• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

InRhythm

Your partners in accelerated digital transformation

  • Who We Are
  • Our Work
  • Our Culture
  • Events
  • Testimonials
  • Blog
  • Contact Us

Cloud Engineering

Nov 11 2019

Practice What You Preach

As agile practitioners and thought leaders in software engineering, when we work onsite at our clients’ offices, it is important that we deliver our best. After all, as consultants, we are viewed as experts brought in with the expectation that we instrument and equip them with high velocity teams. In this regard, as we heard from our CEO, Gunjan Doshi, in last weeks Learning & Growth Newsletter, we are agile craftsmen. Our challenge is how we can balance learning on-the-fly while integrated onsite with our clients and managing their project expectations.

It is one thing to operate as a living lab when you are shielded inside the walls of your company’s office. With the right culture, mistakes will be expected and valued. When they result in a learning opportunity they ultimately drive a new insight into efficiency and judgement, however, when you are working onsite with a client, it can be an entirely different experience. Mistakes can result in injured productivity or be viewed as an inhibitor to progress and improving velocity.

Clients understand that software development is partly intuitive as much as it is scientific, and even masters of the craft will occasionally misjudge. Agile methodologies instill the mindset that we constantly iterate upon and improve our solution as well as our process. This not only holds true in what we craft, but also from within ourselves.  As agile craftsmen it is our responsibility to analyze our own efforts, understand and mitigate risks, decipher inefficiencies in complexity, and test and implement modern approaches, all on behalf of our clients. 

As each of us continues on our own path of learning, an opportunity to support each other within our living lab presents itself. We are a community traveling in the same direction. Such says the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. We are bar-raisers and we travel together. In this sense, all of our clients can benefit from any of our thought leaders.

There will be times where we struggle. Perhaps, through a buggy release or during the release of a new product with unanticipated difficulty. We must take feedback with fortitude and cannot be afraid to pivot our strategies, evaluate new implementations, test and ultimately learn.

Learning by doing is often the best form of instruction. Agile craftsmen must recognize that failure is a part of the development process. As Robin Arzon would say, “Failure is the platform to which we build upon”. Often times success only provides validation and feedback is an essential aspect of agile development supporting the continuous loop through which we design, implement, test, and learn.

Earlier this summer, the much anticipated release of Apache Kafka 2.3, a vastly popular component in microservice architecture, enabling streaming and real-time processing of records, was met with its own challenges. One of the persistent bugs was related to the user unsubscribe functionality. This was obviously a critical part of their offering today given the growing requirements related to data privacy and simply an essential aspect of any offering to ensure customer satisfaction. I’m sure everyone will agree, in today’s modern service oriented technology landscape, that the customer is in control and products must incorporate their needs if they wish to remain in business.

It’s simply not easy to project our own living lab culture when onsite with a client. The pressure is already high to meet deadlines and each of our own efforts is codependent on others’ to execute and deliver. Another factor can be pride. Nobody wants to err and be labeled as the bottleneck.

So how will you manage to accomplish this? Observation and communication. Follow what the signs say in the subway stations and airports. “If you see something, say something.” This is actually universal advice and is highly applicable to agile development efforts. By remaining sharply aware of what you’re doing and how that work is impacting those around you, your sprint, project, and team, you will be in a better position to anticipate potential challenges and outcomes. You can then communicate these as you predict them or as they are happening so that you can work collaboratively with your client and your colleagues onsite to address them. Sometimes simply managing expectations can afford you the opportunity to make mistakes, and as we know, making them earlier saves future development efforts.

Failing is a part of the process and not having the visibility and foresight to identify and cross-communicate about potential issues creates risk and impedes high-velocity teams. Agile craftsmen are expected to be nimble minded, to think and learn fast. We are expected to err on occasion and it’s all about how we handle that situational awareness and how we are communicating to others so that we all learn and grow together.

Written by Robert Morrell · Categorized: Cloud Engineering, Culture, Web Engineering · Tagged: agile, challenges, coaching, engineering, inrhythm, insights, living lab, product development, software, tech, tips

Jul 18 2019

InRhythm’s Cloud Engineering Digest: Cloud, scale, microservices… and Java is there for you.

In this new digest you’ll find latest news, updates and recommendations about cloud-native architecture, patterns and anti-patterns in distributed systems and microservices.

It’s official: Apache Kafka 2.3 has been released!

Micronaut 1.1 GA has been released. You can find more details here.

Apache Dubbo, a Java-Based RPC Framework, Graduates to Top-Level Project

Project Loom: Lightweight Java threads

GraalVM 19.1: Compiling Faster

Java 13 Enters Feature Freeze and Ramp down

AWS Control Tower: The easiest way to set up and govern a new, secure multi-account AWS environment

Read:

5 Principles for Cloud-native Architecture: What it is and how to master it

API Gateways and Service Meshes: Opening the Door to Application Modernization

Patterns in Distributed Systems

Microservices adoption anti-patterns

Tell us what you think! What are you reading now? Let us know in the comments below or @GetInRhythm on Twitter

Written by Nick Logvynenko · Categorized: Cloud Engineering, InRhythm News, Learning and Development, Newsletters · Tagged: cloud engineering, JavaScript, microservices, scale

Jul 03 2019

The Potential of Peer Groups: InRhythm’s Learning and Growth Newsletter


July 2nd: The Potential of Peer Groups


As we head into the 4th of July to celebrate America’s Independence, I’m reminded of the potential and the power that comes from unity and fellowship. Nearly two and a half centuries ago, representatives from the Thirteen Colonies signed the Declaration of Independence and declared that the Continental Congress was and would forever be completely independent from the monarch of Britain – a collective first step toward forming the United States of America. 

I mention this bit of American history because it relates to the mentality of peer groups, which I’ve become heavily involved in and passionate about. The Thirteen Colonies were self-governing, yet had very similar political, constitutional and legal systems. They began collaborating with one another instead of with Britain directly, which cultivated a sense of shared identity and collaboration to achieve success.

Peer groups offer an experienced based forum for exchanging ideas and experiences. I not only belong to a formal CEO peer group, which meets a few times a year, but also have an informal group of peers I meet with regularly. Members have no involvement in each other’s businesses so there is a level of openness when discussing the challenges we all face – from increasing revenue to hiring talent. There is a level of comfortability and candidness when discussing insecurities and concerns, which can be difficult to do for the first time internally.

Peer groups are also invaluable when it comes to the growth of employeesbecause peer-to-peer learning taps into the skills that already exist within an organization and allows employees to share their expertise to help each other learn. These groups also create a safe space without the presence fo hierarchy and feeling judged, and helps employees feel empowered to act as leaders. InRhythm is an organization built on the foundation of continuous learning and growth and InRhythmU was created to do just that. 

Throughout history, people have been leveraging each other to learn, grow and make changes to improve. What experiences have you had with peer groups? Share your thoughts with @GetInRhythm or on the InRhythmU blog.

Thanks and Keep Growing,

Gunjan Doshi
CEO, InRhythm

What We’re Reading Around the Web

Why Every Entrepreneur Needs a Peer Advisory Group
(3 min. read)
WRAL TechWire
“We’ve learned how that sense of isolation can lead to depression and anxiety, chipping away at one’s health and wellness. As a young entrepreneur, I felt that I was alone in facing the challenges in making a dream become a reality. I had nowhere to go to share my struggles, to exchange ideas, to learn from the mistakes of those who had gone before me.”

How to Help Your Employees Learn From Each Other
(6 min. read)
Harvard Business Review
“Peer-to-peer learning is also uniquely well suited to the way we learn. People gain new skills best in any situation that includes all four stages of what we call the “Learning Loop”: gain knowledge; practice by applying that knowledge; get feedback; and reflect on what has been learned. Peer-to-peer learning encompasses all of these.”

10 Reasons to Join a CEO Peer Group
(4 min. read)  
Inc.
“The beauty of joining a peer group is that by listening to your peers, you will see them dealing with problems and opportunities that your business has yet to encounter. It’s like looking into the future.”

How a Peer Group Transformed my Life and my Business
(4 min. read)
Forbes
“Sharing my personal doubts and fears—and finding others who could share their life lessons—opened my eyes to how much I could learn from those on the road ahead of me and enabled me to face my challenges head-on.”

Written by Gunjan Doshi · Categorized: Cloud Engineering, InRhythm News, Newsletters

Jun 19 2019

The future of Emotional Intelligence: InRhythm’s Learning and Growth Newsletter


June 16th: Mixed Emotions – Technology and Artificial Intelligence


To celebrate Father’s Day, I spent this past weekend with my kids at Woodloch – a kid-friendly lake resort in Pennsylvania. It was a great for a quick get-away, and I highly recommend it. During our stay I came across a poster on the wall which contained a quote from ESPN commentator and college basketball coach, Jim Valvano.

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”

I was impacted by this quote because conceptually it’s so simple, yet truly profound. As humans we are so consumed with our day to day, that experiencing just two of these emotions in a 24 hour period is likely to prove itself difficult. I want to laugh, think and be moved to tears every day, but how? It got me thinking a lot about the advancements of AI, but also how limited technology still is. While technology has enabled us in so many ways, can AI really detect human emotion, and furthermore, help us experience it fully? 

How do you feel about the future of AI and emotional intelligence? Share your thoughts with @GetInRhythm or on the InRhythmU blog.

Thanks and Keep Growing,

Gunjan Doshi
CEO, InRhythm

What We’re Reading Around the Web

When our Devices can Read our Emotions
(12 min. read)
MIT Technology Review 
“In the emerging field of “emotion-tracking AI,” companies are studying the facial expressions captured by our devices’ cameras to allow software of all kinds become more responsive to our moods and cognitive states.”

Amazon is Working on a Device that can Read Human Emotions
(3 min. read)
Bloomberg
“Designed to work with a smartphone app, the device has microphones paired with software that can discern the wearer’s emotional state from the sound of his or her voice, according to the documents and a person familiar with the program. Eventually the technology could be able to advise the wearer how to interact more effectively with others, the documents show.”

How Facial Recognition will Change Driving
(2 min. read)
Fortune
“Advances in facial recognition technology mean machines can not only recognize different people, but also how they are feeling. This means the next generation of automobiles may contain features that scan drivers’ faces for fatigue or other signs of impairment.”

Move Your Organization from Fear to Fearlessness
How Emotion-Tracking AI will Change Computing as we Know It (11 min. read)
Digital Trends
“Welcome to the world of affective computing, a heady blend of psychology and computer science. Based on the idea that something as ephemeral as emotion can be captured and quantified as its own data point, it seeks to create technology that’s able to accurately mine our emotions.”

Written by Gunjan Doshi · Categorized: Cloud Engineering, InRhythm News, Newsletters

Jun 11 2019

InRhythm’s Cloud Engineering Digest: Cloud world news, Git, Splunk and 10 books to read in 2019

May was pretty quiet, but the JVM/cloud world is moving forward.

Gloo is a feature-rich, Kubernetes-native ingress controller, and next-generation API gateway.

Pivotal continues improvement of Spring Cloud Data Flow and releases 2.1 GA version. This lib got few major updates in a last month and seems it’s priority for Pivotal

Git 2.22 released

Microsoft Launches Several New Machine Learning Services  and Extends Its Cognitive Services

Open Liberty 19.0.0.4 Released with Support for Reactive Streams Operators 1.0 and JDK 12

Splunk Connected Experiences: The Power of Splunk Wherever You Are

Another cool feature from Splunk: Splunk Augmented Reality (AR) provides direct access to the Splunk dashboard by scanning a QR code or NFC tag that is pasted to a specific server rack, or any real-world object, with a mobile device.

JEP 355: Text Blocks (Preview) – multi line strings are now text blocks, with the preview (probably) coming in Java 13

Read:

10 Books Java Developers Should Read in 2019
Reactive Relational Database Transactions
Consumer driven contracts with Spring Cloud Contract
Corda: Looking Forward and Back, Blockchain on a JVM Stack
How to create a code review process that doesn’t suck

Tell us what you think! What are you reading now? Let us know in the comments below or @GetInRhythm on Twitter

Written by Nick Logvynenko · Categorized: Cloud Engineering, InRhythm News, Learning and Development, Newsletters

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

Interested in learning more?
Connect with Us
InRhythm

140 Broadway
Suite 2270
New York, NY 10005

1 800 683 7813
get@inrhythm.com

Copyright © 2019 · InRhythm on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.

Necessary Always Enabled

Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.

Non-necessary

Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.