TalkOptimized Django deployments with a Continuous Observability Strategy

Python Web Conference 2023

When applications fall short of performance expectations - they are consuming too much memory, response times increase, etc. - it can be tempting to increase the resources in the environment to respond. At the heart of the issue is application performance, and what's missing is comprehensive strategy that connects production monitoring to tools that allow you to identify bottlenecks and enforce performance expectations (a performance budget) in development. Here, we'll show how using Blackfire.io in combination with Platform.sh as a deployment target makes it feasible to not only create a Continuous Observability strategy across every application in your organization, but also how the pair makes it possible to make the environmental impact of web development a measurable and optimizable objective.

TalkWhat you need to know about frontends to decouple

DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023

Node.js frontend frameworks can vary a lot in their approach. How you build, and deploy them becomes another set of concerns to keep in mind alongside how JSON:API is going to be consumed. This talk is meant to provide context, and to better understand the expectations of the frontends you choose to implement headless Drupal with. With that information you will hopefully come away with a better understanding of how these frontends work, how to make sure they perform well in both prod and dev, and how to compare them when considering a decoupled architecture.

DemoBuild apps, not platforms: Optimized DevOps without platform engineering

Produced January 2023

Platform.sh provides a solution that addresses the complexity of application delivery. It provides both stability and flexibility you would like to achieve through platform engineering, all with one unified, secure, enterprise-grade platform. From that platform, you can standardized your application delivery across any architecture design, framework, or programming language, and easily enforce common compliance standards across them all. It's flexible enough to experiment with new features quickly on true staging environments, and promote them to production with a git merge. With a common platform and single API in place for packaging, provisioning, and deploying applications, it's then possible to focus DevOps work on optimizing those apps. Whether that be application performance, or coordinating all of your operations, all for the purpose of minimizing the environmental impact of your organization's work.

TalkDeploying a decoupled restaurant review site with Strapi

Node Congress 2022

Node.js has become an increasingly popular language to build and deploy backend APIs. In a world of legacy CMSs adopting decoupled implementations, plenty of frameworks have sprung up to classify themselves as "headless" CMSs, designed from the start to provide an easy way to personalize content models, administer permissions and authentication, and serve a content API quickly. Strapi, one of the leaders in this space, has recently released their v4 version of the framework, and with Platform.sh it can be deployed alongside a number of frontends within the same project, giving a drastically simplified development experience working with decoupled sites. In this workshop, we'll deploy a Strapi demo application, which has been configured to serve a restaurant review site.

TalkPerformance is a feature: Application Performance Monitoring & Profiling

Malt Academy 2022

Node.js has become an increasingly popular language to build and deploy backend APIs. In a world of legacy CMSs adopting decoupled implementations, plenty of frameworks have sprung up to classify themselves as "headless" CMSs, designed from the start to provide an easy way to personalize content models, administer permissions and authentication, and serve a content API quickly. Strapi, one of the leaders in this space, has recently released their v4 version of the framework, and with Platform.sh it can be deployed alongside a number of frontends within the same project, giving a drastically simplified development experience working with decoupled sites. In this workshop, we'll deploy a Strapi demo application, which has been configured to serve a restaurant review site.

TalkEditorial workflows, GIT them here!

StrapiConf 2021

How do we reconcile the differences between the needs of our developers and those of our content creation teams? Have you ever run into an editorial team who just doesn’t want to get their hands dirty with Git? There’s plenty of them. Strapi’s fantastic for giving them an interface to organize content to be consumed by frontends, but many of their needs work directly against Git-centric development workflows (aka GitOps) we see today. In this talk, we’ll cover how Strapi can be deployed alongside a frontend consuming application on a single project on Platform.sh. From there, we’ll slowly piece together two parallel workflows for teams with very different needs in mind: - Editorial: don’t touch Git. Live content previews. Runtime collection creation that moves to master. - Development: Git as the source of truth, repeatable builds, isolated environments, Infrastructure-as-code.

TalkKeep your heads in sync: Content delivery across a decoupled presentation fleet

DrupalCon North America 2021

More than one "head" consume your Drupal content? Platform.sh helps to make Drupal commander of your fleet, to keep everything in-sync.

DemoBeginner Probot: building and hosting GitHub Apps

Produced March 2020

Chances are, you’re already familiar with and using a number of GitHub Apps on your repositories’ CI/CD pipelines. Have you ever considered creating an app of your own? Whether you want to create a simple app for your specific site’s needs or move on to a full-fledged production app offered in the GitHub Marketplace, getting started has its own learning curve. At Platform.sh, we maintain a template GitHub App using Probot that will get you registered and deployed in minutes, so you can get on your way to developing an app to fit your exact needs.

DemoSingle and multi-site search with Meilisearch

Produced January 2020

Whether you’re running an online store and need users to be able to find items for sale, or an LMS filled with hundreds of courses, chances are your application needs some kind of search engine. Our team found themselves in that situation recently with our public documentation. In the process of determining how we wanted to handle search, we found a new tool called Meilisearch, which has clear documentation and a simple set of methods for posting an index and customizing the ranking of results via a Python client library.

TalkGetting the most out of DevOps with declarative infrastructure and profiling

Malt Academy 2021

DocsPlatform.sh & Upsun public documentation

platformsh/platformsh-docs

• Principal contributor over 6 years, including getting started guides, advanced framework and integration guides, automation and theming.
• Led two major migrations - moving from Gitbook to Hugo, then supporting the parallel white-label launch of Upsun docs with in sync content.
• Launched Meilisearch as a self-hosted multi-index search solution.
• Installed and leveraged user-feedback responses into prioritized content rework, new pages and learning paths, and product feedback loop.
• Tools: Hugo + custom theme, Cypress, Vale, Tailwind, Asciinema, Meilisearch, Google Analytics, LookerStudio, Heap, GitHub actions, JS, Python, Platform.sh

DocsThe Upsun Developer Center

upsun/devcenter

• Principal contributor; designed information architecture in collaboration with product, advocacy, and design teams. Created all theme customizations and roadmap for docs integration.
• Launched search replacement through Flexsearch, which unified marketing blog, example code repositories, API and CLI documentations into a single search.
• Supported larger Upsun, Platform.sh and Blackfire.io community migrations to Discord with Community resources, Codes of Conduct, and Contributing guidelines.
• Established analytics and infrastructure metrics dashboard to track content traffic to newly released posts, announcements, and docs migrations.
• Tools: Hugo + customized theme, Vale, GA4, LookerStudio, Heap, Docker, Nix, GitHub actions, Flexsearch, ExpressJS, Python, goaccess, deployed to Upsun

ExamplesTemplate builder & Platform.sh templates

platformsh/template-builder

• Maintained 112 user-facing code examples across numerous runtime languages that made up the primary trial onboarding path for Platform.sh, as well as support intervention examples and technical sales demos.
• Managed upstream and dependency scheduled updates, along with associated tests on destination artifact repositories, to ensure user success when deployed.
• Oversaw collaboration between example maintenance/tooling with marketing-related tracking initiatives around deployments, product-focused trial conversion APIs, and Console team integration to display catalog within product UI.
• Supplemented "official" templates with an external marketplace that integrated community and partner examples into primary catalog for visibility.
• Tools: Python, doit, GitHub actions, Platform.sh API, and many, many individual frameworks maintained with this tool that ended up as final artifacts.

CommunityOpen Source Sponsorships

• Increased brand visbility by publicly launching program to provide open source projects sponsored hosting.
• Managed application submission, as well as continued eligibility for multi-year partnerships for some 50+ open source projects.
• Controlled and communicated program COGs internally to optimize program ROI.
• Tools: Python, GitLab pipelines, Marketo, Platform.sh, scrapy.

Communitychmodcast: The change mode podcast

• Oversaw the relaunch of the company podcast; managed host and guest interviews alongside conference attendance.
• Tools: Podcastics, Buzzsprout, YouTube.

CommunityCommunity catalog & Deploy on Platform.sh buttons

• Strengthened community and partner relationships by bringing in-product visibility to community examples.
• Combined catalog with a broader "Deploy on Platform.sh" button, that became Platform.sh's more general, trackable open source code outreach mechanism.
• Tools: Python, GitLab pipelines, Marketo, Platform.sh, scrapy.

CommunityDeploy Friday podcast

• Organized and hosted podcast episodes with partners, colleagues, and members of the open source web development community.
• Managed podcast listing and hosting through Buzzsprout platform.
• Tools: Podcastics, Buzzsprout, YouTube.

DemosPlatform.sh Demos

platform.sh/product/demos

• Planned and designed demo slides across major product features, which were pulled into both the main marketing site but also into at-event iPads for interactive sales enablement.
• Produced video recordings of each demo to embed alongside slides and transcripts within website.
• Tools: iMovie, Audacity, RevealJS, Hugo, Gatsby, Strapi.

OnboardingThe Upsun Demo project

platformsh/demo-project

• Developed and managed React-based project, which became the primary onboarding example app for the new Upsun product launch. The app itself instructs the user to execute specific commands to uncover and accomplish events that demonstrate the primary product value features of Upsun.
• Designed and developed testing and automation framework, which executed each command/activity requested of a user during each revision/pull request opened on the project to ensure the primary demo path did not break.
• Tools: React, Typescript, Tailwind, Flask, Blackfire, GitHub actions, Upsun.

WorkshopConsuming Symfony APIs with Next.js on Upsun

upsun/demo-project-symfony

• Organized learning path through beginning steps and deployment on Upsun with Symfony, through adding custom API endpoints, and finally consuming those endpoints from a Next.js frontend deployed in parallel.
• Tools: Symfony, Next.js, Upsun, GitHub actions.

TrainingAgency Partner Developer Certification

Platform.sh Agency Partner Program

• Designed Certification program with two learning paths for Agency Partner Developers; completion required for progression through Program tiers.
• Reduced support tickets by 50% through learning paths & assessments for those who completed training.
• Tools: Allbound, iMovie, Audacity, Discourse, Zendesk Community.

WorkshopBuild a production Strapi instance service by service with Platform.sh

platformsh/strapiconf2021-workshop

• Designed and delivered technical workshop on deploying Strapi on Platform.sh at StrapiConf 2021.
• Tools: Strapi, Platform.sh, Gatsby.