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The role of software project managers is to see a project to fruition while software developers are expected to develop the product, but oftentimes, these roles are interchanged irresponsibly. By Andrew Burak.

You’ve been there: working with a software developer who you desperately want to focus on everything software but who finds themselves knee-deep in scheduling, budgeting, and meetings with stakeholders.

The article main parts are:

• Software project management is important in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
• Project management and software development complement each other
• The future role of project managers in software development
• Interview with the founder of My Theory Test App by James May
  • The use of online software project management tools
  • Embracing a Systems Analyst/Project Manager hybrid role
  • Specializing in managing remote teams and projects

Project managers bring relationship management to software development in addition to overseeing all management-related tasks that could impede the progress of the software project.

Software project management and software development complement each other by working together in a way that allows both to fully immerse themselves in their respective job functions without any implications from the other’s role.

As part of Uber engineering’s wide efforts to reach profitability, recently our team was focused on reducing cost of compute capacity by improving efficiency. Some of the most impactful work was around GOGC optimization. In this blog we want to share our experience with a highly effective, low-risk, large-scale, semi-automated Go GC tuning mechanism. By Cristian Velazquez.

Uber’s tech stack is composed of thousands of microservices, backed by a cloud-native, scheduler-based infrastructure. Most of these services are written in Go. Our team, Maps Production Engineering, has previously played an instrumental role in significantly improving the efficiency of multiple Java services by tuning GC. At the beginning of 2021, we explored the possibilities of having a similar impact on Go-based services.

The article then explains:

• GOGC tuner
• Dynamic and diverse: One size does not fit all
• A case for automation
• Observability
• Implementation
• Impact

Garbage collection is one of the most elusive and underestimated performance influencers of an application. Go’s robust GC mechanism and simplified tuning, our diverse, large-scale Go services footprint, and a robust internal platform (Go, compute, observability) collectively allowed us to make such a large-scale impact. We expect to continue improving how we tune GC as the problem space itself is evolving, due to changes in the tech and our competency. Super interesting read!

We’ll talk through our design decisions in building the extension, and along the way we’ll touch on the Language Server Protocol and, more generally, how an IDE extension works. By osohq.com.

The article dives straight in:

• Why we chose VS Code
• Using the Language Server Protocol (LSP)
• Design
• Why we chose WebAssembly
• Deciding against a Rust LSP Library
• Implementation

With our sights set on Wasm, implementing the language server in Rust largely went off without a hitch, and we landed on a clean, three-part design consisting of a TypeScript entrypoint module, a second, tiny TypeScript module that delegates connection handling to Microsoft’s vscode-languageserver package, and the polar-language-server crate compiled to Wasm.

By splitting the language server into a thin TypeScript wrapper and a Rust core, we were able to build on top of some nice LSP scaffolding that exists in the JavaScript ecosystem while still implementing all of the new diagnostic-wrangling logic in Rust. Nice one!

Traditional API architectures like SOAP and REST have been powering the web for a long time. But over the past five years, a change towards a more flexible and frontend-driven approach to API protocols has started, using GraphQL. But moving from a traditional API architecture like REST towards GraphQL can be challenging. Not only does your team need to adapt to GraphQL, but it also means you could be losing your investment in your current API architecture. By Mark Smallcombe.

Luckily, you can create a clear migration path from REST to GraphQL using StepZen. You get the advantage of adding GraphQL to your stack, but you can still leverage all your current APIs. In this post, author will show how you can use your existing REST API endpoints while migrating to GraphQL.

The article covers:

• Mapping REST API endpoints to GraphQL
• Combining REST API endpoints
• Migration path with Authentication

You map REST API endpoints to GraphQL types and operations. These types and operations can combine the responses of multiple REST API endpoints at once. If you’ve already invested in your application’s authentication flow, you can leverage these investments by adding this flow to your GraphQL schema. Nice one!

When machines need to communicate with one another and exchange data, they require certain formatting for specific data types. That’s where SOAP API and REST API come into play. They allow for communication and transfer of data, but each is different in several ways. From implementation to their required resources, various attributes separate one from the other. By Mark Smallcombe.

The article then describes the following:

• What is REST API?
• What is SOAP API?
• Differences outlined
• How API services work

Compared to REST APIs, SOAP APIs are more specified in their use cases and are necessary for fewer instances. However, SOAP protocols are still required for some business processes, but for true flexibility, they aren’t as capable or nimble.

If you want ease and versatility, REST APIs are the best solution for businesses who want to connect to multiple platforms and websites without issues or complex specifics. They are widely used and easier to work with than SOAP APIs. Good read!

As with any Web Service, the microservices need to be protected from unauthorized access. So how do you protect each of your services? How does one share the token that is received from the Auth service?. By Anu Viswan.

Exposing your microservices directly to the client and allowing them to directly communicate with all your services would have its own problems, so in this example, we will also add a layer of API Gateway which would be the single point of contact for all your clients.

The Gateways, in addition to providing a single point of access, also adds a security layer over your microservices. It could also support load balancing and reducing round trips when the client requires calls to multiple microservices. With regard to authentication, the gateway could pass the authentication token to the downstream paths. In this example, we would be using Ocelot for building our gateway.

The article main parts:

• The working
• Auth service
• API gateway
• UserService
• Client

In this article, we addressed how to authenticate the different individual services in the microservice architecture. We also used the wonderful Ocelot library for building API Gateways. The services and the gateways are loosely coupled with each other, while the client is having a single point of contact in the gateway. Good read!

GraphQL is a great technology for microservices because you can use it as a data layer for these microservices. One use case is to combine the data from all these services into a single, unified API. By Roy Derks.

But building this data layer can be very time-consuming since you need to connect the microservices into one schema. In this post, you’ll learn step-by-step how to build a data layer for microservices with GraphQL in a declarative way.

The article main points are:

• Why use GraphQL for microservices?
• Building a data layer using GraphQL
• Setting up the project
• Creating schemas for microservices

There are many ways to create a data layer by creating a custom GraphQL server, but this is very time-consuming and error-prone. Luckily, the tool StepZen makes it easier to create a GraphQL data layer (or server) by writing GraphQL SDL only. Good read.

No-code is a set of tools that allow you to create websites, apps and software all without writing a single line of code. By Bobi Robson.

A proof of concept (POC) is something that is built to test an idea and to prove that it is worthy of investment. It is different to it’s sibling, the minimal viable product (MVP) in that it doesn’t have to be built on. Both share the trait that they should be created at the lowest cost (in both effort and money) possible.

We connected a few no-code tools to help us to deliver the testable version (proof of concept) of the tool. The tools that we used for this case were, Typeform, Docupilot, Google Sheets, Google DataStudio, and Zapier.

Typeform is a powerful no-code form tool. It looks great straight out of the box and is easy to adjust to brand guidelines. It also responds well to different devices and changes the form size to fit their screens. The tool needed to produce a non editable document that outlined the results. To do this, we connected the Typeform results (saved in Google Sheets) to Docupilot to produce a unique PDF of the results each time all steps were completed. Google Data Studio is a pretty powerful data visualisation tool that you can use to create reports from a google sheet. In this case I used it to highlight the key insights we’d decided on. Nice one!

The semiconductor chip crisis is real, and it’s had a serious impact on our lives. Cars are more expensive and harder to build. Computer makers are rushing to keep up with an insatiable consumer demand for remote work and school devices. Expect low stock and high prices to last until 2023 for GPUs, consoles and many other gadgets. By D. Hardawar @devindra.

While it’s an issue that affects practically everyone, the chip shortage has been particularly painful for gamers. A year after the PlayStation 5’s launch, it’s still practically impossible to order one. As Forrester Analytics’ Glenn O’Donnell tells Engadget, the issue is mostly a simple supply and demand problem.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang echoed that sentiment in a recent Yahoo Finance interview, saying he doesn’t think there are any “magic bullets” when it comes to dealing with the supply chain. Huang also noted that NVIDIA’s own group of suppliers is multi-sourced and diverse, so the shortage shouldn’t dramatically affect the development of new products.

In the US, there’s a glimmer of hope that the Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), which includes $52 billion in funding for the CHIPs for America Act, could spur on more semiconductor production. Good read!

Imagine having a business meeting where you are given puzzles instead of information. To get to the KPI dashboard to round up your performance, you need to piece the puzzle together. Sounds funny, right? Well, in reality, meetings or preparing a report often consist of pure efforts to obtain and interpret the right data.By Blaz Abe.

Furthermore, just having the data communicating nicely doesn’t necessarily prompt the change you need to improve your business. But what if the clear picture, that also inspires action, is right in front of you the whole time?

The article then describes:

• Actionable Reporting put into practice
• Why dashboards fail
• Where should I direct my attention to
• Scaled charts help you understand what is happening
• Proper KPI dashboard example
• How to design actionable KPI dashboards
• 7 components of a great landing page in Power BI

One of the things we see most often when it comes to report pages is that people do not make them actionable. They tend to focus on key performance indicators, like total amounts, gross profit margins, cost of goods sold, quantities, and others. Good read!