sticks with precise detail and problems and drive significant business group-think top of mind. As enterprises continue to think through change. their expansive digital transformation In mobility, there is no one size fits all tool strategies, the need for purposeful mobility to solve the inherent challenges of mobile permeates every division within every development. However, teams that adopt Success is impossible organization. Much like with sports, the an agile DevOps methodology as well as individuals that make up business groups without collaboration & choosing the right solutions to solve and IT must begin to embrace the benefits problems can lead to improved operational delineation of team in order to consistently work processes and enhanced collaboration together to create lasting value. Here are between IT and the business. three reasons why: Business leaders know best the key tasks DevOps is perfect for teams because it and workflows that must be mobilized. helps break down organizational silos by They also expect a consumer-like user developing a culture of collaboration. Mobility is Not Just a experience and performance; something Through the use of low-code platforms Competitive Advantage, it that IT may not know or be equipped to which provide cross- departmental implement. A culture of collaboration collaboration with “drag and drop” is a Necessity makes it commonplace for open dialogue methods, business users can design fullybetween IT and LOB to occur. To create functional apps on the front-end; while the this collaborative environment, consider utilization of common frameworks such as
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basic JavaScript language on the back-end allows IT teams to customize these applications to meet specific organizational needs. It’s a win-win partnership for IT-LOB.
Conclusion Neither IT nor business units can build or deploy successful mobile apps on their own. A good mobility strategy brings both parties together to collaborate and ensures they are aligned around a common set of goals. Business leaders know how things can be done quicker, better, and more cost-effective using mobile devices. Technology leaders are then able to
determine the essential technologies and services required to mobilize these activities across the organization. By working together and creating the perfect team, enterprises can win the mobility championship for years to come. Editors note: Guest submission by Kia Behnia
Mobile UX is just as important as functionality addition to overall downloads, track how many current users install the latest version of your software. Continue to measure the success every few weeks or months until your next software update. If customers are slow to update software or you receive any feedback specific to a difficult user experience, it might be time to get working on your next update.
Editors note: Guest submission by Daniel Assouline When building new software or apps, many developers make the mistake of prioritizing functionality over user experience. But user experience is just as important - if not even more important than functionality in any software, app or product. Take security software, for example. By focusing on the functionality, it can protect customers against security threats but if the software isn’t user-friendly, customers might not even want to go to the trouble of using the software. Or even more dangerous, customers might avoid updating their software due to a poor user experience, which - in the case of security software can leave them vulnerable to the latest threats. Lavasoft (now adaware) recently recognized this gap between functionality and user experience and rebranded its company, with the intention of focusing more on user experience. Being a 17-year-old company they became so focused on the security aspect of the antivirus product that they hadn’t prioritized creating a user-friendly experience for its customers too. But in their latest software update, there are new features, and a redesigned simple, user interface that provides consumers with faster scans and powerful security, and a great UX all-in-one.
Engage in continuous release cycling
customers. You can solicit feedback from your customers directly by sending a survey to your email list asking what’s working and what’s not with your latest software. In addition to collecting survey responses, keeping an eye on social media mentions surrounding your brand can also be helpful in measuring your software’s user experience. Are customers airing their grievances about your software or praising it on social media? Also make sure your support team is reading any feedback received via email or your company website. No matter the channel, take customers’ feedback seriously, acknowledge it with a quick email or social media response and take the feedback into consideration when it comes time to develop your next software update.
Other companies can learn many valuable lessons from its recent rebrand. Following are some ways to determine whether the user experience is working for your customers or it’s time to make improvements.
Measure success or failure at product launch, and after
Listen to your customers
Any time you release new software, it’s important to measure its success on an ongoing basis. If you’re releasing new software, track downloads, feedback from users and any product reviews that might be released about your software. The same goes for any software updates, but in
Sometimes the most effective way to determine if software is user-friendly is to collect feedback right from the source -your
App Developer Magazine April 2017
When you first release software, an app or a product, that doesn’t mean your work is done. Rather, it’s only just beginning. As the market evolves, your business develops more advanced technology and customer demands and preferences change, you’ll need to update your software periodically to keep it relevant. With each new release, you’ll want to improve both the functionality and user experience of your software. Also consider releasing beta versions of your app or software, so target customers can get a feel for your next release while still allowing time for any minor design, functionality or user experience changes before the release is finalized. Software, app and product developers audience are constantly walking the tightrope of creating an impressive product that is not only enjoyable to use but also functional and secure. By testing product updates listening to customers, constantly measuring success and engaging in continuous release cycling, you can be more effective in balancing user experience and functionality.
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How to increase app revenue by using analytics Editors note: Guest submission by Mark Rosner, CRO of AppLovin
User Retention
You wouldn’t create a website without at It’s easy to get distracted by downloads, but least one line of code for Google Analytics. user retention is just as important if not So why would you create an app without it? more so. If you have a low retention rate, then any money you’re spending on user Analytics might seem like an obvious acquisition is essentially wasted. Gaming, element to incorporate into app social, lifestyle, media, travel and shopping development, but I’m still shocked that I apps in particular have some of the shortest regularly meet developers who don’t use lifespans and face an uphill battle with analytics at all, or barely use them beyond retention, so you must have analytics that tracking basic stats like the number of closely monitor it. downloads. Often small development shops and indie developers cite lack of time and Retention is generally measured by looking manpower for the failure to include at the number of days users continue to analytics. engage after downloading and by analyzing
best for your user experience, and then track and see how your app is performing.
In-App Purchases
Most mobile developers today make a great deal of their money off of in-app purchases (IAPs) for goods, power ups, or in the case of games, in-game currency. You should track not only the number of IAPs per player and the dollar amount of revenue per player, but also the time until purchase. When do the first, second, and subsequent purchases usually occur? After a user makes one purchase, do they continue in-app events. With analytics, you can see purchasing? Is there a certain purchase at what point in your app users are dropping number after which most spending users off and closing out. Generally that means drop off? These figures are extremely there’s some kind of recurring bug, issue or relevant to your revenue, so watch them roadblock, and you can develop to resolve closely. it. Once you’ve got the fundamentals, you can start to get more creative with what you use analytics for. Activity
However, putting some resources toward analytics upfront can make developments down the line much more efficient. Instead of guessing at what might be causing issues with your app, asking friends and family for feedback, and developing multiple solutions that may not work, you can pinpoint problems and develop to solve them. On the flipside, you can also find what’s driving usage of your app and focus on improving those features. Instead of toiling in the dark and making gut-level decisions, Getting users to install your app isn’t that employing analytics will save you time as challenging, especially if you have paid user you can make informed decisions. acquisition strategies in place. The bigger issue is keeping them active and engaged. Most developers track at least basic stats You should look at daily active users, weekly such as number of downloads and how active users and monthly active users along many people are actively using an app. with lifetime activity (any users beyond 365 However, these are ultimately vanity metrics days is generally the threshold here) to see - they won’t show you how people are using how much people are using your app and your app, whether they’re coming back or how often. uninstalling it, at what point in the app’s flow they’re dropping out and more. You can also look at the average length of session time. Depending on the kind of app If you want to see the vanity metrics like you have, you may want long or short DAU grow, you’ll need to track other grittier sessions. If you have a utility app, you metrics so you can course-correct generally want the sessions to be short and problems and continue to watch that sweet, but if you have a shopping app, you number increase. You’ll want a deep ideally want people spending more time analysis of how your users are behaving in browsing and therefore adding more items your app. Here are a few basics statistics to their cart. Make sure to figure out what’s that you should track:
App Developer Magazine April 2017
When you have the analytics basics nailed down, you can easily incorporate them into your development strategy. You might discover things like high shopping cart abandonment rates, which are easily reduced by simply incorporating Apple Pay, or you might find a bug that should become a feature by looking at user behavior in the app. By tracking these metrics, you can find hidden sources of revenue in your app that will ultimately better your bottom line. This is really the tip of the iceberg. I hope I’ve convinced those who think analytics are a “nice to have” that they are in fact a “musthave.” You don’t need to devote your whole working life to tracking analytics, but the more energy you spend in this area, the better experience you can create for your players, and the more successful you can be as a publisher.
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Tips for success in today's app market: A chat with Sean Galligan of Yahoo
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As consumers continue to spend more time using mobile apps, app developers and marketers want to better understand this behavior and how to stand out in the crowd. That's why we had a chat with Sean Galligan, Vice President and Industry Lead for the technology, media and telecom categories at Yahoo to share his insights on how marketers can drive adoption of their apps and stay top of mind for consumers. Here's what he had to say.
ADM: How are consumers using their mobile apps today, and what are the most notable trends that you are seeing for entertainment apps? Galligan: Social is having a big impact on mobile behavior. Time spent in social and messaging apps grew by an astounding 394% over the last year. It’s the rise of “communitainment,” which is communication for the sole purpose of entertainment. With news and magazines sessions down 5% and music, media and entertainment up only 1%, it’s safe to say that social is central to media consumption on mobile devices. Consumers spend less time on mobile gaming too, down 4% year over year. It remains a hit driven industry with a limited number of titles capturing consumers’ attention. But even the hits fade faster today, as seen with Pokemon Go, which peaked in popularity and then interest waned, with consumers only returning for marquee holiday events. OTT marketing is accelerating, especially on mobile devices. Consumers’ options to watch traditional TV programming are growing in a world of consumers quickly becoming cord cutters, shavers and nevers. It’s a clear win for consumers, but
it means stiff completion for OTT providers that want to acquire and retain users. As a result, we’re seeing a significant increase in app install marketing activity from OTT brands.
ADM: What do these trends mean for app developers and marketers?
ADM: How do mobile ads differ from other tactics that marketers are currently using to drive awareness and downloads?
Galligan: Mobile ads offer app marketers a number of advantages over other formats and channels. The contextual relevance of the mobile device and the immediacy of Galligan: The good news for marketers is being able to act upon an ad by that consumers’ are open to new mobile downloading the app and launching the entertainment experiences, outside of experience is powerful. In fact, we found gaming. However, there is definitely an that consumers are 16% more likely to increased competition for consumers and install apps after seeing mobile ads their attention on mobile devices. In addition compared to TV ads. Additionally, to developing strong app marketing marketers can easily attribute users to strategies, one big opportunity for app specific ads and channels, segment and developers is integrating social and target users more effectively, and measure communication elements to enrich their ROI or LTV (lifetime value) with better experiences and drive conversation among accuracy. their users.
ADM: What are some of the biggest opportunities for app marketers today?
ADM: How is mobile video disrupting this space?
Galligan: Video content is growing across apps and, by captivating user attention, it’s increasing time spent. OTT brands are Galligan: Not all apps can create that killer stepping up their marketing, as consumers “communitainment” experience, but there is choose to watch more of their favorite still opportunity. App developers can reach shows on their smartphones. The potential customers by running ads across phenomenon that we call the mobile experiences where consumers “communitainment” is another great spend a majority of their time. Video content example. Streaming apps, including live.ly, is also becoming a bigger part of the app musical.ly and Houseparty, are designed to experience. That means there are new go beyond standard messaging to opportunities for video advertising, which entertainment and they have been on the has proven to be the most effective ad App Store Top 100. format to acquire loyal users for a broad range of app categories. In fact, in a recent study, mobile video ads were the most effective for driving apps installs among 68 ADM: Competition is percent of users. fierce in the app space.
How do you stay top of mind with your app users?
About Mr. Galligan
Galligan: It starts with creating great content and building an addictive experience. Beyond those foundational elements, app marketers need to update their apps and keep them fresh; leverage engagement tools like notifications to bring users back into the experience and increase frequency; integrate social elements that encourage sharing and stoke virality; and invest in a content marketing strategy that is constantly driving attention and conversation around their great content.
ADM: How do you predict app marketing will evolve over the next year? Galligan: Over the next year, native ad formats will continue to grow and evolve, along with even better mobile video
Sean Galligan is the Vice President and Industry Lead for the technology, media and telecom categories at Yahoo. He leads a team that develops programs for major brands within the media and entertainment verticals.
experiences. We’ll also see improved measurement tools that help marketers to better identify ROI, ROAS and LTV. Marketers are looking for more sophisticated segmentation strategies that leverage these improved measurement capabilities.
As the Publisher and Editor for App Developer Magazine, Richard has several industry recognitions and endorsements from tech companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google for accomplishments in the mobile market. He was part of the early Google AFMA program, and also involved in the foundation of Google TV. He has been developing for mobile since 2003 and serves as CEO of Moonbeam Development, a mobile app company with 200 published titles in various markets throughout the world. Richard is also the founder of LunarAds, a mobile cross-promotion and self-serv mediation network for developers. He has been a featured presenter at trade-shows and conferences, and stays active with new projects relating to mobile development.
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Messaging
How to help push alerts not seem so pushy! Editors note: Guest submission from Sunil Thomas, CEO of CleverTap Here’s a challenge for you - try to read this article through without attending to your buzzing, pinging, distracting smartphone.
downright resentment that leads to the opposite of the intended effect. In fact, we’ve seen a direct correlation between broadcast, untargeted notification volume and, minutes later, consequential app uninstalls.
Rules” in mind. They’ll go a long way toward ensuring your messages are seen as relevant and helpful and not annoying interruptions that will hurt your business in the long run:
News apps are some of the biggest culprits. 1. Make sure the user is Many publishers believe that sending a daily dispatch of headlines -same ones to always front and center all their users - is great. But our internal data shows that, unless these headlines are from deliberately subscribed categories, A push notification is an extension of your consumers tend to tune out of these daily, app and your brand. Use it for what you scheduled intrusions. think your users will welcome and Fast-forward a few years, and we are appreciate from your brand We’ve seen former over-notification overloaded. Research suggests the average person is deluged by more than 50 offenders like coupon apps and food delivery services getting off this hamster alerts daily. While previously, apps could 2. Keep notifications wheel after learning their lesson through use notifications to spark activity in the the decline in engagement. Instead of doing timely time between alerts, now there is no offer blasts at a specific time, say 10:30 or breathing space -every moment seems 11:30am, they’ve now taken a insightfilled by that screen re-illuminating. based approach. By analyzing user Notifications that are triggered by specific behavior, they can now schedule the Notifications have reached a logjam. The user behavior OR triggered by important real risk is that the road we are now on will notifications to the optimal shopping or eating hours of each individual. As a result, users dates and time (the day before your render them ineffective for everyone, turning the clock back on engagement. The they’re seeing big upticks in the desired user flight; 2 hours before your movie show starts; 10 minutes before your scheduled notification is about to die before our eyes. actions. package delivery) are much more contextual and appreciated by users In fairness notifications are still a young Once upon a time, mobile notifications were just for person-to-person text messages. Some time around the turn of the decade, brands realized that provoking consumers’ fear of missing out was also the key to reigniting users’ attention.
Who fired the fatal shot? Blame trigger-happy marketers and dumb technology.
When product marketers and growth hackers discovered the benefits of notifications, it was a revelation. Now many companies have re-engineered their business model around trying to provoke engagement using alerts. There is nothing inherently wrong about that. But many product marketers have drunk far too much of this kool-aid. Too many of them are over-using notifications, sending excessive numbers of alerts for trivial and cynical reasons. At best, excessive notifications can flatline engagement. At worst, they can prompt
App Developer Magazine April 2017
medium, and many people are still learning to use the language proficiently. For an art to become a science, takes several years. Now, after an early embrace, marketers must be thoughtful about using this channel more responsibly. And while mobile operating system makers have spent a great deal of time tinkering at the edges of alerts, adding rich notifications and emojis to enable a robust functionality within alerts, user control has barely been addressed. It is up to app makers themselves to become more granular with the notifications they send consumers. This kind of granular relevance is the key to delivering a non-intrusive experience that both edifies consumers and produces results for marketers. When looking to engage users through notifications, just keep these “Golden
3. Appeal to users on a personal level For example, an e-commerce operator notifying a consumer of a sale on a specific pair of shoes she browsed last week is many times more likely to provoke app engagement than just sending a generic “We’re having a sale” message The same issues the mobile industry is facing was experienced in the early internet days, when widespread, excessive marketing emails nearly made the channel buckle and collapse. It is time to tame the mobile alert Wild West. Marketers must act now to get smarter and more respectful in the way they reach out to their users. If they do not, they risk widespread disengagement. Those who do will reap the rewards.
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Enterprise
How Fanatics gets ready for March Madness When a team makes the playoffs, signs a player, or wins it all, Fanatics, a sports apparel company, wants to be first with the gear fans want. In order to maintain speed in the cutthroat world of e-commerce, the tools that Fanatics needs to use must be just as fast, reliable, and flexible as the current market trends. That's why Fanatics chose CircleCI Enterprise as their continuous integration solution due to ease of deployment, ease of use, and the level of support and documentation available for the product to be deployed securely behind their firewall. Fanatics previously used Jenkins as their CI tool, but it created big issues across the organization. During release weeks it was at least one person’s full-time job just to manage Jenkins. During the rest of the month, Jenkins would frequently go down or would be using too many resources, and so the day-to-day maintenance oversight to keep it running was very high. Like all e-commerce companies, the 6 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are the most critical revenue period of the year. Waiting even 10 minutes for a build in late November has a huge cost on Fanatics’ bottom line - and Jenkins could not keep up. Beyond the operational cost, developers had no flexibility in their ability to configure builds to work the way they needed, and there also wasn’t a way for the team to see versioning of changes. One day, their git configuration stopped syncing, and the team had no way to see why it wasn’t working, or what the issues were.
App Developer Magazine April 2017
Some Backstory The final straw for Jenkins came when a Jenkins job was accidentally deleted for Fanatics’ legacy monolith app. When the job started running again, it started to rebuild over 10,000 builds it had done in the past. For Fanatics, it was time to look for a new CI tool. Fanatics had a shortlist of criteria for their next CI solution. Beyond the need for an on-premise solution, they knew they wanted more developer freedom and empowerment, as well as a tool that was self-service enough to free up time for their DevOps team. Other tools on the market were either too DIY, or didn’t have the features needed for a business of Fanatics’ size and velocity. With that list of requirements in mind, CircleCI was "an easy choice", and Fanatics was able to get set up and running with with their new provider in no time. In fact, using the new system was so straightforward for the team at Fanatics that it was surprising for some developers who thought the pain of Jenkins was simply the cost of doing business.
“To be honest, CircleCI confused a lot of people initially,” said Johnny Sheeley, Senior Engineering Manager at Fanatics. “Our team wasn’t used to have a product that just worked. Our developers were surprised that there was a solution that allowed them to add what they needed to run their builds, and that they didn’t need anyone to manually configure something for them.”
On Jenkins, each job took as much as 15 minutes, and stacking builds meant that at peak times developers would wait hours. On CircleCI, it takes as little as 3 minutes to run a build. With CircleCI, the ability to have independent builds in parallel saves a lot of developer time, and ultimately, money. “On CircleCI, when our builds take 7 minutes, it’s because the things we’ve chosen make it take 7 minutes. CircleCI just automatically handles scaling and parallelization. On Jenkins, a 7 minute build could take over an hour by being enqueued. Using containers for each build means everything runs as quickly as possible.”
On the operations side, Fanatics no longer has 5 people worried about Jenkins and spending at least part of their day on it. That team has moved on to other, more strategic infrastructure projects. “The number of people who have come up to me and said, ‘I’ve never realized builds could be so easy,’ is huge,” said Johnny.
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