Open Tabs No 5

On Innovation, Emerging Technology and a Hitchhikers Guide to APIs.

Posted by Holger Reinhardt    on October 3, 2016 in Dev tagged with General, Reading List, Culture

Here is the latest from Open Tabs - my weekly column with links and commentary on my browser tabs.

One week overdue and from the road, this weeks edition will have less commentary than usual.

Innovation

I presented an overview over Corporate Innovation methodology at the BWCon Blue Ocean Meetup. Preparing for my presentation I (re)discovered a very good article from Steve Blank on Why Internal Ventures are Different from External Startups

Emerging Technology

Serverless is all the rage as cloud vendors like AWS try to prevent Docker from commoditizing their platforms. Check out Serverless Computing & Machine Learning if that is of interest to you. And somewhat related: With one click you’ll have a sandboxed JavaScript environment where you can instantly switch node versions, use every npm module without having to wait to install it, and even visualize your results.

I keep an close watch on blockchains since I truely believe in their disruptive potential. So I took note that Microsoft delivered version 1 of ‘Bletchley’ Azure blockchain as a service middleware.

Development

You have kids (like me) and like gaming (like me)? How about Teaching Unity to non-programmers. And yes, not strictly development, but you got to admit that the RPi is a great way to get ‘code where code has never gone before’: Turn Your Raspberry Pi into Out-of-band Monitoring Device using Docker and Build your PiZero Swarm with OTG networking.

Frontend

Check out How Twitter deploys its webpage widgets.

Product & Marketing

If you are not content building products for the customers you already have, check out The Power of Designing Products for Customers You Don’t Have Yet. And yes - The Presentation of Your Value Proposition Matters

Data

How about Five Ways To Create Engaging Data-Driven Stories? And if you are like me constantly being amazed what people do with Github, check out How We Turned Our GitHub README Model Into a Microservice.

Culture

Yes, How much communication is too much? is primarily concerned about marketing, but I am looking for patterns on how to fine tune my own communication to my team and the company at large. And talking of patterns: A personal view on the 800+ results of a tech due diligence survey to early stage startups.

API

‘Thank you for the fish’ - I am looking forward reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Twilio Programmable Voice as well as GraphQL Subscriptions in Apollo Client - Experimental web socket system for near-realtime updates.

Over in the API developer ecosystem corner we find a good writeup on how Virtual Assistants Harness Third Party Developer Power.

The folks at NordicAPIs keep publishing amazing content, like how to Decouple User Identity from API Design to Build Scalable Microservices.

And the @apievangelist scores two tabs this week: My Forkable Minimum API Portal Definition and Providing YAML driven XML, JSON, and Atom using Jekyll And Github

Last but not least - an article on A Twilio Process To Emulate Within Your Own API Operations

This should cover it for this week. Plenty to read, think and catch up on. See you again next week.