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Tips for Building SaaS Products Efficiently Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

Since 2015, the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry has grown to an estimated value of $31.5 billion. In 2022, it is expected to grow by up to $171.9 billion, according to the research. This means more companies are building SaaS products. After all, cloud computing makes SaaS products cost-efficient, scalable, and reliable. Are you looking to create Software as a Service (SaaS) products for your company? Then, this blog is for you. Read on. What is a SaaS Application? A SaaS application refers to a software licensed Software as a Service application. Using the SaaS approach, companies can market their applications as a service where customers can subscribe. These services are hosted with the help of the cloud, which means the application or customer data doesn’t have to be physically installed on the computer.  Here are some key benefits of SaaS applications: There is no need to buy expensive hardware, which makes it very cost-efficient. SaaS applications can be upgraded o

Jellyfish announces benchmarks for engineering leaders

The newly announced Jellyfish Benchmarks enable engineering leaders to add context to engineering metrics and performance by introducing a method for comparisons.  Jellyfish customers now have insight at the percentile level as to how they stack up against their peers since the complex nature of modern software engineering often fails to give engineers proper context, according to the company.  Engineers who opt-in will have their data anonymized and added to the benchmarking Jellyfish customer pool. Among the key metrics are allocation, delivery, productivity, and collaboration.  Allocation benchmarks enable teams to understand how their resource investments compare to other engineering organizations. Delivery can be benchmarked using metrics such as cycle time, productivity using metrics like issues resolved, and collaboration using metrics such as PR reviews. New benchmarking capabilities also enable DevOps teams to track against DORA metrics including deployment frequency, lead

Linux Foundation, CNCF, and Ethical Intelligence partner on new ethics in open-source course

The Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and Ethical Intelligence have all partnered up to create a free online course on ethics in open-source development .  It is designed for developers looking to apply ethics to their coding practice, and for product managers looking to incorporate ethics-by-design technology into their workflows.  According to the Linux Foundation, developers aren’t always thinking through how a piece of code could be used by a bad actor or how an algorithm might affect different classes of people.   They explained that this is why it is important to include ethical principles like transparency and accessibility in open source.  After this course, students should be able to assess technology for ethical blind spots, apply ethical critical thinking techniques, understand the Ethics Journey Cycle in open-source development, and utilize ethics as a decision-making tool for risk mitigation. They will also be prepared for roles like a Respon

Planview Announces Strategic Acquisition of Tasktop

Planview, a global leader in Portfolio Management and Work Management, today announced that the company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Tasktop, a pioneer and leader in Value Stream Management (VSM). Based in Vancouver, Canada, Tasktop has 200+ employees and in FY21 saw record growth with 43% year-over-year user expansion. “As companies strive to differentiate, survive, thrive, and disrupt their markets, there is a surge in digitalization and transformation initiatives. While well-intended, the facts show that most digital transformation efforts fail to achieve value for the business,” said Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer at Planview. “Together, we provide an exciting and much needed capability that will help our customers to connect the business of software delivery – enabling them to efficiently transform their organizations faster with more confidence, and a better ability to achieve desired business outcomes.” “Connecting Planview’s leadership in enterpri

Apollo GraphQL releases the supergraph

Apollo GraphQL today introduced the supergraph, a network of a company’s data, microservices, and digital capabilities that enables product and engineering teams to create a better experience for users.  A supergraph works as a composition layer and facilitates collaboration between backend data services and front-end applications and devices. The supergraph also helps to control complexity by automating organization-wide composability that delivers better performance and several ways to orchestrate and recombine business domain models in order to meet future needs. With this, Apollo is also releasing major updates to the core components of its supergraph stack. These include Apollo Router, a free and open Rust-based supergraph runtime, as well as two new features for Apollo Studio’s free tier.  These new features are Schema Checks, which help to be sure that newly composed schema will not break client applications, and Launches, which offers visibility into the schema-checking an

Report: Upskilling is becoming a major challenge for organizations

Having insufficient IT resources is one of the major challenges that IT organizations are facing today, and companies will need to implement upskilling programs in order to combat this.  According to DevOps Institute’s 2022 Upskilling IT report, 40% of those surveyed said that the resource skill shortage is one of their top three challenges. While 52% said that they have formal upskilling in place, 27% are just starting to develop one. The findings also showed that upskilling is a professional and organizational imperative, with the top five must-have skill capabilities for upskilling being process framework skills, human skills, technical skills, automation skills, and leadership skills.  In addition, almost 60% of respondents said that they plan to recruit for operations engineering, while 40% are planning for team leaders and 30% for site reliability engineers.  Security and cybersecurity were also found to be the most important technical skills, according to the report. Ninety-

CD Foundation announces new specification for defining event data format

The CD Foundation has announced CDEvents, a vendor-neutral specification for defining the format of event data.  A standardized set of specifications will enable an ecosystem of tools that can collect, store, visualize and analyze events across CD platforms to help measure DevOps metrics and performance and visualize end-to-end workflows. “CDEvents open the doors to scalable and decoupled integrations within the software supply chain and create the potential for greater visibility and measurability of continuous delivery workflows,” said Andrea Frittoli, open source developer advocate at IBM, co-creator of the CDEvents project, and member of the CDF Technical Oversight Committee. Currently, developers must constantly re-learn how to consume events, limiting the potential for libraries, tooling, and infrastructure to aid the delivery of event data across environments. “The Continuous Delivery Foundation is actively improving the developer experience. CDEvents increases interoperabi

Software supply chain hygiene: The big picture

Organizations have been forced to learn the hard way over the past year the importance of software supply chain security.  In late 2021, a vulnerability was detected in Log4j, which is a framework for logging in Java that is used as a dependency in over 7,000 open-source projects. This was just one example of a software supply chain security risk that companies have had to pay attention to in recent years.  Managing what’s in your software supply chain is not only important for security purposes, but it can also eliminate technical debt and innovation tax, leading to increased productivity and revenue.  In a recent SD Times Live! event, “ Software Supply Chain Hygeine: The Big Picture ,” Steve Poole, developer advocate at Sonatype, discussed how to achieve those benefits by investing in software supply chain hygiene.  “There’s no real rocket science here,” said Poole. “If you’re going to produce better quality software, you’ve got to have a better, more secure pipeline. And you’ve

Codefresh announces hosted version of GitOps platform

Codefresh , the continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) solution, today announced that its CD platform will be made available as a fully-hosted solution for GitOps teams looking to achieve frictionless, GitOps based continuous software delivery in the cloud.  This new hosted offering works to provide Argo CD as a Service as well as introduces new DORA dashboards and integrations with multiple CI providers at no cost for small teams and community projects. According to Codefresh, the hosted GitOps service is a simplistic way for users to get started with GitOps. Additionally, it is cost-effectively scalable for bigger teams that target multi-cluster, multi-application deployments. Codefresh GitOps CD will also add new dashboards, including fully integrated DevOps Research and Assessment tracking that provides visibility across Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and Time to Restore Service easily filterable by project and team.  For the first time, Code

Solve TypeError: list indices must be integers or slices, not str in Python Gorakh Gupta The Crazy Programmer

In python, we can have many types of errors in our code. One of the most common errors is TypeError: list indices must be integers or slices, not str. In this article, we are going to see what causes this error and how can we fix this error. This error mostly comes when we are working with lists in python. Whether we are printing the contents of a list or modifying any value at a particular position in the list. In this article, we will discuss some points to remember when working with lists so that the probability of occurring these types of errors will be much less. Case 1: # Declare a List l1 = [10, 20, 30, 40, 50] # Get Index input from User index = input("Enter the Index at which you want to change value: ") # Get the number from user number = int(input("Enter the final value you want in list : ")) # Update the value in list l1[index] = number # Print the list after updation print(f"Updated list is : {l1}") Output: PS C : \ Users \ ASUS \ Des

AWS increases its commitment to OpenSSF by $10 million

To address the ongoing concerns in the industry regarding supply chain security, AWS has announced it is increasing its investment in the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) by $10 million over the next three years.   “Security is our top priority at AWS,” said Mark Ryland, director of the Office of the CISO at AWS. “As a result, we are committed to contributing to the quality and safety of open source software. We see great value in contributing both engineering efforts and also projects, tools, training, and guidelines to help improve the security of open source software. These efforts benefit us, our customers, and the broader community.” OpenSSF is an initiative that is working to identify and fix security vulnerabilities in open source software.  The goals of OpenSSF include developing improved tooling, training, research, best practice, and vulnerability disclosure practices. In October 2021, the Linux Foundation had announced that it raised $10 million for OpenSSF fr

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare recently announced that it would be open-sourcing its Cloudflare Workers runtime, which is a platform for building serverless apps.  The decision came about because when talking to developers not yet using Cloudflare Workers, their two main hesitations tend to be that they worry about vendor lock-in and they want a local development environment. According to Cloudflare, though these might seem like unrelated concerns, they both led to the same question from developers: Can Cloudflare open source Workers?  Cloudflare’s director of product Rita Kozlov explained in a blog post that it had never been Cloudflare’s intention to introduce opaqueness into the stack, but that it couldn’t give developers the ability to program on its network at the expense of performance or security.   It first looked at building its runtime on V8, but that introduced issues like latency, so then it turned to web standards, specifically the Service Workers API. Though Service Workers was designed

Microsoft launches new lab for building inclusive tech, unveils new adaptive accesories

Microsoft has been putting a lot of effort into building more inclusive solutions for all of its users over the past few years, and at its Microsoft Ability Summit, it announced new updates on that front.  It has launched the Inclusive Tech Lab, which is a successor to a lab that was created by the Xbox team. The purpose of the lab will be to “to learn and develop specifically for people with various types of disabilities.” Compared to the original lab, this one is larger and will be more equipped to bring in visitors who can participate in the product-making process.  Though the lab will showcase Microsoft’s accessible hardware, software, and services, it will mostly serve as a design incubator for inclusive products.  “It is a place designed to demonstrate what is possible when you intentionally and proactively include people with disabilities in the product-making process and strive to build products that are genuinely inclusive by design,” Dave Dame, director of accessibility at

Flutter 3 released with multiplatform capabilities

Google has announced that the open-source UI software development kit, Flutter, has been updated and Flutter 3 is now generally available. This announcement came as part of the Google I/O keynote and completes Flutter’s roadmap from a mobile-centric to a multiplatform framework. With Flutter 3, users are enabled to build experiences for six platforms from a single codebase, offering developers heightened productivity and enabling startups to bring new ideas to the full addressable market from the start. Additionally, this release offers added support for macOS and Linux apps, bringing users new input and interaction models, compilation and build support, accessibility and internalization, and platform-specific integration.  According to the company, the goal of this is to provide customers with the flexibility to take advantage of the underlying operating system while sharing as much UI and logic as they choose.  Flutter has invested in supporting both Intel and Apple Silicon on

Android 13 Beta 2 now available with strong emphasis on privacy improvements

As a part of Google I/O , the team at Android announced the release of the second beta of Android 13. According to the company, this release is intended to gauge user feedback and encourage collaboration with the community. This second beta release places a strong emphasis on both privacy and security as well as developer productivity, core themes of Android 13.  In pursuit of this, this release includes a new permission for sending notifications, a privacy- protecting p hoto picker, and improved permissions when pairing with nearby devices and accessing media files.  Additionally, it is now easier to support app-specific language settings, match your app’s icon to the user’s chosen theme colors, and build with modern standards such as HDR video, Bluetooth LE Audio, and MIDI 2.0 over USB.  Android 13 Beta 2 also continues to provide users with an even better OS on tablets and other large screen devices, offering better tools to improve the experience.  To get started using Be