Infobip Shift Miami conference takeways

I was recently invited to the InfoBip Shift Miami Conference that took place on US soil for the first time! Miami is quickly becoming one of my favourite US cities so I was thrilled to be able get back there. The infectious energy, vibrant people, relentless hustle, and vibes, are truly what will keep me coming back!

What is InfoBip Shift?

Infobip Shift is a European developer conference that has been around for over a decade pushing the boundaries of delivering educational, engaging, and cutting-edge developer content to a global audience. It was a one track full day conference with prominent speakers from each of their respected domains sharing insights, best practices, and new tooling to look out for.

I came away with a ton of notes that I will be distilling here along with key takeaways. From discussions on microfrontends and API privacy to improving software shipping practices, this conference covered a range of topics. So let’s get into it!

Powering up Micro-frontends at the Edge!

I was particularly excited about Gift Egwuenu’s talk as Gift and I finally got to meet in person for the first time after being involved with the Vue Vixens and Front-end Foxes organization since its early days!

Gift, a Developer Advocate at Cloudflare, discussed the deployment of microfrontends using service workers, particularly highlighting the advantages of leveraging Cloudflare workers on the edge. The concept of breaking out abstractions and modules emerged as a recommended approach for implementing microfrontends effectively.

What if privacy had an API?

Another thought-provoking session revolved around the concept of an API for privacy. Sean Falconer, Head of Developer Relations, delved into Skyflow, an API that securely encapsulates personally identifiable information (PPI) by storing it in a vault. Skyflow's API and GUI provide controlled access to private information while maintaining a single source of truth and copy for user data, offering enhanced privacy and security.

There's No Place Like Production

During Paige Cruz's insightful talk, several valuable takeaways emerged. Emphasizing the importance of testing in production, Paige highlighted the need to focus on mitigation rather than excessive investigation when incidents occur. She also relayed that production issues are rarely the fault of a single person but rather a result of testing systems not being as robust. Identifying root causes, such as unstructured logs, and conducting thorough investigations by comparing acceptance, staging, and production environments were some effective practices shared.

Additionally, Paige advocated for the implementation of distributed tracing to trace logs and gain deeper insights into your system’s behavior. These takeaways underscore the significance of proactive monitoring, comprehensive root cause analysis, and collaborative problem-solving in ensuring robust and resilient production environments.

Writing Documentation That Doesn't Suck

Ekene Eze, Director of Developer Relations at Abridged, emphasized the importance of well-crafted documentation in his session on writing documentation that doesn't suck! He highlighted common issues with documentation, such as using jargons that are too technical, outdated content, inaccessibility and no searchability function.

Ekene suggested utilizing suitable tools and architecture, like the JAMstack, to create fast and accessible documentation sites. One intriguing idea that was shared was integrating documentation into the development lifecycle and adopting a documentation-driven development approach. For instance, updating documentation could be a step in CI between staging and QA or could be simply be worked into the development phase. When writing and implementing documentation, it's crucial to consider the intended audience and purpose, as documentation can inform the product and vice versa.

Onboarding like Uber or Stripe is Simpler Than You Think

Toma Puljak, a software developer at Daytona, shared insights on onboarding processes for engineering organizations. Uber and Stripe were mentioned as examples of companies that have simplified their onboarding experiences. Uber developed "devpod," utilizing Kubernetes for underlying infrastructure, while Stripe introduced "devbox" to enable developers to preview running code in a production-like environment. The concept of in-repo configuration was also mentioned in the context of streamlining onboarding.

Extracting Insights from Unstructured Data: Exploring Vector Search and NLP in Elasticsearch

In this talk, Priscilla Parodi, a Principal Developer Advocate at Elastic, discussed the challenges associated with unstructured data, such as media, videos, and photos. The speaker highlighted the importance of importing and deploying text embedding models into Elasticsearch to harness the power of pre-trained models or proprietary ones for efficient searching and analysis.

10 Ways to Improve How You Ship Software

Brandon Bayer, Co-Founder & CEO at Flightcontrol, shared practical tips for improving software shipping practices. He emphasized the importance of production environments for discovering bugs and recommended setting up notifications for various events, such as failed builds, deploys, service downtime, and unexpected errors. Suggestions for enhancing efficiency included working in small teams, breaking projects into manageable tasks, focusing on quick reviews, and unblocking oneself by merging safe pull requests.

It was truly a day packed with a ton of new learnings, energy and excitement! And of course a great conference always ends with an even greater after party! It was there where I had a chance to connect further with the attendees, organizers and volunteers.

If you’re looking for a conference that effectively converges new tech, practices, and attendees from all corners of the world, check out the next InfoBip Shift happening in Zadar, Croatia on September 18-19!