We continue our Language Spotlight series with Java, an object-oriented programming language that has shaped the course of the internet in enormous ways. Today we speak with two Java champions, Monica Beckwith and Geertjan Wielenga, to discuss Java’s impact so far as well as its course for the future. What is a Java Champion? Since we have two Java champions as guests today, let’s start off with defining a Java champion. Monica and Geertjan describe the term as a collection of expert knowledge, ...
Jun 16, 2021•56 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Today we continue our Language Spotlight series. PHP is the most-used server-side web development language in the world, and it’s also one of the few to be purely open source. We speak with two PHP 8.0 Release Managers, Sara Golemon and Gabriel Caruso, about the current status of PHP and the PHP 8.0 release. Exciting PHP features and benefits It’s hard to understate how important PHP is for the Internet. It has been in constant, evolving use online for 26 years — the Internet itself has only exi...
Jun 16, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 27
The digital accessibility umbrella is broad Digital accessibility means different things to different people. Most people, on hearing the term, think of people with disabilities, such as being deaf or blind. But our two experts, Nic Steenhout and Carie Fisher, make it clear the digital accessibility umbrella encapsulates much more. It also includes people who: Have ADHD or other cognitive issues — such as with memory, concentration or information processing Are accessing digital information via ...
Jun 11, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 26
In our new mini-series, Language Spotlight, we’ll take a tour of every language that Platform.sh supports. Today our focus is on JavaScript, as we delve into what’s new and exciting in the space, asynchronous coding, and the advantages of Node.js with two JavaScript experts and Software Engineers, Jessica and Austin Keener. Understanding asynchronous JavaScript JavaScript can be different from other asynchronous languages. As Austin Keener explains, “In JavaScript, you say, ‘Hey, make this reque...
Jun 01, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 25
In this episode, we talk with our guest Mike Pirog about Lando, the free and open source local development tool. Mike is the Co-Founder of Tandem, a full service digital agency in the PHP space, and the maker of Lando. Lando offers a high degree of flexibility for common setups, and it’s now fully integrated with Platform.sh. How to use Lando Lando is based on Docker as the underlying engine, and it’s primarily for PHP projects, but it can be used for any kind of project. As Mike defines Lando, ...
May 25, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Adding more complexity to international privacy law A recent ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidates the US EU Privacy Shield, which has many implications for data rules around the GDPR. More than 5,000 U.S. companies rely on Privacy Shield to conduct trans-Atlantic trade in compliance with the GDPR. We talk with a team of legal experts to clarify what this means for you and your international business. Comprehensive data protection for European residents GDPR stands f...
May 21, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Defining and standardizing microservice architecture Microservices break down application development into independent functional components. One of our guests, Emily Jiang of IBM, defines a microservice as “a piece of software that can do one thing and do one thing very well.” For building good microservice architecture, she recommends following the 12 Factor App methodology. The 12 principles in this methodology were created in an effort to guide development and help standardize Java microserv...
May 06, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 22
What’s new with Typescript 4.0 Typescript is an Object-oriented, open source, scripting language, with static typing. With our guests, we discuss several exciting updates that come with the release of Typescript 4.0 , such as short-circuiting assignment operators, labeled tuple elements, and more. You can also follow along with this helpful slideshow about the release. Variadic tuple types Variadic tuple types are of value when you don’t know the ordering of an array. Our guest Stefan Adolf, Dev...
May 06, 2021•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 21
Open Social is a Drupal distribution and online community platform. We speak with the founders, Taco Potze and Bram ten Hove, in our episode today about how Open Social was born out of the idea to productize community building. Open Social origin story Taco and Bram started Open Social after 14 years of Drupal agency experience. Taco says, “We stumbled upon this amazing use case of building a SaaS platform around social communities where we quickly host, maintain, and deploy your installations.”...
Apr 22, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 20
The internet economy would not be what it is today without the influence and the value added by open source software. As software development in general has become more sophisticated, complex, and time-consuming, maintaining open source software has, too. Today we talk about the importance of funding open source software sustainably with Pia Mancini, Co-founder & CEO of Open Collective, and Luis Villa, Co-founder of Tidelift. Time vs. money in open source Open source software is not exactly ...
Apr 02, 2021•59 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Apache Camel is an open source Java framework that helps developers make integrations faster and easier. Our two guests, Christina Lina, a Java developer and software architect, and Hugo Guerrera, a software developer and open source advocate, speak about how Camel can help you implement inter-system Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP). Apache Camel helps developers with integration If you listen in the podcast, I define Apache Camel as integration between database web servers, Apache Kafka, a...
Mar 30, 2021•53 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Simplify and speed up cloud-native development with Micronaut Micronaut is an open-source, JVM-based framework for building full-stack, modular, easily testable microservices and serverless applications. In this episode, we speak with Iván López Martín, a JVM Developer and Micronaut committer at Object Computing, and Rodrigo Graciano, a Java User Group leader, about how Micronaut can help developers build their cloud-native applications more simply and easily. Faster start time and lower memory ...
Mar 30, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 16
OpenAPI: Clarity and structure for API development The OpenAPI specification (formerly known as Swagger) is a blueprint to help develop APIs and to make sure what’s in the API is clear and understandable, before development even starts. Lorna Mitchell, a Senior Development Advocate at Nexmo and one of our guests today, explains it like this, “OpenAPI is an API description standard. It's a way of explaining everything in your APIs. So think of when you would write documentation and the endpoints,...
Mar 26, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Defining Kafka Apache Kafka is an open-source stream-processing software platform which aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. Anna McDonald, one of the Apache Kafka experts we speak with in this episode, describes it like this, “The easiest way to describe it is a durable log. And that makes it different from most all other messaging systems, where a message goes in, you have to broadcast it out. And as soon as it's consumed, it's gon...
Mar 17, 2021•56 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Diversity and inclusion is a perennial challenge in the tech industry. In this episode, we have two guests from Witty Works to help us learn more about research-backed ways to be more inclusive in our hiring processes and everyday lives. Unconscious bias starts very early in life Unconscious bias is one important factor behind the underrepresentation of women and other marginalized groups we often see in certain fields and leadership positions. Our guests Lukas Smith and Nadia Fischer tell us un...
Mar 17, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 13
Our two guests, Jeanne Boyarsky and Adam Bien, are both long-time Java developers. On today’s episode, we talk about what consists of “good” architecture in the changing world of software development, and where exactly Java fits in to the puzzle. Defining software architecture Pinning down a solid definition of software architecture can be tricky these days. Our guest Jeanne Boyarsky agrees. ”Architecture feels a little like a vocabulary word because it means so many different things to differen...
Mar 11, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Branding is just as much a part of your product as its code, but it can be hard to nail down a definition: branding means different things to different people. For some, you say “brand” and they think “logo”. But for the Platform.sh team, branding goes a lot deeper than that. Savannah Bergeron, Communications Designer at Platform.sh, defines their branding process this way. “We really wanted to build something that helps express that emotional reaction someone has to our product when they unders...
Mar 05, 2021•54 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Meilisearch is an open source search engine meant for small-to-medium size applications that are just getting off the ground. With a simpler, more elastic experience than many of the market leaders, Meilisearch aims to provide an executable, fast, and easily customizable search engine to fit more common use cases. Meilisearch deeply values its open source roots Meilisearch has been open source from its beginning. In fact, the three founders, Clément Renault, Thomas Payet, and Quentin de Quelen, ...
Feb 17, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Spring’s wide ecosystem of modules simplifies the development process Spring is the most popular Java-based framework for application development for many reasons. One of them is its wide ecosystem of modules and integrations, which you can use to: Develop REST APIs Connect to a database through a JPA or a JDBC template Create batch jobs Use Aspect Oriented Programming Create reactive APIs Integrate with microservices Josh Long, a Spring Developer Advocate, says Spring’s variety of integrations ...
Feb 16, 2021•59 min•Season 1Ep. 9
The pandemic has accelerated the use of e-learning With the world moving suddenly-online, training and education has had to change and adapt rapidly. Today we discuss what qualifies as e-learning, its benefits, and other tools and strategies new e-learners can employ with two experts in the field, Olivia Lidde, Technical Curriculum Developer at AWS, and James Aparaicio, a Developer with Opigno. The benefits of e-learning While the pandemic may have pushed us all into understanding the intricacie...
Feb 10, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Use Platform.sh’s extensibility to your advantage Platform.sh is a highly extensible platform for managing your development workflow. As Larry Garfield, Director of Developer Experience, says, “We try to make Platform.sh an extensible system because we want to enable others to come up with better ideas than we have.” As a part of that, many Platform.sh customers have built their own custom tooling on top of Platform.sh. Serhey Dolgushev, lead developer at Contextual Code, says they decided to mo...
Feb 08, 2021•53 min•Season 1Ep. 7
What is Quarkus Quarkus is a cloud-native, (Linux) container-first framework for writing Java applications. It has become more popular lately due to its fast boot time, and low RSS memory, enabling your APIs to start more rapidly and consume smaller amounts of memory. The impetus for creating Quarkus In this episode, our 3 guests, all Red Hat technologists, talk about how they began to see the need for a framework like Quarkus. Explains Burr Sutter, “Over time, we kept hearing from customers tha...
Jan 25, 2021•59 min•Ep. 6
The principles of open source Open source has redefined how we work since its genesis in the late 90s. One of our speakers defines open source as being like a “social network for developers”, where competition is replaced with collaboration. This emphasis on collaboration, as well as transparency and contribution, are key principles of open source. So how can adopting an open source mindset have a positive impact on your career, like it did for our speakers? An open source mindset can help your ...
Jan 25, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 5
TYPO3: From underdog to international CMS TYPO3 is a free, open source CMS that’s been around for 23 years. Universities, airlines, banks, and cruise ships around the world use it and love it for its reliability, structure, and stability. Robert Douglass compares TYPO3’s success to a “David and Goliath story, where the scrappy open source project came along and overthrew proprietary software.” TYPO3’s unique multisite and multilingual capabilities TYPO3’s strong multisite and multilingual capabi...
Jan 22, 2021•59 min•Ep. 4
Migrating Java applications to the cloud Java is a popular framework that’s been a foundation for many enterprise applications for over 20 years. But lately, those enterprises have run into trouble: moving their applications to the cloud. This migration promises more security, reliability, and easier scaling, but it can be daunting with an older framework like Java. The host, Robert Douglass of Platform.sh, asks, “With all these older versions of applications floating around in this huge plethor...
Jan 22, 2021•57 min•Ep. 3
Harness the power of Gatsby with your headless CMS The monolithic approach to content management, where you have two parts, the backend and the frontend, has been shifting. Now the “headless” CMS paradigm, where the frontend and the backend are separated, and an API replaces the frontend, is front-and-center. Pierre Burgy, co-founder & CEO of Strapi defines headless as a “CMS without a frontend.” Adding Gatsby to the headless mix changes the direction of web development A headless CMS offers...
Jan 15, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Our work lives have changed During this episode, Robert Douglass goes live with the founders of Mattermost, Nextcloud, and Platform.sh to discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the way we live and work. There is no question that our work lives have been upended dramatically. With children staying home, there are new demands on our time. Most of us no longer commute to the office, and are carving out a place to work in our own homes, where space can be limited. Many of us are also struggl...
Sep 28, 2020•49 min•Ep. 1
