DEV Community: Pusher

Sponsoring You Got This 2020

Amy Dickens — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 16:44:42 +0000

Last month we sponsored You Got This 2020, which was held in Birmingham, UK. You Got This is a conference that is a bit different from the usual technology focused forays, as the content is centred on the non-technical skills needed for a happy, healthy work life.

But what exactly does that include?

Taking a look at this years talk titles might give you a better idea 👇

Speaker Name	Talk Title
Keziyah Lewis	It's not your job to love your job
Matthew Gilliard	Learning to invest in your future
Amina Adewusi	How to find your perfect mentor
Gargi Sharma	So good they can't ignore you!
Melinda Seckington	Level Up: Developing Developers
Nathaniel Okenwa	0 to 100 Real Quick: making your first days count
Ruth Lee	Company Culture, Performance Reviews & You
Dan Parkes	Unions Got This: organising the tech trade
Amy Dickens	Real talk about when to walk away

The event covered many of the woes that technology professionals (at all levels) face at some point in their career. From how to find the ways in which they learn best, to making tough choices on whether a job role or company culture is the right fit for them.

These topics can be very sensitive for most, and not to mention really hard to talk about. Having an event like You Got This which provides an open forum and honest talks about these topics is extremely important.

Not only was the content on point, the You Got This team also pride themselves in making the event an inclusive space. They made a conscious effort to provide an accessible venue, closed captioning, gender neutral toilets, pronouns on name badges, and ticket, travel and childcare scholarships.

The team make sure to re-iterate the importance of these features at the beginning of the event and link to their Code of Conduct for the conference. We were truly impressed with the You Got This team’s dedication to inclusion and cannot wait to see what they will bring to the event in 2021.

But don’t worry if you are feeling like you missed out on You Got This 2020 - as this year's video sponsor, we've got you covered! You can now watch videos of all the talks from You Got This on our Pusher sessions YouTube channel.

Want to know more about what we do at Pusher? Check out pusher.com.

Why I believe in the brave new world of serverless

Zan Markan — Thu, 30 May 2019 15:02:49 +0000

A few days ago I took part in a lunch & learn session at work, where we discussed the paper Serverless Computing - One step forward, two steps back. It was an excellent discussion, and if there weren't any time constraints I'm sure we could have talked about it for the rest of the week, not just our lunch hour.

Note: In my eyes, serverless is not just AWS Lambda functions. Or Azure, Google, or IBM/Apache Openwhisk. It's all the other technologies that work well alongside it - databases, queues, event-driven computation, and technologies that make it super easy to configure and deploy new services in code.

What made it such a great discussion is the fact that while most technologies are polarizing, only a few are as deeply polarizing as serverless.

The Serverless Hater's greatest hits include:

serverless has servers
I can't use it for machine learning or [insert obscure academic research topic here]
It's more expensive than renting your own EC2 instances and running your own servers!
Vendor lock-in!
It's slow!
I can't run it on custom hardware!

All of these… are true in their sense. Not all use cases are well supported by serverless technologies (or at all).
My argument is just that… it doesn't really matter. There are two main reasons for it.

Reason 1: The new liberal computing 🗽

Most profoundly, serverless is just a marketing name (yet a pretty good one - it certainly has that Marmite quality…) for a new computing paradigm - an idea.

It's the idea of writing some code and letting the vendor deploy it anywhere without worrying too much about the where, how, or how much maintaining it is going to cost you, as you only pay per invocation. Serverless is about making it simple and fun to experiment. It's what Heroku was, but more.

The Serverless framework (with a capital S) makes most of your configurations portable between vendors, and opinionated frameworks like Architect make it great for quick productivity.

Tools like Glitch, in addition to being beautifully weird, lets you tinker with deployed code from users of the whole platform, directly in your web browser, like GitHub without any of the git.

To paraphrase Paweł Ledwoń, our CTO at Pusher - "Serverless might be this generation's PHP".

That's awesome. PHP made a whole generation build things.

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Just like PHP did back in the day, serverless is opening doors to programming to the new generation of app developers (also known as "kids these days").
Returning to my earlier point, as of why the arguments against serverless (mostly) don't matter? As long as serverless (or any technology, or computing paradigm) is able to lower the barrier to entry to, the playing field has expanded enough, so that it has free rein to take up a bunch of new market share. As the market grows, the earlier arguments merely become fringe or niche concerns.

And the kids? They are the ones who are going to build the future - The kids are alright.

Reason 2: Birth of an ecosystem (of ecosystems), and mash it like it's 2005 🕺

The idea of "just" liberalizing computing was mostly true for the first generation of serverless, way back when Lambda was new. In 2019, serverless is also liberalizing how easy it is for services to interact with one another. It's increasingly being used to extend the functionality of existing services with whatever you really wish to create - flows, extended logic, you name it.

Webhooks are everywhere, and let you integrate and glue services together, with ease.

Zeit Now lets you make any app serverless, and deploy it in seconds, with one command. They have also launched an integration marketplace, that lets developers connect other services, and manage them from Zeit.

The good people at Zeit are also running a global hackathon with some cool prizes between 1 and 2 June 2019, and Pusher is one of the sponsors. If you're building something with Pusher APIs, please come talk to me.

We also we have Netlify Functions -they let you add dynamic components to otherwise static sites that deploy in seconds.

Or Github Actions, to create complex flows based on what's going on in GitHub, taking ops to the next level.

Or Auth0 has their rules that extend the log in functionality of their services.

Cloudflare workers deploy and execute anywhere in the world - and execute nearest to your request.

We're seeing an ecosystem of ecosystems emerge. Want to handle a webhook? Build a chatbot, even? Serverless makes that really, really easy. Just add JavaScript ✨.

What the new generation of serverless reminds me of is actually fulfilling the promise of API mash-ups.

For the younger generation, API mash-ups were the idea from circa 2005 (or when Twitter wasn't a thing yet) - of making dynamic and fully-featured websites by calling on different APIs and connecting their results on your own site.

API mash-ups never really took off in the mid noughties, because the tech just wasn't there at the time. The ecosystem wasn't there. But now, I believe it is here, and serverless is the glue. The JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, Markdown) is a prime example of where we currently are, and it's amazing.

To summarize, I am a huge fan of Serverless. I believe serverless is a paradigm that greatly lowers the barriers for getting into software programming, and will see serious adoption and development in the next few years.
It's also showing itself as a great "glue" technology, connecting various service ecosystems, and making them work well together. These two benefits greatly outweigh any naysayer arguments.
More, and together - that's progress, and I'm sure that amazing things will happen. 🚀

Pusher is hiring a Visual Interactive Designer

Pusher — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 15:21:57 +0000

About Us

Why Pusher?
There are more than 20 million developers in the world with millions of soon-to-be developers currently in colleges, universities, coding bootcamps, or teaching themselves how to code via online courses and tutorials. This is your potential audience 🌍 .

We believe that in the next ten years, every company will become a software company, and developers will need great tools to be productive and do their jobs. Pusher acts as a force multiplier to help people build more products and features with less code.

About The Opportunity

At Pusher, we understand the importance of good design, and using it to make our products more fun to explore, and much easier to use 🙌 . From our marketing site to our product dashboards (and everything in between), you’ll work with cross-functional teams to craft the visual story of Pusher to over 200,000 developers both on and off the web.

You’ll sit in one of our autonomous, cross-functional marketing squads that encompass design, engineering, growth, and data science. There, you’ll help research, design, and develop ideas that help us to connect with our growing audience and turn them into long-term, happy users of our products . You’ll sweat the design and technical details to make things beautiful, simple, and fast.

Skill & Qualifications

Responsibilities:

As part of a marketing squad, you’ll have broad reach through designing thoughtful, delightful experiences for our visitors and customers. You’ll work on anything from high-impact marketing pages to experimental projects that engage our community.

Example tasks:

Designing and building new projects such as Sessions
Revamping our marketing website and blog
Designing impactful creative for web, email, and events
Designing the new versions of our fan favourite t-shirts
Contributing to our UI component libraries and style guides.

Is this you?

1-3 years creating visual design work and helping to build web experiences
Portfolio featuring a variety of digital design solutions across different mediums
A strong grasp of layout, colour, and typography on and off the web
Awareness of current design trends and how to use them effectively in your work
Experience with design tools such as Sketch, Figma, or similar alternatives
Understanding of web technologies such as HTML, CSS & JavaScript - experience a plus

How To Apply

https://pusher.workable.com/jobs/597251

Please feel free to leave questions in the comments section.