Are You Doing COVID-19 Research?

“World War II was the defining moment of our parents’ generation. In a similar way, the COVID-19 pandemic—the first modern pandemic—will define this era.” – Bill Gates said it in his last post yesterday.

One of the interesting aspects of his observations is the need to collaborate our efforts on treatments, vaccines, testing and contact tracing.
We all want to help fight Covid-19. At JFrog we are helping developers be more productive with their work by harnessing the power of DevOps best practices (and tools).
Are you working on IoT to medical devices?
Here is one example on how to improve your process to ship better code in a faster way.

There are many more examples like that but bottom line, we want to help any organization that is fighting Covid-19.
You can apply here: https://jfrog.com/covid19/

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Continuous Software Updates With JFrog Pipelines

“Liquid Software” release practices are rapidly becoming the standard in many companies. However, as software shapes digital transformation, DevOps teams are feeling challenged to manage their growing influence on corporations’ success or failure. In a talk I gave last week, we looked into the growing pains that most enterprises (many of them JFrog customers) face when adopting and consolidating DevOps at scale, and how these challenges are being mitigated with end-to-end platform solutions. We also wrap up with some DevOps best practices that will help you address emerging trends that your bosses’ bosses care about.

The slides

The Future of Continuous Software Updates Is Here from Ido Green

JFrog Artifactory REST API in 5min

A good API is like a classic car – You want to use it again and again.

Most of the interactions with Artifactory will be from your CI/CD tools. It might be your build engine or from your log aggregator. This powerful API can be invoked in any of the standard ways you like to work with any other RESTful APIs (e.g. curl, CLI, your source code, etc’).
In many cases, it’s the preferred ‘glue’ for developers when it comes to automation. The options are extensive and you can do many useful things with this API. However, in this short post, we will cover the most popular actions you ‘must have’.

Let’s start with the most common action: “upload/download binaries“. This action could run automatically from the build machine to Artifactory using:

Market Trends Talk – swampUp 2019

The world has many buzzwords that people like to use. Some are more relevant to the real world and some aren’t. If yesterday was powered by new products and features, today is going to be filled by insights from our communities.

There are around 37 million developers in the world (according to GitHub last report) so it’s a substantial community. Moreover, DevOps is growing at a rapid pace. Btw, according to StackOverflow last survey – DevOps developers and site reliability engineers are among the highest paid, most experienced developers most satisfied with their jobs, and are looking for new jobs at the lowest levels.

I think we can all agree that data is stronger than opinions, rights?
This is what I really like about the special point of view that we have at JFrog. As the “database of DevOps“, we are sitting in a unique place – holding the output of what developers producing.
This is giving us excellent visibility into trends and the real world.

What does this mean?

It’s about contrasting perception with reality.
We combined our own data from 5000 customers with internal and external researches in an effort to give you a clear picture of the current state and what are the DevOps trends for the next 12-18 months.

The main challenges

A Trip To TRANSFORM!2019

Make your software flow

Last week I had the pleasure to participate in a panel that talked about the future of DevOps. It was part of Transform!2019 Event that was in Munich, Germany. Fun fact, from the hotel I could see the Google office, which brought many good memories.

The main goal of the event was to let participants a way to experience what it means to change a company to become more “Intelligent”. The way to share the knowledge was by engaging in an open dialogue between industry leaders, start-ups in the DevOps world, executives and SAP experts. The event had few tracks and many options to network which was a great opportunity to learn from others.

DevOps Panel

When it comes to creating a business that can thrive in the digital age, the benefits of DevOps are clear. Faster deployment frequency and lower failure rates are proven to be some of the advantages of DevOps adoption. It brings more velocity into your (software) organization and enables you to add more value (faster) to your users.

Do You Need A Binary Repository?

Any developer knows that you must have a source code repository (e.g. Git) but from time to time I get the question “why do I need a binary repository”?

Here is the short answer:

Faster and more secure software development – Any company is a software company these days and the best companies release updates on daily/hourly bases. The ability to push updates quickly is a real competitive advantage. The minute you have few engineers on your team you wish to avoid ‘fetching the all internet’ with every ‘npm install’.
A binary repo will give you the option to cache these libraries and make sure you are working with the correct ones (vs a hacked one). From the developer perspective, it is a big boost for their productivity as it saves time during development and on each build. Even better, from the DevOps perspective, the ability to control all the packages/libraries (and scan them for vulnerabilities) is a huge advantage. It enables the internal engineering team to control the releases better as they have full transparency (e.g. quality, performance, security, licenses, etc’) on everything the ‘compose’ the release version. Check the 12-factor app manifesto for more on dependencies (declaration and isolation).

Product Excellence Best Practices

What are the components that help teams to build quality into their outcomes?

The main goal is to create a baseline that developers could follow and be in a quality level that is well defined and measurable. The main parts to focus on are:

1. Testing
2. Code reviews
3. Static analysis
4. Health monitoring: availability, resilience, etc’.

Tests

Code Reviews Will Improve You (And Your Code)

There are many options to improve your software quality.
One of the most effective methods is to do code reviews with other developers.
Code reviews are as much a social interaction as a technical best practice. In a healthy engineering culture (egoless), team members engage their peers to improve the quality of their code and increase their productivity. Developers understand that the time they spend looking at a colleague’s code is repaid when other team members examine their own deliverables. These days, most of the companies (e.g. Facebook, Netflix, Google, Amazon, Uber) are embracing it, so it’s another sign that something is working well here.
The important thing to remember when you are doing a code review is to be kind and to ask questions (clarifications) before you suggesting anything.

Why Ask For A Peer Review?

1. The most basic reason is to find bugs.
   If you won’t ask for it, you will miss bugs in your code:
   a. Accidental errors – typos or mixing variables.
   b. Structural errors – dead code, logic or algorithm bugs, performance or architecture concerns. These are often much easier to spot for an external reviewers the see your work from their perspective.
2. You preventing from yourself a great way to learn and get better – Committers are motivated by the notion of a viewer who will look over the change request: the committer tends to clean up loose ends, consolidate TODOs, and generally improve the commit.
3. Your code is not as clear as you think. Another developer will make it better both from its testability and readability aspects.

Code reviews are very important not only for developers but also to product managers, test engineers, designers and others.

In many cases, developers will be the first ones to see the benefits. It will allow them to move faster and with higher quality.