DEV Community: Nikema

PayPal Streamlines Checkout Integration Workflows with GitHub Codespaces

Nikema — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 22:57:47 +0000

In the fast-paced digital payment world, seamless integration is essential for developers aiming to embed PayPal into their applications. This is particularly important when integrating with payment gateways, like PayPal, which are pivotal in ensuring successful and secure transactions.

Traditional challenges in local integration environments involve time-intensive configuration, potential issues due to environment disparities, security complexities with sensitive data, and the burden of continuous maintenance to adapt to changing needs. To streamline the integration process for developers and address these challenges, PayPal has introduced an innovative feature to our integration guides — the “Open in Codespaces” button. This addition offers developers the ability to edit and run our sample applications in GitHub Codespaces.

How GitHub Codespaces will improve the PayPal developer experience:

By leveraging GitHub Codespaces, we aim to make integrations smoother, faster, and more accessible for PayPal developers. Here are some benefits of using GitHub Codespaces as your development environment to explore our sample applications:

Simplified Onboarding and Setup

With GitHub Codespaces, developers can now instantly access and run a sample application with just their PayPal Sandbox application credentials and a few clicks. The entire development environment is pre-configured, reducing setup time and allowing developers to dive right into the integration process.

Enhanced Collaboration

When you click the “Open in Codespaces” button, you’ll gain immediate access to a PayPal sample application repository in a cloud-based coding environment. GitHub Codespaces allows developers from around the world to collaborate, share ideas, and edit code with others using the Visual Studio Live Share extension.

Risk-Free Experimentation

GitHub Codespaces offers a safe environment to experiment with PayPal’s sample integrations. By creating separate branches, you can test new ideas, explore different features, and experiment without the fear of breaking existing code. This risk-free space encourages creativity and enables developers to confidently develop innovative solutions.

Standardized Development Environment

GitHub Codespaces ensures a consistent and standardized development environment for all PayPal developers. The “Open in Codespaces” button provides access to the GitHub Codespaces environment in just a few clicks, ensuring that every developer works in the same environment, reducing potential compatibility issues, and creating a smoother integration process.

Try out the “Open in Codespaces” Button

To see this new feature in action, navigate to the Standard Checkout, Advanced Checkout, Google Pay, or Apple Pay integration guide, then click the “Open in Codespaces” button in the “Know before you code” section. You can then create a new Codespace using a PayPal REST API application client ID and client secret. You can find these credentials by logging into the PayPal developer dashboard and clicking Apps & Credentials from the navigation menu.

Learn about how to use GitHub Codespaces in the PayPal developer documentation.

Watch this video on how to set up a Codespaces environment.

Conclusion

The “Open in Codespaces” button is an exciting addition to the PayPal developer documentation, transforming the way developers integrate our payment services into their applications. This new feature is a testament to PayPal’s dedication to creating a vibrant developer community, where developers can easily explore and integrate PayPal’s services to meet the evolving needs of the digital economy.

PayPal Developer Community

The PayPal Developer Community aims to be a valuable resource hub, support system, and knowledge-sharing source that empowers developers to build and enhance their applications with PayPal’s payment capabilities.

Website: developer.paypal.com

Twitter: @paypaldev

GitHub: @paypaldev

How to add donations to your website with PayPal's Donate SDK

Nikema — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 20:15:47 +0000

Low-code donation integration using PayPal's Donate SDK

Follow step-by-step instructions to create a Donate button and donation page that’s functional and well-designed out of the box. Follow the prompts to customize images, donation amounts, and instructions to your donors.

The Donate SDK provides a great solution for enabling donations on a static site. Once your donation page is set up, you don't need to be an advanced web developer to add donations to your website. PayPal provides all of the code needed to add the Donate button and the direct link to your donation page.

Check your eligibility

To check if your account is eligible to integrate the Donate SDK, log in to paypal.com/donate/buttons. If you can see the options to create a new donation page, you’re good to go for live donations.

If you can get to this page you can create a Donate button and accept donations on your live website

Create a donate button in the sandbox

If you have a PayPal Developer account and you would like to follow along, you can still create a donation page in the sandbox. Log in to sandbox.paypal.com/donate/buttons with your sandbox credentials to start the flow to create a Donate button. For this example, I’m using my sandbox business account but a personal account will work as well.

PayPal Developer account holders can create a Donate button in the sandbox environment

For help with setting up a PayPal Developer account and accessing your sandbox accounts, see the Sandbox accounts documentation on the PayPal Developer site.

Take the four steps to setup a Donate button

There are four steps to setting up your hosted donation button and payment page. In each step there are a number of options to turn on or off.

Step 1: Customize your button

In this step, you can choose between the large or small PayPal donate buttons or upload your own image for a custom hosted button.

Step 2: Set up your donation page

Here you have the options to display your logo, upload a banner image, and add an inspiring message to your donation page. In this step, you choose to display your donation page as a fullscreen experience or a pop-up.

Step 3: Customize your donation details

In this step, you choose the currency and amount for donations. It can be an exact amount, any amount, or 3 options, plus any amount. You can let the donor make it a monthly donation, donate more to offset fees, or donate to specific programs.

Step 4: Set up your payment page

The payment page is the last page a donor will see before completing the transaction. In this last step, you can choose to collect donor mailing addresses, accept notes from donors, and whether to send visitors back to your site if they cancel or complete a donation.

Demos!

For the demo site, I created three similar home pages with different ways to add a Donate button. For two of the home pages I used the code that PayPal provided. For the third page, I created my own button with CSS and linked it to my donation page.

For the complete donation flow, open the website using the button on the embedded replit or use the links from the list below.

Donate SDK demo site pages

Why three pages to show the Donate button?

I created three pages to show adding a Donate button with three levels of visual customization.

The simplest option is to take the code and Donate button image that PayPal provides and paste it into your website HTML.

PayPal will also host a button image that you upload in the first step of customizing your button. It's not mentioned but it's best to make sure that the image is less than or equal to 300px wide before you upload because the rendered button has a max-width of 300px. This is more work than using the PayPal designed button because you have to create a button image that will look good when it's rendered.

The example with a CSS donate button links to the donation page URL that PayPal provides. This requires some custom CSS and HTML because PayPal doesn't give you code for CSS buttons.

My preferences

I like using a CSS donate button most because it's the easiest to customize. I might want a snazzier button with animations and hover states. We don't get that level of customization with the Donate SDK hosted button.

With PayPal's hosted buttons, I didn't like the way my uploaded image rendered as a button and I wasn't sure how to make it look better. I don't love the look of the default buttons, specifically because the "large" button is still very small. I'd like to see buttons provided in the style we see on the actual donation page.

My recommendations

If you want the simplest way to add donations to your website without writing any code, go with the standard, gold, PayPal Donate button and use the pop-up experience.

If you want to customize your button, create it with CSS or SVG, then use the donation page link that PayPal provides. You will lose the option for a pop-up, but the full-page experience is functionally the same.

For a low-code implementation, the Donate SDK does everything it needs to do without a lot of fuss. If that's what you need for your website, I recommend that you give it a try.

Thanks for reading!

If you decide to add donations to your website using PayPal's Donate SDK, let me know in a comment or tweet. I'd love to see it.

Cover Photo by Markus Winkler

Interview with Guillermo Huerta for National IT Professionals Day

Nikema — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 15:18:25 +0000

To celebrate National IT Professionals Day, we're sharing an interview I had with Armory's Head of IT and Workplace, Guillermo Huerta. The interview is broken into seven parts. There's a video and transcript for each section.

Introductions

Nikema Prophet: [00:00:00] I'm Nikema I am the Associate Community Marketing Manager at Armory and I'm talking to Guillermo today. We are celebrating National IT Professionals Day this month, and we wanted to talk to you and get to know more about you and like what you do at Armory, what it's like to be an IT professional.

So Guillermo, can you share a little bit about yourself and your role at Armory?

Guillermo Huerta: Sure. So I'm, Guillermo Huerta. I am the Head of IT and Workplace here at Armory. And I joined Armory in April with the plan to build out an IT department and facilitate the growth and structure that IT brings to a company.

A lot of the role when you think of IT is who's fixing your laptop when you have a problem. But that's when you have a problem and when IT is going well, you're not having a problem. So [00:01:00] a lot of the work is preventative. How do we prevent issues from arising? How do we make sure that the services that we need as a company to do our jobs are running and are available before we need them to be

IT at Armory

Nikema Prophet: [00:00:00] Can you describe a typical day or week at Armory?

Guillermo Huerta: Sure. So I think one of the things that makes being in IT at a startup a little bit different from a larger org is so much of what IT is doing is preparing for that growth and getting us ready to scale.

So it's, it's looking at what applications are we using? What hardware are we using? How is that going to work? When we add another 50, a hundred people into this environment and start tracking that. So, a lot of it is planning. So having meetings with the various departments, understanding what their goals are, what their team is working on and what are the tools and processes that they need to get that job done.

And then taking that information and looking at what systems we currently have, what systems we need to have, and planning out what is the path that's going to get us from, where we are today to where we [00:01:00] need to be to continue that growth and planning. And then there's a lot of administrative work that goes alongside with that.

Because to do that scale, we need to bring new employees on, onto the company accounts, we need to be able to give them the appropriate access, make sure that their machines are secure. So some of it is planning how those things operate and then the actual action of doing those tasks.

And again, looking at how do we scale? A lot of this is automation. How do we do all of those things in an automated fashion? Because we could do them manually that doesn't scale, but also by doing them manually, we're creating the opportunity to make mistakes. So when you set up your, email account, for example, if I, type in your name manually, rather than it coming from the HR system where, you know, the new hire [00:02:00] inputted their information directly, there is an opportunity that it gets mistyped and then that information is wrong. And the employee can't use that account because they can't log in, or it's going to start sending out emails as this misspelled name and all of those things that need to be created, creating more work.

Whereas, if you could just automate it – that's one of the things that IT focuses on is how do we automate things in a way that improves our accuracy and ease of life for the employees

Guillermo's Career Path

Nikema Prophet: [00:00:00] So that makes me wonder, how did you get on this career trajectory? How did you get started?

Guillermo Huerta: Yeah, that's a great question. IT, definitely, wasn't my original plan to go into IT. I went to school with the idea that I would be pre-med and look at medical school. But I always had an interest in technology. In high school, I got interested in computers in actually the hardware side. So I had access to a computer lab. I thought it was really cool that if you opened up a computer and took out parts and swapped them out and put them back in, it would change how that computer, behaved the next time you powered it on. And so, I got exposed to it then, and it became, a hobby. And then in college, well, I was focused on my studies. I got a job in the libraries as a tech, so servicing computer labs and the library and then also in the dorm. So supporting my, [00:01:00] fellow students to do that.

And so it was always one of these hobbies where I was getting more and more skilled and interested in it as I was growing up. And then when I did have to make a career decision I was in California looking for jobs and found a, company that was looking for an, IT support role. So my, first full-time IT job was as, a lot of people started in IT as a desktop support person. So I, literally was the person who went around and fixed your laptop if you had an issue. And through that learned that IT is really a very wide field. There's a lot to do in IT. You can focus on the end-user support.

You can get into system administration and system administration is a giant field. There are all sorts of different kinds of system administrators, and a lot of them have completely distinct skill sets. I actually was interested in [00:02:00] network engineering because that to me was, well, that's the backbone of all of these systems and how they talk to each other.

So I got into that and while I was doing that, I just so happened to, start supporting as a system admin, the video conferencing infrastructure that my company was using. And as I learned more about networking, I realized that well, video conferencing is using 60% of our internal bandwidth on a day-to-day basis.

Cause this was before everything was SAAS based there wasn't a SAAS service that would handle over all of our video conferencing. Like there is today, it was more, if we needed to make a video call somebody in the IT department had to maintain a server in each office, the infrastructure and the conference rooms and the servers and data centers.

So that, that conversation between our dev team in Mountain View and Toronto and Paris could have that, [00:03:00] call and a smooth and seamless process. And so through that, I kind of realized, oh, This keeps on getting wider and more more interesting of a field. And that's, how I started to get more and more technical.

Just, realizing that every time I learned something new, I found a whole new a whole new avenue of IT. And I think that's really one of the things that I share with, anyone who tells me they're interested in IT, is that, well, IT is a really large and wide field, and it's great to come in with a, generalist point of view, and want to learn everything, but what you should do is see what are the things that actually interest you in IT. And how, can you learn more about those things? Because there's, just so much to learn and all sorts of directions.

Thoughts on Representation in Tech

Nikema Prophet: [00:00:00] I know you mentioned that you were in California, at the time, are you originally from California ?

Guillermo Huerta: I'm not from California, so I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. I'm actually, not from there either though. I was, born, outside of Detroit, Michigan. And my parents are from Detroit and Miami though.

My, my father is a Cuban refugee, so he grew up in Miami. But was born in Cuba.

Nikema Prophet: What are your thoughts about representation in tech?

Guillermo Huerta: Yeah I think representation is one of the keys to having good diversity and inclusive company culture. Because one of the kind of reasons why we talk so much about representation is a person can't really see themselves in a role if they don't have representation in that role. If it's a role where [00:01:00] you've never seen somebody who looks like you has a similar background to you in that role, then you have to.

Really go out on a limb to to imagine yourself in that role. And so, I mentioned, my father is Cuban. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, where there were not a lot of Cubans there wasn't a large Latin population. And our kind of careers that we were encouraged to, were, doctor, lawyer and that was kind of the end of the list. And there was a small Latin community that we would celebrate holidays with get together. And it was kind of the same for all the other kids in those families. We were encouraged to, go to school, stay focused. And then, try to get into one of, one of those professions.

And when I had this interest in tech, it was always seen as well, this is an interest or a hobby, it's not a career. [00:02:00] So representation matters not only in the industry that you want to get into, but also within your community, because if your community doesn't understand that industry or that field, there's there, isn't a resource within your community that you can go talk to and understand what are the things that I should be doing, or learning, or researching

about, so that I can get into that field. And that was, there was definitely one of the things that I struggled with as I made this movement into tech. It was always seen as, oh, this is a opportunity to learn more about this. This isn't a career. And as I got more involved in it, as I learned more about the industry, the opportunity there, just like learning more about how wide and varied IT is, I learned that, oh, there is opportunity in tech. I do have a path and a career here in tech and I can focus on this and not just see [00:03:00] it as, a hobby or an interest of mine.

And that really, really would be supported more with representation. And so my kind of personal outcome of that is I have been more conscientious of how do I, support representation be representative of my community in my community as well as at the company. And so I definitely think it's not only important, but it's one of those things that you can't just talk about, you have to act on.

So at my previous company, I was active in our ERG and focused on, those kinds of things.

How do we show representation within the company? And we would do a lot of events throughout the year. One event we would do was around the Latinx/Hispanic Heritage Month. And when we did those events, we made sure, okay. Not only do we have a, a Latin panel or presenters who are speaking, but they are all varied [00:04:00] levels at the company, because if we can't show anybody at a leadership level, then what we're really showing is the representation that, yeah, you can be in tech, but you can be in tech at an entry level. And that then represents that the career path really isn't there. And so I think taking those opportunities to really show that there are individuals that you have similar backgrounds to you, that, that look like you in these roles at all different levels of the company that have gone through a career in this industry it, it encourages people to focus and see this as a career rather than this is a job and I'm going to have to, you know, find a real career in the future.

Nikema Prophet: That's so true. I don't have anything to add to that. That was great.

It's Latinx/Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 - October 15)

Guillermo Huerta: [00:00:00] It is Latin/Hispanic Heritage Month. And I think this is a great opportunity for individuals and companies to better understand, well, what is the exposure of the Latin community to tech within their company, outside of their company.

And it's not only, who are you hiring? It's how do you interact with those communities? Because those communities are your customers. They are your vendors And they shouldn't just be limited to a hiring plan because going back to why representation matters and why diversity matters, is if you don't have a diverse workforce, but also, work with a diverse set of vendors and contractors, when you do engage with your users you're inevitably not going to be able to reflect your user base because your user base for most [00:01:00] companies is everybody. And if you don't represent a good portion of everybody, then how can you possibly have a product that understands the needs of all those various communities? So I think the heritage months throughout the year, they're a great opportunity to learn what resources are out there, but those resources are available year-round.

Techqueria is a great one for the Latin community in the tech industry. They put on lots of events throughout the entire year, but particularly during this month. They have great programming. I highly recommend if anybody is curious about the Latin experience and the tech industry to check out their events. And then there's also a Latin Fest that's happening at the end of the month. And that's a three-day event that has all sorts of speakers, career development paths, and sessions for networking.

So it's not and I think this is one of the things that I always [00:02:00] talk about when planning those events is yes, we are celebrating a particular community's heritage or culture during one of these months, that does not mean that is the only audience for these events, which goes back to, true diversity and inclusion is having diversity and including everyone. And so if you only create an event and you're only having the community, that is you're supposed to be raising awareness about show up to that event. You're not really raising awareness your just creating an environment for that community.

What Do You like About Working at Armory?

Nikema Prophet: [00:00:00] What do you like about working at Armory or is there a favorite part about working here?

Guillermo Huerta: I really enjoy working at Armory.

I think it's an exciting time to, to join Armory. And I think one of the things that, really makes it different for me is I started this job entirely remotely in the middle of the pandemic. But I think one thing that really stood out to me as while there was this special circumstance on why I was starting remotely

Armory is the first company I've worked at, which is, a remote first culture. And really, reinforcing that in the way that we are thinking about how the office is being used, how employees get their setups. And so I think I've really appreciated that, that not only am I starting as a remote employee and in this special circumstance, but the fact that it's something that the company [00:01:00] is committed to.

And despite that I have had the opportunity to get to know people and the company culture is very friendly. Like I've enjoyed my conversations. You know, the, all the coffee meetings that we randomly get paired with and just get to know who are the people behind this company? And they're all very interesting, and that they all have plenty of fun facts to find out about.

Thanks Guillermo!

Thanks for the awesome work you're doing at Armory. I'm glad I had the opportunity to interview you so that we all can celebrate you on this year's National IT Professionals Day 🎉.

ICYMI: Our Celebration of #NationalDogDay

Nikema — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 19:34:06 +0000

In case you missed it: The Armory crew celebrated #NationalDogDay and shared super-cute photos and video of some of the special dogs in our lives. Get your daily dose of cute in the photos below.

Armory

@cloudarmory

🐶 IMPORTANT PUPDATE 🐶

Today is #NationalDogDay so give your furry friend an extra cuddle from us 🐾. ❤️

18:27 PM - 26 Aug 2021

Nikema

@dev_nikema

@cloudarmory More of the canine @cloudarmory crew #NationalDogDay2021

20:48 PM - 26 Aug 2021

David Morgenthaler

@d_morgenthaler

@cloudarmory Almost forgot! Here’s Brody jumping into the pool for the first time ever… MUST. GET. BALL!!

21:40 PM - 26 Aug 2021

Interview with Daniel Ko — Google Summer of Code 2021

Nikema — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 15:50:44 +0000

I’m personally excited about this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project try.spinnaker.io. Daniel Ko is the student who worked with Armory mentors and the Continuous Delivery Foundation to complete the project. After his midterm demo, I asked Daniel some questions about the project and why he chose it.

Nikema Prophet: What inspired you to work with the Spinnaker Project for GSoC?

Daniel Ko: I was inspired to submit a proposal for Spinnaker because I was broadly interested in contributing to open source CI/CD tools. I think I would like to work in the DevOps field in the future rather than traditional software development and through my research before applying to GSoC I found out that Spinnaker was one of the most popular and powerful tools for deployment.

My project, try.spinnaker.io, in a nutshell is a sandbox environment where users can test out the core functionality of Spinnaker such as deploying pipelines without having to worry about installing on their machines.

I was motivated to work on try.spinnaker.io because I had a lot of trouble setting up my first test environment for Spinnaker. Spinnaker is notorious for being hard to get up and running. There were so many dependencies that one had to set up correctly such as network configuration and an external storage provider just to see the main ui. I saw that other popular open source projects such as Docker and golang have their own sandbox environments and thought this project would be a great opportunity to encourage people to see for themselves what all the fuss about Spinnaker is about.

NP: We’re midway through GSoC, have you had any challenges that were particularly satisfying to overcome?

DK: One of the tricky technical challenges was mitigating the risk of bad actors deploying malicious containers such as cryptocurrency miners. I first thought of the idea of blocking all inbound and outbound requests besides our private container registry on an AWS security group level but quickly found out that this would cause problems because the Spinnaker images are pulled from a public container registry. I found a workaround where we install a Kubernetes admission controller called “Portieris” which allows us to define image security policies on a namespace level.

NP: Do you have any examples of getting unblocked?

DK: My mentors were able to unblock me on exposing Spinnaker using an ‘Application Load Balancer’ (ALB). This wasn’t a trivial process as there were a lot of moving parts; you need a Route53 hosted zone, changes to the Spinnaker config file such as defining the correct URLs for the Deck and Gate, and setting up certificates for our ALB.

NP: What is something you’re excited about or looking forward to?

DK: I’m excited for new people to try out our sandbox environment and experience Spinnaker for the first time. I know that there will be a lot of bugs and feedback from the community and I hope that this project can gain more traction so we can get more hands working on it!

NP: Has your experience so far matched up with the expectations you had coming into the program?

DK: My experience has definitely exceeded the expectations I had coming in! I didn’t know that I would be paired with three amazing mentors who are willing to unblock me and give constructive feedback. The weekly meetings that we have really helped me to set attainable goals for myself and made me accountable for the work I wanted to accomplish.

NP: Is there anything you need from the Spinnaker community right now?

DK: Nothing as of this moment but keep your eyes peeled for a future beta test release of my project!

NP: Any news to share or amplify?

DK: A video presentation where I go over the project in more detail can be found here! GSoC Phase 1 Try Spinnaker io

Thank you, Daniel, for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer my questions. The demo looks awesome and I can’t wait to try out the beta!

Additional Insights from the Mentors

This year was the second year that Armory provided mentors to GSoC for the open source Spinnaker project. For this Armory blog post I asked the mentors Cameron Motevasselani, Dan Johnston, and Fernando Freire how it went from the mentor's perspective. They had great things to say about Daniel.

On working with Daniel (and what he did well)

It "was a great experience."
"He came up with a plan of attack, broke the project up into doable parts with milestones."
It was an "ambitious project and he delivered."

On overcoming technical challenges

"Daniel’s work touched many different areas, requiring help from different mentors. Having multiple mentors with a variety of experience helped. "
As a team, they implemented role-based access control (RBAC) to prevent abuse of service.

Advice for future GSoC mentees

"Be prepared to do research prior to diving into coding"
"Break the project down into achievable milestones"

A callout of Daniel's technical skills

Locking down the instance and creating a plugin to modify RBAC was impressive.

A final thought

A great amount was accomplished even with a shorter project time this year.

Getting Started as a Content Contributor

Nikema — Sat, 10 Jul 2021 01:09:01 +0000

Hi! Nikema here. I co-lead the Spinnaker Contributor Experience Special Interest Group (SIG) with Adetokunbo Ige. Since stepping into this role, I’ve wanted to write a post to explicitly welcome non-code contributions to the project. This is meant to be a living document, and I am open to feedback and suggestions. Let’s work together to make open source contributing a little less intimidating.

I will be loosely referring to contributing to Spinnaker, but I intend to make this a starting point for anyone new to content contributing.

What You Need to Get Started

Prerequisites

Familiarity with Git and GitHub

The Spinnaker project lives on GitHub. It’s helpful to know how to navigate the platform and complete common tasks. Later in the post, I’ll list some ideas for non-code contributions. Not everything you do as a community member needs to go through GitHub, but it’s a good skill to have and to practice.

If you aren’t familiar with GitHub, Kent C. Dodds has a free community course on egghead.io. He’s a great teacher so this is an awesome place to start.

https://egghead.io/courses/how-to-contribute-to-an-open-source-project-on-github

An interest in an open source project

My suggestion is to find a project that is exciting to you or solving a problem you have experienced. You may also want to work backwards from finding a great community. Good people can make the most challenging work enjoyable.

Willingness to participate in a community

You’ll have to interact with people as you are making your contributions. There might be times when you have to discuss an issue or Pull Request (PR). Don’t be afraid but keep in mind that you don’t have to put up with toxicity or dismissive attitudes. If people are jerks to you, find a better, more inclusive project to contribute to.
Helpful Resources

Ways to Contribute Content Without Coding

If there’s one point I’d like to get across, it’s that you don’t have to be an expert in the technology to make awesome contributions. In this post, I’ll provide a short list of ideas for creating content for project contributions.

Participate in community discussions

Join the community forum (in our case, it’s Slack and introduce yourself. Ask questions. Find out what the project needs and how you may be able to help. Make comments and bring yourself to the community.

Learn in public

It’s okay to be a beginner and content from a newbie perspective is incredibly valuable. Once you are familiar enough, it’s hard to remember the things that were challenging or blocking for you when you were just starting out. The more perspectives we have documented, the more accessible our projects are to people within a range of experience levels.

Add your perspective to existing content

View talks, tutorials, and workshops and add your perspective. You could talk about it on video or write a blog post.

What did you learn? What was hard to understand? Did you get stuck?

Again, it’s super-helpful to do this. If you got stuck and were able to resolve an issue, sharing that with the community will help others avoid the problem and could eliminate the problem for future users.

Share on social media

Like (or clap), comment, subscribe, share.

Organize or join local or virtual meetups around a project

Meet up with others. There is so much potential for magic ✨ to happen when we get together.

Give a talk on your experience

Your experience matters. Your unique voice is a value add to the community and no one can provide it but you.

Publish interviews of community members and maintainers

Learn from others through interviews; share them with the community.

Start a study group and document your progress

The journey from newbie to knowledgeable is much more fun with friends. Get a group together and level-up as a team. Learn stuff and tell people about it.

Use your writing skills to make existing documentation more readable or easier to understand

Break out those GitHub skills and make a pull request to improve documentation. Find something missing or lacking? Fill in that blank with your awesome technical writing.

Teach something you’ve learned about the project

Document your learning as if you are teaching it to someone else.

Submit issues when you come across bugs or errors

Find out how your project handles bug reports and submit them as needed. Don’t underestimate how helpful this is!

Become an ambassador

Find out how to become a champion for your project and community. Some projects have formal ambassador roles. If you’re excited about the work your community is doing, help spread the word.

My Ask

I’m still new to open source contributing, and I’d like to collect more resources to share. What are your favorite guides and tips for new content contributors? Please let me know in the comments.

Nikema’s Spinnaker Summit 2021 Recap

Nikema — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 21:13:51 +0000

My Second Spinnaker Summit is in the Books!

Last week I attended and spoke at my second Spinnaker Summit. Like last year’s summit, it was fully virtual. This time Spinnaker Summit was co-located with cdCon and took place on the Hopin platform.

Last year, I spoke on a panel about Black professionals a few months after starting as a new employee at Armory. I showed up and just spoke my mind. I was just getting introduced to the Spinnaker community. Between then and now, I co-founded a Special Interest Group (SIG), the Contributor Experience SIG, with my co-lead Ige. We presented the story of our SIG on Day 0 of the summit.

In less than a year’s time, I can see how much I’ve grown in my comfort level and my level of community involvement. I no longer feel unsure that I have anything of value to offer this project. I am solidly an active member of the community.

As further confirmation of my place in the community, I won an award for contributing to Spinnaker. I was super surprised but honored.

Must-See Sessions and Keynotes

As the Associate Community Marketing Manager at Armory, Spinnaker Summit was an important event for me to participate in. For a number of reasons, I didn’t get a chance to attend all of the sessions I wanted to check out in real-time. Fortunately, this was a virtual conference that was recorded. I can’t wait for the replays to be posted in July.

Until then, we have the conference keynotes available on the Continuous Delivery Foundation YouTube channel.

Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF)

@cdeliveryfdn

#cdCon talk recordings will be available sometime in July on our YouTube Channel. For now, watch the keynote sessions you missed (or rewatch; some of them have extra footage)! bit.ly/3h4zt1V

15:01 PM - 25 Jun 2021

Tweets!

Tweets posted during the event that caught my attention.

SpinnakerSummit

@spinnakersummit

Right now at #SpinnakerSummit @talk2toks and @NikemaAtWork are chatting about why they started the @spinnakerio SIG

14:42 PM - 22 Jun 2021

Jenkins

@jenkinsci

Terminology cleanup updates at the #jenkinsContributorSummit! Thanks to @aHenryJard for driving the session. Slides are coming soon! @inclusivenaming community.jenkins.io/t/jenkins-term…

16:21 PM - 25 Jun 2021

Tracy Miranda

@tracymiranda

Passive gatekeeping is unintentional but has the same effect as intentional gatekeeping.

Things that contribute to this include jargon, lack of docs and lack of mentoring.

21:23 PM - 23 Jun 2021

Personal Notes

Burnout is REAL. I’ve been approaching the point of burnout since the beginning of May. The #SpeedOfLife campaign was a stretch outside my comfort zone. Stretching and growing pains are fine and normal under regular circumstances. Unfortunately, during #SpeedOfLife, I started writing energetic checks I could not cash at work and in my personal life. I quickly found myself overwhelmed, over-capacity, and struggling.

What I’ve learned from two months headed towards burnout

Count the costs and know your capacity. Factor in the whole picture when it comes to agreeing to a workload. Creative expression, caregiving, family, emotional labor, and self-care all have time and energy costs.
It is my responsibility to get unstuck. Ask for help sooner rather than later.
Remember who you are and what you do best. Don’t stray too far from that center.
Plans, structure, and strategy need to be in place. Having few to no surprises will prevent last-minute efforts and leave margin for changes.
I’m doing a lot. I can’t do it all 100%. I have to learn to prioritize the most important task at the moment and allow an appropriate amount of time to complete it.
I have support and means of assistance. I can remember to access that when it’s needed.
I can’t do my job well if I’m not taking care of myself. I can take breaks before performance suffers or my body forces the issue (illness, exhaustion, immobilization).
I’m allowed calm, peace, and to be doing better than just scraping by. That will be my new normal. I’ll be happier and healthier once I address my addiction to chaos and break the habit of overcommitting.

The #SpeedOfLife campaign taught me through my experience of leading a project for work and from the words of the people I spoke with. Kelsey Hightower talked about being present, Lee Faus talked about how the appropriate speed depends on the context, Margaret Francis spoke about how our work at Armory enables developers like me to work effectively at the speed our lives necessitate.

I am grateful and relieved to be where I am today. I had three major projects to complete over the past few months, #SpeedOfLife, the Spinnaker.io website refresh, and Spinnaker Summit. I many ways, I fell short of the expectations set for me but I have objectively accomplished a significant amount.

I’m grateful but I definitely need a break ASAP. I am looking forward to returning refreshed and reset, in a mental state that sets me up for success.

#SpeedOfLife - In Conclusion, Thanks for the Conversation

Nikema — Thu, 27 May 2021 02:26:39 +0000

As we close out the month of May, the #SpeedOfLife campaign will come to a close as well. Soon I will no longer be monitoring the hashtag but please feel free to continue the conversation on Twitter. You can even tag me (@dev_nikema) if you like.

What does "speed of life" mean to you?

Before I step away, I'd like to highlight some of my favorite parts of my interviews with Armory crewmates. It was interesting to hear all of the different interpretations of the phrase, "speed of life."

Lee Faus, Field CTO

First up is Field CTO Lee Faus on speed. In the full conversation, he gives great examples of how the appropriate speed depends on the situation and the needs at hand.

Chad Tripod, Field CTO

Field CTO Chad Tripod with examples of what software delivery at the speed of life looks like today.

Fernando Freire, Software Engineer

Software Engineer Fernando Freire on how great developer tooling "helps software delivery fade into the background"

This campaign was a stretch and a challenge for me. I have thoughts about it but I'm saving them for a future blog post 😀. To say the least, I learned a lot. I appreciate everyone who took the time to speak to me and extra-special thanks go to the people who joined a live stream (Kelsey Hightower, Margaret Francis, and David Morgenthaler).

Some recordings I've yet to publish. If you're interested in viewing them, check out the #SpeedOfLife YouTube playlist. It will be updated with clips from the interviews and live streams.

#SpeedOfLife Week Two Recap

Nikema — Thu, 27 May 2021 02:15:07 +0000

Tweets, Clips, and Double the Livestreams

In week two, we shared some awesome clips from my #SpeedOfLife interviews. Additionally, we had a bonus live stream with Kelsey Hightower. To date, there has been an element of chaos in each live stream. I've got two more planned, so two chances to get through a smooth stream 🤞🏾.

NikemaWrites.com

@dev_nikema

#SpeedOfLife clip from my chat yesterday with @kelseyhightower

19:50 PM - 14 May 2021

The Armory Crew is Chiming In

I shared clips from my chats with Becky Jaimes (Chief of Staff) and Margaret Francis (COO). It was nice to hear their personalized perspectives on #SpeedOfLife.

NikemaWrites.com

@dev_nikema

20:26 PM - 17 May 2021

NikemaWrites.com

@dev_nikema

I talked with @cloudarmory COO, Margaret Francis last week about working at the #SpeedOfLife. She brought up single mom programmers a few times and it was nice to feel seen ❤

23:10 PM - 19 May 2021

Reminder, You Can Join the Conversation on Twitter

Jeff Barr and Isaac Mosquera did. Just use the hashtag #SpeedOfLife and share what coding at the speed of life means to you.

Isaac Is Laughing

@imosquera

#speedoflife is about fast feedback loops with users and iterating towards perfection. twitter.com/jeffbarr/statu…

16:30 PM - 12 May 2021

Jeff Barr ☁️ (@ 🏠 ) 💉 @jeffbarr
What does #SpeedOfLife mean to me? Getting things done with minimal meetings and without bureaucracy! https://t.co/k0qQJckhzC

We're chatting with the community for the month of May. I'd love to hear your point of view. See you next week!

#SpeedOfLife First Week Recap

Nikema — Thu, 27 May 2021 01:43:38 +0000

It Begins

We started the #SpeedOfLife campaign last week, yay!

It has been a bumpy start but we're happily moving forward. The first person I spoke with about delivering software at the speed of life was our CEO at Armory, DROdio. I posted a snippet of our conversation on Twitter last week and here that is 👇🏾

NikemaWrites.com

@dev_nikema

I asked @cloudarmory CEO, @drodio what working at the #SpeedOfLife means to him and how we at Armory enable software companies to achieve that. Here's a snippet of what he had to say 🔊

16:37 PM - 07 May 2021

A live stream happened.

I'll let you be the judge of whether or not it was successful. It was mildly chaotic on my end but next time it will be better, I promise! We had at least one live viewer (shoutout to Morgan Lucas) and something awesome came out of my call into the void for a last-minute guest.

NikemaWrites.com

@dev_nikema

#DevOps peeps, anyone interested in joining me live for a quick chat in ~8 minutes? I'm live streaming every Friday in May. We're talking about delivering software at the #SpeedOfLife.

Streaming from the Armory YouTube and Facebook profiles. Reply and I'll send the studio link

23:25 PM - 07 May 2021

I got a DM from a Performance Engineering Lead at MathWorks. She's interested in collaborating so hopefully I will be able to share a conversation between the two of us soon. I was able to chat with several people from the Armory crew about #SpeedOfLife and what it means to them. It's awesome to share their perspectives, but I'm super-excited to involve more of the DevOps community.

Look out for #SpeedOfLife on our social channels. I'll be back next Tuesday with another blog.

What Does It Mean To Deliver Software At The #SpeedOfLife?

Nikema — Tue, 04 May 2021 20:21:02 +0000

In this blog post, I’m excited to announce the #SpeedOfLife campaign that I will be leading for the month of May. I’m looking forward to getting to know more of the awesome people who make up our DevOps community.

What is #SpeedOfLife?

"#SpeedOfLife" is a social campaign meant to highlight users and experts in the field of software development and delivery. More specifically, I will be posting snippets of my conversations with the community in the form of weekly blog posts, social media messages, and a video live stream every Friday this month.

It is now more than ever essential for enterprise-scale companies to deliver software products and services with safety, resiliency, and velocity. At Armory we are proud to enable developers to work and ship at the speed of life. What are you proudest of in your line of work? What does work at the speed of life mean to you? I want to know! I’m listening and my goal this month is to amplify community voices.

How Can I Get Involved?

I’m so glad you asked.

Starting today, I’ll be sending out messages asking for participation. If you are eager to contribute now without a personal invitation I have a handy link that you can follow where you can submit your contribution on your own time. Alternatively, if you want to reach out to me (Nikema) directly, I will be thrilled to hear your story. Hit me up at [nikema.prophet at armory.io]!

Join Me, Tell Me Your Stories

I’ve already spoken with our CEO, DROdio and he shared some customer stories that truly exemplify #SpeedOfLife. I can’t wait to share that with you, and it’s coming soon. More importantly, I can’t wait to hear your stories and get them out there.

Join me, it’s easy I promise 😀. You don’t have to use your voice or get on camera to participate. See the contribution form for a text-based response option.

#NikemaLearns About AWS – #4 Officially AWS Certified

Nikema — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 17:41:24 +0000

I’m an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner!

I took the exam and I passed. I fell behind on blog updates starting about a month ago but I studied up until the day before the test. I was somewhat disappointed in myself for not keeping my schedule but in the end, I passed and that was the main objective.

Persisting Through Difficulty

First, I want to remind myself and everyone that we are still living through a pandemic. Being a year into it, the abnormality of pandemic life is becoming the new normal. The new normal is still a collective state of crisis, widespread trauma, and loss. Many of us have been not okay for at least the past 12 months.

It’s okay to acknowledge that we aren’t okay. Out of necessity, I’ve developed the ability to be productive at times when I’m in need of rest and care. As I move into a new season of my life, I’m intentional about being kinder to myself. I’m learning to let “good enough” be good enough. I’m learning that I am responsible for asking for the help I need and taking breaks as necessary.

I believe that I hit the “pandemic wall” between my last blog post and this one. I hit the wall, took a moment to recover from the shock, and then went to work on scaling it. To scale the wall means to keep going even if it’s at a slower pace, setting reasonable expectations, focusing on what’s most important, and rationing the energy that is available to me.

All of this is to say, please give grace to yourself and others right now. There’s pressure, even if it’s coming from yourself, to act and perform as if things are normal. Persist, but don’t forget to rest. Don’t be hard on yourself for the times when you are not operating at full capacity.

What I Would Have Done Differently

Near the end of my study period, I started to have doubts that I was ready for the exam. I didn’t take the course that AWS provides until about a month before the exam and by my test date, I hadn’t even finished half of it.

If I had known what I know now when I started studying, I would have started with that course. It makes sense that AWS itself would have the most up-to-date curriculum for its certifications. The videos are well-produced (with transcripts available) and they also present content in text and illustrations. At the end of each lesson, there are links to documentation so you can go deeper on the topic if you choose to.

What’s Next?

I’ve secured the certification so what’s next for #NikemaLearns? I have a web project to wrap up with a Hugo site, so I’m sure I’ll be learning and re-learning some things for that. For my next blog series, it’s looking like I’ll be learning and playing with Spinnaker and Armory Enterprise. My AWS CLI is installed and my own namespace is ready to go. Should be fun.