A Fork in the Code: cli and Powershell projects

chuck.* 🥑 — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 01:09:26 +0000

In this series, I’ll be highlighting open source projects and openly available code. You’ll find examples, tools, libraries, and projects that I’ve discovered or that are managed by members of the community to enable other developers.

In this first post, let’s look at cli-jsonnet and akamaipowershell.

cli-jsonnet is used by service reliability engineers and software developers to manage Akamai delivery configurations and is known to be especially valuable for commerce and public sector customers using CDN services. It’s ideal for people in charge of managing multiple clones of the same configuration, or who are managing many configurations with shared components.

It was originally built to address the complexity of switching large configurations to an as-code model, making it easier to turn existing CDN delivery configurations into usable IaC code templates, ready to be committed to version control. cli-jsonnet can also output a ready-to-deploy project structure for Terraform and Bossman.

The project is led by Akamai Sr Enterprise Architect and Developer Champion, Anthony Hogg. Anthony makes updates to address bug fixes and DX improvements based on developer feedback. The project has been stable, but evolution of products and APIs may require future commits. There is an accompanying Postman collection available which helps customers maintain their unit tests as code and reuse their configuration data to generate Postman test suites which can be run in postman or on the command line.

Originally built to help support a particular customer, akamaipowershell now helps any Akamai admin who needs to use a combination of scripts and individual commands to manage their Akamai estate. According to project lead, Stuart Macleod, Enterprise Architect and Developer Champion at Akamai, the primary design tenet was “one CLI to rule them all”. As a result, all the PowerShell functions have a consistent interface, without any dependencies.

akamaipowershell is used by admins performing day to day maintenance that might fall outside of IaC designs such as Terraform. The tool is also intended for users working more closely with the APIs as the PowerShell module tends to have a 1 to 1 relationship with the API endpoints as opposed to the CLI which masks a lot of what it does. It’s been found valuable by financial services customers who often have heavily locked down PCs and are able to use pre-installed PowerShell.

Stuart maintains the project, making updates based on new API functionalities or finding a gap in capabilities. An upcoming release will cover the new AppSec endpoints that were recently released. Stuart has carefully accepted two relatively small contributions. Future improvements may include new documentation and some kind of automation where portions of the code writes itself based on RAML or Swagger docs.

Thank you to Anthony Hogg, Stuart Macleod, Julia Tetrud, and Mike Elissen for contributing to this post.

Staying in Touch with the Creative Side of DevRel

chuck.* 🥑 — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 21:25:03 +0000

Developer relations and advocacy teams focus almost entirely on communities of programmers. And rightfully so -- companies have DevRel groups to engage and enable developers interested and/or actively building on their platforms.

To achieve goals for growth and success, programs usually must focus all resources on those that are coding. While creativity can always be found among much of what developers build, through their innovation and experiences, there are select communities to look at that I find always so fulfilling to engage.

Many of the most inspiring technical communities are very creative in nature. In several industries, especially gaming, programmers and artists work side by side. So from time to time, for inspiration, perspective, and outright fun, it’s healthy for developer-focused programs to engage more purely creative groups.

My teams have always learned so much from creative technical communities – Some of the most fulfilling developer programs I’ve managed have involved platforms like Flash and Unity, where the community includes professionals like game developers, artists, and designers - and where the community can easily share their work and thoughts with people from a wide range of disciplines. However, DevRel naturally puts emphasis on engaging and enabling developers so it can be challenging to surface, showcase, share, and get inspired by the creative side of technical communities.

For me, the further “into” a technical platform I get, the more I observe and appreciate the level of design and interaction around it. I’ve gone deep into platforms to enable geolocation and mapping, media streaming, AI, augmented reality, and recently, cloud services. Through learning and teaching countless APIs and writing docs and examples to support them, what ultimately drives me is seeing the experiences and solutions that developers build. When I need to tap my own creative side, I always find my way to coding games or smart devices - lately using CircuitPython. This creative outlet has a big payoff for me. I love observing how others interact with what I’ve built and that motivates me to continue exploring what can be done.

Our team at Akamai supports a wide range of developers. Most use our services and solutions to deliver, optimize, and secure experiences and content for their customers. Within almost every developer is something, usually an interactive experience with technology, that set them on their path. To bring out the many talents and interests within the technical community, our team started to explore different creative outlets that people we know use to express themselves.

Back to gaming. It’s one of our most exciting industries and our entire team often celebrates games we love and we take pride in knowing that Akamai enables some of the most innovative features in gaming to be delivered worldwide.

In an effort to inspire the creative side of the technical community, and, really, because we all love gaming, we created a new GitHub repo with artwork from one of our favorite Voxel artists Zach Soares. Zach is a celebrated Voxel artist, teacher, and the creative director at Bunnyhug Games. In the new repo, we added instructions on how to use the files and how to get started. There are several Voxel tools to work with, including VoxEdit, Blender, Qubicle, Avoyd, and MagicaVoxel. You can download Zach’s artwork to inspire your own creation, or use them as building blocks for your own designs.

In Zach’s words, Voxel art is a “3D visualization of points of data in space.” Since seeing how flexible Voxel art is and hearing Zach’s passion for artwork, we wanted to see what the rest of the community would come up with, so Zach helped us put together a contest (running Aug 8 - 29) that inspires artists to revisit their favorite childhood video games and recreate scenes in Voxel. We partnered with the open source Voxel editor MagicaVoxel to host discussions during the contest so participants can discuss issues and share their work. Everyone has the chance to win prizes awarded by both Akamai and MagicaVoxel.

The relationship between artists and programmers within communities, especially gaming, is so significant to powering incredible online experiences. According to Zach, “Artists love it when the programmers make the thing move and then programmers love it when the thing that moves looks good.”

We hope this contest inspires the community and showcases the brilliance of the creative and technical communities that make gaming (and a lot more) possible!

Check out the contest, all the awesome prizes, and how you can enter here: https://github.com/Akamai-Community/inspiring-game-scenes

Watch Zach Soares as a guest on my Developer’s Edge show here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RydidSdtlak

DEV Community: chuck.* 🥑

A Fork in the Code: cli and Powershell projects

Staying in Touch with the Creative Side of DevRel