Have you ever wondered how biogenesis or the evolution of life happened? There are 6 elements called the biogenic elements. These are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, hydrogen and phosphorus. These six represent about 99% of the composition of all the atoms in a living cell, including proteins, nucleic acids, and cell membranes. Life does need these six elements, but it only works if the elements have combined into molecules. Let’s consider what happens if we put two or more of the elements together in a compound. Carbon and hydrogen, for instance, become hydrocarbons, and the hydrocarbon chains in cell membranes are an essential component of life and also provide the energy to sustain life in the form of fuel. A combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen yields carbohydrates like sugar and cellulose. Five elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur from the amino acids of proteins, and if we exchange phosphorus for sulfur five elements also compose nucleic acids like DNA. And then there is the combination of oxygen and hydrogen to form the compound that makes earth so suitable for life, water.

But why, you wonder, is a technopreneur talking Biology & Chemistry in the blog.

This is because this stitching of resources to make newer and better resources is not limited to abiogenesis. As Mark Twain said, “There is no such thing as a NEW IDEA. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely, but they are the same old pieces of coloured glass that have been in use through all the ages.”

When two ideas are combined to form a new one, two plus two does not need to be four, it can be redefined to mean five. Combining two minor inventions – the coin punch and the winepress – gave birth to the mighty printing press.

The trick is to take a product and make it work in an absurd way. Trevor Bayliss is the English inventor who conceived the clockwork radio. What a strange combination! Radios need electricity and clockwork mechanical. Surely batteries or mains electricity are better ways to power a radio. However, in the developing world batteries are expensive and mains electricity is unreliable. Bayliss built a reliable radio that people could wind up by hand. It transformed the availability of information in many of the poorest regions of the Earth.

Similarly, when it comes to startups and businesses, a lot of the ideas are a kaleidoscope of multiple ideas. A lot of new businesses take existing ideas from one industry and improve them using techniques from another industry.

Closer to home, when it comes to product building ideologies for software, while the world’s spotlight might be on Agile, large companies have not let go of the waterfall model for their software cycles. In fact, in a quick journey to value, the smartest minds combine the waterfall, agile and DevOps ideologies to create a system that’s the best-best for their use case that is. Because, for every problem, there will be a unique blend of approaches to create the best one.  

Why then, when it comes to building enterprise software, this methodology is not a default way of operation? Is it because there are not enough solutions to stitch with each other? Is it because we only value what we create?  Most definitely not, ask any analyst, developer or project manager and they will tell you that any problem that they have faced is nothing new and that every problem has already been solved or is being solved. The problem here could be of a mindset. When faced with a problem we tend to directly jump into building a solution rather than assessing the approach towards resolving the problem...

ProDT solves this by bringing the philosophy of nature to building software. Using a unique method that allows us to construct the entire solution in an accelerated way depending on the problem at hand.  E.g. one of our startup clients have not yet found a product-market fit and one of their requirements was to do a video integration.  So rather than building a core video engine, we suggested to the Founder, to look for a video engine.  This improved our time to market for the launch, reduced costs & the need for highly specialized skills. We blend this philosophy into our execution.

Our platform accelerators reduce the complexity of implementation which often is one of the reasons for projects to fail.  We are proud to have our partnership with WEM.io that is the key enabler for this business kaleidoscope.  We promise 5x results with this methodology, giving great & predictable results every time with each customer.

But why us? If technology building is just a process of stitching existing technologies, surely anyone can do it, right? Well, even a tailor designing clown’s costumes make clothes right, but you would not be willing to wear them daily. Similarly, stitch and build require a certain approach and technique. For example, elasticsearch, a service traditionally used for technical logs, was used to record business transactions in one of our solutions simply because we could see that business transactions were essentially logs of a business. This approach has helped us build the required transformers. To know more about these transformers and our other projects, feel free to reach out to us in messages or comments and stay tuned to understand more about our stitch and build a methodology of building software.

P.S. This article too, was conceptualized and written using the stitch and build philosophy, combining various ideas and thought processes into a new one ;)

Habits are the human mechanism for simplifying decisions which drive what we do daily. When thinking about habits, it is essential to recognize they can be good, bad and with respect to our goals.

Heads of technology always have a love-hate relationship with DevOps. A solid DevOps team can provide cutting edge speed, collaboration and delivery but the kind of changes in the culture it brings along is difficult to accept and adapt in some organisations. Despite this, DevOps is being adopted across many organisations due to the good features it brings to the table. Hence, it has even become the new hack to get investment from IT investors these days. But in no way is the importance of DevOps being overstated by organisations that do abide by it. Future of organisations is highly dependent on their ability to deliver software faster and faster while not compromising on security and stability. This article on “10 Habits of all successful DevOps” will familiarize you with 5 best and 5 worst DevOps habits that your organisation can imbibe. ‍

The Good

1. Fail fast, learn fast: Failure is not a sin, it is something you should strive for to succeed in DevOps. Success by failure sounds contradicting. But it is executed by having failure built into the testing process. DevOps means a shift from the worry of failure to a desire to a fail-fast and learn. This does not mean that your goal should be to fail. Rather, you need to look at failure as an opportunity to learn and improve without playing the blame game. The sooner issues are discovered the cheaper it is to fix them, thus making failing early on a benefit. Once you fail fast, you need to learn fast and for this, the 2 most effective techniques are to make sure that you include strong Application Performance Monitoring tools (APM) which help you in identifying what caused the failure and feedback loops that raise immediate alerts in case of failures using tools like Slack to communicate.
2. Architect your delivery pipeline: Organisations need to treat their delivery pipeline like a product rather than a separate set of tools used to move a feature from idea to deployment. For this, they need to have a product owner for the pipelines who define stories and owns prioritization just like business products’ owners. Apart from this, the choice of the right stack matters too. The next great tool for CI/CD is always round the corner and they need to be a part of a company’s DevOps stack for a well-architected pipeline. But they need to be integrated using standard integration patterns and technologies that are model-based so that your workflow isn’t disrupted and the tools work the way they were intended. Customisation creates a dependency that will cost you in future when you need to replace or upgrade certain tools.
3. CI-CD: From being an added star in a company’s tech report card, CI-CD has now become the norm. The discipline of validating a project through automated regression testing whenever there's a commit into the version control system enables the development of quality solutions in small, safe and uniform steps. Continuous deployment helps development teams to scale back the time between a new feature being ideated and deployed in production which ensures responsiveness in companies.
4. Standardising and simplifying the environment: There ` things can be done making standards necessary while adopting DevOps. There is a need to have some rules around how the architecture and unfractured is configured. However, there is a reason why standardising and simplification are mentioned together. Sometimes, when adopting such standards, organisations hit an axe on their foot by overengineering. If teams are not given a certain autonomy, it leads to lower productivity. To prevent this, a right balance can be to have guardrails around how the infrastructure is architected but let teams choose what technologies they think is most effective for their needs.
5. Inculcate good programming habits: This point focuses on some habit changes in programmers that help. A strict no for programmers should be doing something manually even if it automated just because it is one time. This includes builds, merges, deletion of old files and so on. Another habit that should be made mandatory is writing documentation, the lack of which, while might not hurt in the short term, can be a disaster in the long term. Good documentation will make your code better incrementally. Such habits matter because long term maintainability should always trump over short term execution.  ‍

The Bad

1. Making DevOps one person or team’s job: The major failure in DevOps come when it is a one-person or team responsibility. With agile being adopted across the board, changes that occur in one team affect the entire organisation. Along with this, you will also be changing how deployment, monitoring and customer support happens. Thus, for DevOps transformation to truly succeed, silos never work and everyone should be involved and engaged. An easy way to do this is to simply redefine success as a satisfied customer from the current metric of a feature being shipped which will lead to everyone being accountable in the success measurement.
2. Trying to be Netflix: Netflix deploys multiple times a day and tries all new tools, so you should too. Right? No, you could not be more wrong. Organizations need to understand that business value is in observing the impact of each change and the way users react. Patterns of multiple deployments might even end up having negative business value if there are no behavioural patterns formed in end users that businesses can track and measure to make decisions. Ultimately, DevOps is not about being ‘cool’ and not all organisations have the resources that Netflix does.
3. Ignoring security early in the development cycle: There is a tendency of many organisations of being narrow-minded in DevOps with the focus being on faster releases but this usually comes at the cost of ignoring security during the development cycle and in production. The result of this is that there are security loopholes in the product and infrastructure that get missed by the team which leaves the product exposed and additional time is needed to apply fixes upon a breach, which makes security a game of catch up. It is thus a great practice to make security a core part of DevOps goals at your organisation.
4. Overdoing automation: Organisations need to understand that automation is about converting a manual process to automatic using technology. This means that if the manual process itself is flawed so is the automatic one. Automating this flawed process would just make it possible for mistakes to happen at a faster rate. So, organisations should know that overdoing automation would lead them to an unproductive extreme and that the primary focus has to be on understanding the requirement, developing, testing and then automating a process.
5. Making speed your only goal: In today’s world, the constant focus on releases without qualitative improvements is useless. Deployment automation should not be a focus for organisations without test automation. A focus solely on speed shows that while there might be an understanding of the aspects of automation in the organisation, the cultural groundwork of having developers, testers and operations team build automation collaboratively is missing.

The goal behind effective DevOps habits is to enable DevOps teams to maneuver fast with a continuous delivery workflow. Building a DevOps culture isn't an instant process, you can’t simply pull it out of the box. But if you're taking a thoughtful and incremental approach, DevOps becomes a strong combination of culture and tools which will elevate your business to a level of agility and quality that your competitors would find hard to beat. And adopting the above habits of highly effective DevOps will get you there.

It’s your turn now. Tell us in the comment section the habits that drove DevOps success at your organisations and the habits that you make sure are avoided at any cost. For more such articles, follow us on LinkedIn, and if you have queries specific to your business or want to leap into the cloud, drop in your contact details in the comment box and we’ll reach out to you.

Containerization is a simple way to separate personal and workspaces within a single machine, with each not being able to access the other. It does so by creating a separate secure area called containers which is accessible only by the admin and which cannot access anything outside it. All the interactions between the user and the corporate data take place within this encrypted container and the bounds of the permissions granted to the user.

A container is an isolated, lightweight silo for running an application on the host operating system. In contrast to containers, Virtual Machines (VMs) run a complete operating system–including its kernel–on this host hardware. If you had to ship 2 t-shirts from one place to another, a VM would load on a ship (hardware) two unnecessarily large containers (OS with its kernel) and keep one t-shirt (applications) in each. While what containerization would do is, load on the ship one container and then have separate locked boxes for each t-shirt. Using this method of containerization provides speed, lower costs, portability, easier deployment, maintainability and if need be, deletion.‍

How do containers reduce cost and time to profit?‍

Containers need fewer copies of the operating systems, meaning lesser licenses, and also fewer resources to run. The machines will get more amount of useful work done too. Easier and automated management techniques also mean cost-effective maintenance. Decomposing things to the level of containers means easier development and deployment, making human resources more cost-effective too. Most importantly, containers make your move to the cloud easier, and moving to the cloud means paying for only what you use in most cases.

Containerization not only leads to lower costs but also increases profits by reducing the time to profit. It removes the roadblocks between development and deployment by making the dependencies between the two smaller and easier to handle. These roadblocks are a major factor of a slowdown as developers want to create the best product and the operations team want to create the most stable one, leading to a deadlock sometimes. It also increases operational velocity as it becomes easier to add new features to applications in containers and test them. This is possible because containers are discreet and developers only need to update one thing at a time without caring about how other processes are affected.‍

Netflix also uses containers to test its features on 10% of the customers and check the response.‍

How do containers help with predictability and dependability?‍

These factors come from the way containers work. Each application has a separate environment with everything it needs to run and all of these container environments are independent to avoid affecting or altering each other. Moreover, the containers can be moved from one place to another, without affecting the application functioning. It is easier to set the rules and conditions of the container and once set, the can’t be changed thus avoiding non-standard systems. Debugging the issues is faster since the sources of the issues are not many.

It’s become increasingly important for business leaders beyond the technical side to understand application containerization. The same features that make containerization an important tool for developers also create immense, and often untapped, business value and I hope that this article helped you with understanding that. Comment down below if you think containers can help your business and as the title track of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. says, “I’ll be there for you”.

Let’s start today’s piece with a simple question. Why do people travel when they want to do soul searching? Sure, some like me go to their nearby meditation centre for a week and some backpack through western Europe (hi, Joey *wink wink*). Why has there never been a story of someone finding their purpose in their own house, on their bed? That’s because, as the saying goes, life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

But, we do not see this happening frequently at companies after a point, and probably rightly so too, since, at a company, there is a lot more at stake. But, once in a while, there occurs a black swan event that forces companies to go outside their comfort zones and think, and disrupt. The covid-19 pandemic is one such event. This event has made companies rethink their structures and working styles overnight, but we do not think that this is the end, we think this is the beginning of a paradigm change. A change from ineffective remote collaboration to effective communication, remote or otherwise. A change from a mismatch in demands from business and the delivery capacity of technology teams to technology teams who deliver faster than the businesses can even expect. A change from high attrition rates to retainment of skilled and in-demand resources. A change from technology teams that are resistant to different demands to ones that embrace them.

So what can you do?

The traditional recipe

1. Take a pause
2. Assess, prioritize, plan and implement things the traditional way
3. Limit the scope since the operations can have too many environmental challenges
4. Try to avoid mistakes which you probably won’t be able to due to the fractured communication and that will rake up costs manifold since the cost of digitizing is on the rise
5. Finally, go through the painful process of finding people talented enough to execute this.

Or, take a pause and equip teams with force multipliers on the path of digital acceleration

1. Take a pause
2. And equip your team with force multipliers.

What are these force multipliers we talk about? They are tools and processes that help you make your processes faster, more efficient and tolerant to failure from the human and machine side.

We have already talked about a few of these in our previous articles such as DevOps and agile methodology, but today we talk about the NoCode Revolution.

But why are we calling it a revolution?

Because this part of the technology industry is booming like never before. Faster adoption, bigger and bigger funding rounds with crazy valuations and most importantly happy customers.

And why now?

The no-code industry has been evolving for years now, but we were simply not ready for it. The intent of the computing industry has majorly been towards packing more power with higher efficiency in a smaller space. We have gone from mainframes to bulky desktops to mobiles and laptops that weigh less than a kilogram which can do highly complex tasks with relative ease. Earlier too, we have taken steps in the direction to get ready for no-code, such as moving desktop solutions to the web, however, they were not branded that way as the web was not mature enough to replicate the power of an on-premise database system. It was very difficult to create web email clients in the early 200s that were even 50% as powerful as their desktop counterparts, but in the last decade, we have learnt to live with Javascript, invented react and have started using technologies that were intended for web to make desktop apps too (hi, electron.js). It was a technological gap that stopped this revolution, not user acceptance.

And why exactly should I care about this? Because you want to take this black swan of a pandemic with optimism and start doing things in 2 steps instead of 5. Your focus as an organisation should only be on one word, AUTOMATE!

Automate everything, automate every process that needs a manual action. Do you have a 5 step procedure to reconcile sales? Automate it. You press a button every day to download a report? Automate it! We usually don’t realise how much time we can get back from our schedules till we do this. Organisations with small business IT teams can plan to adapt no code and blend them with specialized API driven products. Those with medium-sized teams can use it to tailor the specialized business process and differentiate from the competition.

Those with a large team should have a specialized DevOps team so that change management is automated. This will help you deploy a no-friction ecosystem. There is an urgent need in the industry to stop friction in execution. And the no-code philosophy can help you do it!

We know that you have a lot of questions in your head, like, how are businesses currently using and benefiting from no code, when should you plan to go from code to no code, why transformations fail, what about your current IT teams and a lot more. Don’t worry, we have an article coming up on each of these topics and you can follow us to stay updated.

Shameless Plug: We, with our technological philosophy and specialised stack, help organisations in digital acceleration  Feel free to reach out to us transform-me@prodt.co for a quick assessment.

I completed my engineering in BE(IT) from Bharti Vidyapeeth Pune in 2016. After completing my education, I did some language courses like Java and PHP which were related to front end and backend development. Then I started giving interviews for the position of a software developer at different IT companies.

What were my challenges:

During my journey, I started facing multiple challenges. I was interviewed by many companies and in these, I cracked all aptitude tests given to me. On an average I was able to clear 6 to 7 rounds of interviews in most companies, however there were a few companies where I was able to clear all the interview rounds. All these efforts were not getting rewarded as I was not getting selected for a long time until I got an offer from a company in Pune. I worked at the company for a short period of time as I had to leave due to health issues.

Once my health became better, I began searching for a job once more. The long/increasing career gap of two years led me to feel depressed and frustrated, therefore I was not able to focus. Despite my situation, I showed tremendous determination and I was connected with PRODT through a consultancy service. I successfully gave 2 to 3 rounds of interview and was offered a position as a software engineer.

Changes in me since I joined PRODT:‍

I joined PRODT on 8th March 2021. PRODT incorporated a no-code platform and expected us to work from home (due to the COVID19 pandemic), which was a new experience to me. I wondered if this work culture was appropriate to me but after a while, I comfortably adapted.

I really love the innovative and disciplined culture I am working in. I see myself as productive and satisfied. I have learnt many new things in PRODT and I have noticed an improved version of myself since I joined.
‍

I have made some healthy lifestyle changes as I started working out regularly, reading books and learning new languages like French. As a result, I see myself as a completely focused and positive individual. Also, I talked to friends and tried to understand their views on the coding line. Everyone had different opinions and experiences which drew my attention towards the uniqueness of our lines of code. I am very grateful for being a part of PRODT and hope to contribute extraordinarily to our unique culture.

In our previous articles of this series, we talk about why the stitch and build philosophy of developing technology solutions is the way to go forward and where no-code fits in this philosophy. Today, continuing on that, we shall delve deeper into why it makes sense as a business to adopt no-code in your organisation.

Businesses now more than ever have increasingly fast-evolving requirements and traditional programming has responded with frameworks and solutions for faster execution.  We have witnessed framework, runtimes, COTS, DevOps all contributing towards the success of modern application development.  However, we have also witnessed that developers’ learning for each of the platforms and the challenges thereof are multi-varied uncontrolled aspects that still lead to slow execution to complex business processes.  In all this the business analysts are often removed from what actually is happening underneath the hood. . With no-code and low code solutions, business and domain experts can sit with developers and share the same visualization of the business logic. The definition of a developer itself is changing.

Let’s have a look at where exactly can No-code help businesses.‍

Optimizing Resources‍

Due to no-code capabilities, organisations will be able to work without huge IT capabilities and yet deliver better results in an agile manner. This means a direct cost saving as when companies have to outsource tasks or hire professionals, they incur costs while when using a no-code platform, the same requirements can be fulfilled with a smaller yet efficient team.‍

More Robust Solutions‍

If no-code enables the ones with relatively lesser expertise to design technical solutions, what do the expert developers do then? They design architectures that run these solutions for you and work on specialized use cases thus leading to robust solutions.  These developers now focus more on the logic development of the core business processes, elegant user experiences and change management.

Fast Application Delivery

With the agility that no-code gets in due to the developers not hand-coding each line,  businesses will be able to create applications quicker as compared to conventional coding methods.  No-code also offers built-in bullet tested, gold class non-functional aspects of an application like security, single sign-on, integrations, data management.‍

Integrate Changes Quickly‍

With the evolving nature of demands from the end-users, coders have to change the code midway while creating an application. This costs both time & money and creates frustration among developers as it leads to rework & wastage in time. With no-code, integration of changes becomes easy and enhancement of functionality can happen on the go. With this, the development process is streamlined thus reducing time to market and forming a better customer experience.‍

Reduction In TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)‍

These platforms can also help you significantly reduce the cost of ownership. The no-code platforms are a very cost-efficient alternative to conventional coding. Since a no-code platform does not require the same efforts and skills as a conventional platform, an organisation can reduce a lot of its burden and think of optimizations and automation at the enterprise level by developing solutions for specific needs.‍

No-Code and Uncertainty‍

No-code has also led to fluid teams as developers get more and more involved on the business side and business analysts on the development side. This dislocation leads to a team with higher awareness of things at a higher business level as well as in different teams, leading to readiness for change and empathy for each other make your organisation an overall better organisation. Up to 90% as per 451 research which makes dealing with uncertainty much simpler and tolerable when measured by both time and money.

No-code has also led to fluid teams as developers get more and more involved on the business side and business analysts on the development side. This dislocation leads to a team with higher awareness of things at a higher business level as well as in different teams, leading to readiness for change and empathy for each other make your organisation an overall better organisation.

Who knows, in future this change in workflows will lead to a change in hiring patterns and processes and lead as requirements shift and new roles evolve.

If you think of it, no-code is like riding a bicycle. Once you experience the speed, energy-saving and gush of the wind, why would you ever go back? We would like to know your thoughts on how no-code can help or has helped businesses in developing more robust, quick and cost-efficient solutions. Don’t forget to leave your comments.

As a work-from-home Digital-Factory-styled company, PRODT connects on a camera-on, NSA (no-strings-attached) Zoom session every fortnight. The theme of these sessions vary from playing online multiplayer games like Pictionary or Dumb Charades to movie reviews to light-hearted conversations. Our objective is to connect our staff with the organisation and vice versa. I encourage all my team members to spend this time with the organisation irrespective of how their week/fortnight went. We try not to judge each other as our personal sides are reflected in these meetings.

The meeting on 14th August 2021 was extremely different as Jyotsana, our HR lead, came up with a seemingly unassuming topic to speak about our childhood and our favourite memory. I expected it to be a casual/carefree atmosphere and it indeed was that for most of us. We reflected on how we were as children with some interesting and funny incidents along the way. Although some were able to narrate incidents with clarity and some could not, I felt this was an important step where our team members began to express and learn the art of expression. The more we express, the more we will find ways to improve.

One of our team members reflected that he was not blessed with a great childhood as he was forced to leave school and work as a kid to meet basic needs of his family. Vimal achieved this with a lot of ease and he showed zero negativity about his childhood. Today, with PRODT he has found and grown new wings and he has thanked me for the opportunity. I was aware of his past however his narrative was extremely moving and that led me to write up this short blog. We have all gone through highs and lows in our childhood and I have read a lot of material that talks about how what we are today (our abilities, mindset and well being) is a reflection of our experiences of our childhood. Vimal spent around 10 years as an office boy in a bank running errands. He earned everything that he is today and he also made decisions for every aspect of his life. WOW, this should be a real confidence booster. He has gone through hardships, but he is indeed a leader in the making.

Vimal was referred to me through my cousin as banks were closing down due to the COVID-19 outbreak. I required someone to maintain the company books. My simple breakdown of what I wanted to ask him was clear as he has been with money and numbers for 10 years and he would understand form filling and compliances. I also asked him questions to validate this. My analysis was fair, he came out with flying colours. I also suggested that he do a desk job instead of a job which required moving around. It was important to mention that it will take him conscious effort to learn to sit at a place with concentration. Finally, I felt that accounts would require some English skills and he was not all that great. We started simple English lessons for him.

It has been a year and Vimal is managing company books, generating invoices, family books, GST payments, payroll computation and tax computation. He also writes follow-up Emails for all ageing ARs and keeps things tight. All this with applying baseline Agile principles, democratic execution, daily SCRUM, fuelling passion, allowing some mistakes to be made and allowing to correct those, thus giving him an environment and a coach. There is a lot left to be achieved as we are in an early part of Vimal’s professional career.  He also feels that he is changing for the better and I am delighted to have Vimal as part of our team and on the path of transformation. In addition, I also feel blessed that I could contribute to someone's life journey.

I also reflected on my childhood and narrated a few of my funny incidents. While I was writing this blog, I felt that I was blessed to have great parents, well-wishers, and experiences without which I would not have experienced the joy of transformation.  This is one of the ways for me to acknowledge all those who supported me and lifted me when the chips were down. Tasmay Shri Guruvay Namah. I bow down to all people and experiences that have made me what I am today. I am proud of what I am today.

At PRODT we are trying to build a culture that is reflecting, caring, and transforming in all aspects. The journey is not easy and the culture is difficult to develop during this pandemic, however value can only be created only if challenges exist. I am trying to build this company with a transformative impact to each stakeholder in PRODT and starting with ourselves and then as an organisation, therefore to our clients in the end.

We need all the blessings and luck to endure this journey!

Route 53 Resolver is an AWS solution to enterprises who are looking to use an existing DNS configuration in a hybrid network by bridging the data center and public cloud.

On a high level, Route 53 resolver:

1) Is a managed DNS resolver service from Route 53

2) Helps to create conditional forwarding rules to redirect query traffic

3) Enables hybrid connectivity over AWS Direct Connect and Managed VPN

Now, we will be working on creating a route 53 resolver inbound and outbound endpoints, and then share the rule with target VPCs in multi AWS accounts. (Note: All the VPCs used here are from multi account architecture and are associated via Transit Gateway and all the subnets used here have routes to On Premise Infrastructure using Direct Connect.)

Let’s do a small thought experiment. Think about a time when there were no printing presses, no huge machinery that could print tens of thousands of papers a day. Instead, you had blocks and dyes that were used to print papers. Suddenly, someone says that there is a printing press. But, you, as a publishing house owner, are worried about the 1000 things that can go wrong in this transformation and are naturally worried about it. Yet, you take a leap of faith, and make the change in a single night without a plan, and fail. You then tell your friends from the industry this story. They are naturally worried about this and don’t adapt to the new technology easily.

The story of digital transformations is similar to, and no code is no different. There are a lot of failures in adopting this technology, but there is one thing that is different. This time around, there are well-documented case studies and blogs (like the one you are reading right now) to give you a list of things you need to avoid, so read on to find out 5 major reasons why no code transformations fail.‍

1- The Resistance (friction)‍

No code, to date, sees a huge resistance not only from developers but also from project managers, DevOps teams and even from the business itself. While the worry on the developer end is about their jobs being taken away, on the project management end, it is purely about the complacency of adapting to the change.

The newness of the methodology that shows up as complexity is overwhelming to the people involved and this builds up resistance, a side product of which are frustration, demotivation and annoyance.

Having said that, we do see resistance in any change.  In my last 20+ years of the technology transformation journey, it is seldom seen that resistance is towards anything that is not mundane.  One of the ways to overcome resistance is to develop a friction-free execution culture, and in one of the points below, we will see that no-code allows for seeding this culture. ‍

2- Leadership Decisions‍

When timelines and expectations are unrealistically set by the leadership from day one, the impact is exponential. Given the uncertainties of traditional execution, there is significant anxiety about a successful outcome.  This creates pressure to set unrealistic expectations.   No-code is not a shift from one tool to the other, it is a shift in the paradigm and the way your business thinks and operates. Due to this, not only setting timelines but also picking the right people has a huge impact. Failing to choose the people who understand the intent and the philosophy is a grave error that needs to be avoided.  ‍

3- Change Management being an afterthought‍

All discussions around transformations talk about technology and yet the most impacted are people. This is exactly why in the digitization era, change management is at the forefront. Not only having the buy-in of the people but also involving them with decision making will make their worries around the uncertainty in the need of their role go away and be a key differentiator in the failure or success of the transformation. This also gives you an opportunity to identify the resistors and address their concerns. It is also important to understand that change management needs proper investment and experts instead of just handing this over to project managers due to its intangible nature.‍

4- Silos being an accepted reality in the system‍

No-code is inherently about focusing on what needs to be done rather than the exact code that needs to be written. The focus, in no code, shifts towards logic and the outcome that businesses need. Additionally, another advantage that is advertised is rapid changes being possible, but this can not happen if your organisation is working in silos. If the developer does not go outside his cabin, both figuratively and literally, to understand the pain points from the sales team and the customer feedback from the support team, they will not be able to empathise with the requirements that come in. So, this organisational change of breaking down silos is necessary for a successful no-code transformation.

For example, one of our customers’ IT team faced tremendous pressure from their business teams and market to deliver a solution in a matter of 3 weeks. Whilst, it took us 1 week to understand the user stories however in the next 10 days we were able to deliver an end-to-end solution, and still have a few days left for incorporating user feedback and changes.  No-code helped us to complete the user stories ahead of the expectation.‍

5- Expecting exponential value‍

This factor might have an indirect but significant impact in the transformation. Organisations depend on big bang methods to achieve success in gaining gradual and continuous improvements with progressively decreasing time to market. Sounds counterintuitive, right? A common trap in this method is to get stuck in analysis paralysis as you want the “best outcome”. There is nothing wrong with incremental value. In fact, we’d say incremental steps are preferred as they give you more opportunities to reflect, introspect and most importantly, correct them without major impact, since, if they are recognised and corrected at the very end, they might have a higher time and money impact.

These five (5) factors are in no way comprehensive or exhaustive.  What other reasons could lead to a failure in no-code transformation as per you? We should mention

1. Are these different from any other tech/platform stack implementation?
2. How can PRODT help, any reference to our work
3. Despite the challenges and failures, why we still propose that No-code is still the recipe to Digital Transformation.

The need for Human Resource (HR) functions and processes is emerging and has claimed importance right since the birth of an organisation. However, the myth still exists regarding the existence of HR as a separate function in an organisation because it has always been seen as a cost centre. However, budding companies like PRODT are changing the mindsets of the past by not considering the HR function as an overhead. It has started to be considered as an indirect revenue centre because it increases revenue generation capabilities of an organisation through recruitment, training and development, performance reviews, etc.

Why is it important for any organisation to define HR systems?

The HR function is the central authority for the smooth running of an organisation. It is still easy to execute what has been set, but it is difficult to set up the entire function, execute it and build a habit of that process as it takes time.First of all, it is imperative to understand that HR defines the policies and guiding principles as per the nature of the business. In fact, other units follow the same principles too. Once these guiding principles are defined and the process documents are set, the hardest challenge is to get it started. In my opinion, this is the main difficulty of most HRs who try to build it from scratch. This may be because the need of the execution does not seem to be required at that point and as a result, the entire function takes a back seat.

Areas covered by an HR:

Let’s get a quick overview of what the HR department covers in the initial days of the firm:

Recruitment: Finding the talent, not only in terms of skills, but also understanding whether the person will be able to adapt to the working culture and can be a good team member, becomes critically important. As human capital is the capital that can make or break a company, finding the right talent is a must for any organization.

Compliance: One must adhere to the state and country laws and make provisions of the same to safeguard the interest of the employee as well as the employer.

Policy formulation: This gives an employee the overall structure and processes of an organisation. Like every house has its discipline, every organisation has some discipline which gives a person a fair idea of how this organisation works.

Building the culture: Defining the culture of an organisation and bringing it into existence is very sensitive. It involves understanding the nature of the business, empathy for each other, discipline, ownership and being result-oriented.

Defining the processes: Listening to the word ‘processes’, you may sigh because you may have to follow principles. However, once these guiding principles are adhered to can make the processes and life much easier and relaxed for each one of us. These points are a few of many tasks accomplished by HR and this is what we are trying to build in PRODT as well. Especially, when it comes to a work from home culture, where teams are connected through Zoom, Slack, etc. the chances of us feeling alone, not being appreciated and not being motivated enough, increases. Hence, the challenge of making sure we are connected with each other becomes extremely important. Some of our upcoming initiatives are meant to develop the employee-centric approach in a work from home culture, to bridge the gap between the management and the collaborators from various cities in India.

In today’s article, we are doing something different. We are not focusing on the concerns of the business heads and CEOs but focusing on your tech teams and their concerns. For the last few articles, we have been talking about how revolutionary no-code is and how it easies development efforts. But a big concern that developers have is that this revolution will take their jobs away.

This is not a new phenomenon. Whenever a technology looks like it could take away a job previously held by humans, people get worried. It has happened with printing, accounting and many more, so why not software development.

Answering the big question right at the start, no. No code will not replace developers. NoIn fact, today less than 0.3% of the world population is tech-friendly i.e devs, analysts, users etc. No-code is going to take digitalisation to next level

Abstraction has been in the laws of nature, from cells to complex beings called humans as we reflected in my first blog. Also, it has been a target benchmark of software development since the earliest of times. Software engineers have been hired to build tools that automate tasks since the start and thus it is contended that the same skills can be applied to their jobs. This is exactly why so many domain-specific languages and tools have evolved over the years. People once looked down on languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript and COBOL because they weren’t as “close to the machine” as C, says Airtable engineer Mary Rose Cook.

But today, there is massive adoption, acceptance and community around these.

But then why do developers see this new abstraction as less legitimate and yet worrisome at the same time? Do they not know that this has put them on the wrong side of history before? While we may not have the answer to that, here are a few reasons why we think developers need not worry about no code taking jobs away.

1. No-code is continuously and rapidly evolving from its current form. Anyone who has used a no-code app will tell you that none of these tools can do every single thing that possibly can be achieved by coding.
2. No-code solutions might lead to developers not writing simple applications and MVPs, there shall always be a need to understand the lower-level workings of systems to solve challenging higher-order problems.
3. Putting no-code tools in the hands of users that do not understand the code they generate may lead to a new kind of Frankenstein monster with parts difficult to maintain and evolve. This also could lead to bigger security issues due to both limited knowledge and vulnerabilities arising from non-technical users and the platform respectively
4. Complex customizations and integrations remain a challenge for no-code platforms. If advanced flexibility is needed in the features being developed, there is a need for a developer and capabilities that go beyond no code.

These platforms provide a wider array of integration opportunities by the day but as your apps develop into bigger systems and newer third party add ons emerge, you will have to go to code level and get these integrations without compromising the integrity of the software. Moreover, you can not use no-code to develop and consume the core of today’s complex application’s, APIs. However, this is not true for all no-code platforms.

Here, we would like to plug one of our No-Code partners wem.io which can consume any existing REST API and allow complex business logic to be built separately as well as consume existing logic.

So what should developers do? Like what the developers have done from the 1970’s onward, adapt and adopt.  This tribe is the best at aligning to changes and blend a completely new outcome.

We think that the projections are that no-code is going to become more commonplace in the future. Thus, developers need to continue learning. They need to learn the low and no-code platforms out there so that they are more productive and keep adding value to the business. Their job is to solve problems and writing code will not be enough. Just like very few developers write machine code today, we may live in a future where only specialists write HTML and CSS from scratch and we should be looking at the concept of blending code and no-code together to achieve our goals faster.

Additionally, they also need to learn new and “hot” skills such as machine learning and blockchain. It won’t be enough to just understand programming fundamentals. The successful coders of the next decade will have skills that can not be replicated by the no-code platform as of now, and who knows, they may be working towards making exactly that possible too just like the current developers working on building no-code platforms.

Lastly, developers need to make sure that the products they build are not easily substituted by no code. And if a part of it is substitutable and yet they are not using a library or purchasing a subscription to a no-code platform but rather writing it by hand, they need to have a strong reason for it.

Developers need to focus their time on high leverage tasks and use existing solutions wherever they can. Businesses that adopt the no code wave earliest will create products faster and have the most time to extract value from the platform itself.

After all, product teams that have thrived have always used existing solutions where it has made sense and built custom tools only when it does not. Thus, they could move faster and produce more value for the world.

But now the question is to you. Are you a developer? Are you worried about no code or do you embrace it with open arms? Do let us know along with your reasons in the comment section.

As a key decision-maker, it feels that you just can’t ignore the big buzz words of technology like AI, Computer Vision, Mobile First and so on, and it is just natural to sideline DevOps Transformation as a buzzword that will fade out soon. But, doing so would mean missing out on a train of fast-paced, technology-supported growth. Today, we try to explain to you this paradigm simply and understandably.‍

What is DevOps transformation?

‘In an organisation, there is an unwritten coding policy, called throw it over the wall and let the operations team run it. The ops team is usually the one responsible for customer or manager facing tasks and so developers are less worried about buggy code. The incentives are misaligned and there is a vision mismatch between the business and the technology side since everyone is working in their silos.’ Do these sentences remind you of an organisation you have worked/are working with?

DevOps Transformation is a process aimed at breaking down these silos and building an integrated environment working towards a common vision.

While there is no standard definition or way to do it, it is essentially a process that aims at cultural and technological change aimed towards improved communication among business, design, engineering and all other parts of an organisation.
‍

Why should you opt for DevOps transformation?‍

Without beating around the bush, here are 3 solid reasons why you should opt for DevOps transformation.

1. Better quality: While better is ambiguous and every tool and consultant offers it, in a DevOps culture, it can be assured by asking the correct questions, such as the biggest worries, what is lacking and so on to the leadership and planning the transformation around it.
2. More confident releases: Since DevOps addresses essential quality concerns, there will be lesser unpleasant surprises for the team and users. This is because the visibility to the processes increases and the riskiest and critical quality checks are done early on.
3. Higher flexibility: Flexibility in this paradigm is not about changing the business model but rather constant improvements in the release process as business needs change. Early on, speed might be the most important, but later stability will matter more, and this can be achieved incrementally.

These 3 factors together ensure that there is lesser wasted effort and higher predictability, which will directly reflect on productivity and profitability of your organisation.‍

What is the journey going to look like?‍

As you start with DevOps transformation, be aware that it will bring major cultural and procedural changes. It will mark the start of shared decision making. While collaboration and standardisation may be slightly chaotic early on, as time goes by, it will be refined and lead to constant optimisation with the help of the metrics tracked. The process of DevOps transformation is like washing clothes. First, observe. As different clothes are observed for materials and colours, observe where the organisation stands currently on different metrics such as speed and ability to handle change. Next, lather, that is, measure how things work today and find the greatest pain points and bottlenecks. Now, rinse, that is, start fixing the problems that are evident by using tools and techniques such as CI/CD, automation, etc. and streamline them. Lastly, repeat. Remember that this is not a one time process and as new observations crop up, be ready to repeat the process and change incrementally.‍

What are the challenges of this transformation?‍

The journey is not going to be without its challenges. Organisations need to reimagine the structure of doing things and culture. It is important to ensure that you don’t underestimate the effort required. Choosing the right metrics is tough. Focusing just on feature development speed without a focus on corresponding better quality will not yield results. The goals set must be realistic and in line with the limited funds that an organisation can allocate. Lastly, the complexity involved in the process of DevOps transformation must not be undermined. Your IT leaders must be able to answers questions like, ‘Will standardisation improve results or delay innovation?’ and your teams should be ready to overcome resistance to change and relearn many ways of doing things.‍

What is the future going to look like?‍

The DevOps transformation journey is most going to be an ongoing journey since new paradigms will keep on emerging, but its core mission will remain the same. With the involvement of AI, automation will play a major role in the transformation. AI, with machine learning, will put the focus on anomaly detection, predictive insights and performance baselining which will speed up mundane and repetitive tasks. AI will also take in metrics and put actionable insights from the data. All of this will ultimately sharpen focus on cloud optimization.

Be it about habit, health or DevOps, transformations are tough. Fortunately, we can help you with at least one of them. Feel free to reach out to us for any help or advice on DevOps Transformation and use the comments section to tell us how DevOps Transformation helped your business scale new heights.

CloudFormation: AWS CloudFormation gives you an easy way to model a collection of related AWS and third-party resources, provision them quickly and consistently, and manage them throughout their life cycles, by treating infrastructure as code. A CloudFormation template describes your desired resources and their dependencies so you can launch and configure them together as a stack. You can use a template to create, update, and delete an entire stack as a single unit, as often as you need to, instead of managing resources individually. You can manage and provision stacks across multiple AWS accounts and AWS regions.‍

API Gateway: Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. APIs act as the "front door" for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services. Using API Gateway, you can create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that enable real-time two-way communication applications. API Gateway supports containerized and server less workloads, as well as web applications.‍

Lambda: AWS Lambda is a server less compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers, creating workload-aware cluster scaling logic, maintaining event integrations, or managing runtimes. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code as a ZIP file or container image, and Lambda automatically and precisely allocates compute execution power and runs your code based on the incoming request or event, for any scale of traffic.

Luxurious life, a successful career and comforts were the thoughts that lingered in my mind as I stood among the toppers with my head held high and a B.E. degree with a well-paying job from an MNC in hand. Over 15 years, thoughts changed to family, kids, their health and education. These thoughts of a woman give rise to loving families and disciplined kids. But there was a fire deep within to implement the knowledge, to prove the caliber, to step back into the professional world. Many opportunities knocked my door (now an M.E. topper too) but I always dreamt of a job where I would not be forced to leave my kids at the mercy of domestic helpers at this tender age. Could there be a job where I could restart my career and yet attend to the needs of my family?

Luckily the answer was ‘yes’. When I received a work from home offer from ProDT Consulting Services with flexibility in working hours, I felt it was my dream job. But I was skeptical about the work from home culture, remote organization and administration. All my doubts were dispelled in the three months that I spent as a proud member of the ProDT team. I understood the power of Agile concepts & project management theories and witnessed their potential outside the books. I learnt here how a project can be planned and executed so efficiently using Jira stories and scrum calls, even when the team resides remotely throughout the country. Posting scrum message at the end of the day, which includes updates for the day, impediments faced and plan for the next day, helps the team to track the progress of the project. It also helps to understand the blockers the individuals are facing so that it can be resolved on time. Using WEM, a no code platform enriched with very powerful tools and functionalities, the projects are completed and delivered to meet the deadlines in few weeks (even days), as opposed to the traditional technology that would have taken months for the same project. As I unfold its new features every day, I realize how reusable components can prevent writing code from the scratch and save you a lot of time.

Using a new platform brings in lot of queries but when the CEO himself is so experienced and intellectual, and yet so down to earth, resolving doubts never seem tough. Moreover, the colleagues are always ready to help and are just a message away. Work from home has its own pros for me: no more hustle bustle in the morning, rushing to the office, scorching summer heats and drenched monsoons. It’s a good bye to traffic jams, umbrellas, raincoats and on the top of all to the anxiety about family and to the full day leaves when my kids are sick, as I can work at their bedside now.

ProDT, as its name suggests, enables truly digital transformation not only of the product and services but also of its team. It follows one of the core values of the Agile manifesto that states that individuals and interactions are over processes and tools. Every alternate Saturday, instead of working for the client, we work on ourselves by writing & sharing blogs and learning and implementing new technologies to transform into our better version both personally and professionally. Its humane to feel the gap sometimes as we work remotely and to miss the moments spent near the coffee machine where we would discuss our problems face to face or indulge in some gossip to relax in the break. To bridge this gap, a hangout activity is planned every fortnight where we switch on our cameras, play games, discuss the progress and future plans of the company and share our thoughts with each other. 'Happy team leads to happy customers' is what is followed at PRODT. I had a great time learning here in past few months and look forward to a long-term relation with ProDT.

How to adapt change management into Agile projects?‍

Earlier, the software project management worked with the waterfall method. In the Waterfall method, we need to execute all the software development life cycles in one direction and there is no going back. Therefore, Agile was introduced with 12 principles and 4 values. One of the principles and values added for change.

In the principles, they have mentioned:‍

“Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.”‍

And in values, they have mentioned:‍

“Responding to change over following a plan”‍

This makes Agile friction free. The Agile environment lends itself to an ongoing change management approach during development projects.

With an Agile project management development lifecycle, the approach to change management also needs to become more effortless.

When we are supporting change using Agile, the project development process becomes more flexible and adaptable.

The most important reason for change is lack of understanding of and appreciation for change management because requirements' analysis do not happen properly. Agile project managers are not too different from other project managers, in terms of their focus on delivering successes on time, cost and scope, and for real results to be achieved, we still need change management to support adoption and usage.  

First, engagement between the Agile team and the change management resource is important to ensure that the technical side will not affect it. After that senior leaders discuss and find out a way to implement the change.

At PRODT, working on 'SCRUM' is one of the frameworks on Agile. SCRUM works on three pillars: transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

For transparency, SCRUM has artifacts- Product backlog, Sprint backlog and Increment. Once transparency is achieved, the inspection then works and following that, SCRUM has events for inspection.

In adaptation, we always accept any change and all adjustments can be implemented in the next increment.

SCRUM can create a safe environment that enables teams to experiment, and most importantly, learn from their test results and continuously improve. Instead of doing an extensive phase of planning at the beginning and only testing at the end (like the waterfall approach), SCRUM provides a space for teams to try, test and innovate faster based on repetitive cycles of input from the customer. The team that plans sufficiently, has a reasonable hypothesis of what may work and what goes with it.

Marketing is a very important process in any organisation as its role is to connect the organisation with customers and vice-versa. The marketing department aims to identify customer needs/wants and market trends, promote the company’s products and services to consumers and to maintain long-term relationships with consumers and other companies. All of these activities require good skills as the right strategies need to be applied in order to satisfy customers.

Before joining PRODT as an intern, I had very little idea of what marketing is or its process. Being an 18 year school pass-out, I had no experience or professional degree for joining PRODT as an intern, however Sanjeev showed faith in me and offered me a position in the organisation. My initial days involved conducting communication and blog reviews, which I was able to do effectively. My strength was the command over English and this allowed me to improve the team’s communication and blogs by providing consistent feedback. In 2 months, our team was able to produce numerous technical blogs which are being posted every week on our website. I enjoyed my role in the company, however was dissatisfied as I wanted a role which required me to go outside my comfort zone. That’s how I approached Manas and he recommended me to assist him in marketing activities to help boost the company’s sphere of influence.

I was very hesitant to choose this new role as I had no skill nor experience in business marketing. Despite all the apprehensions, I chose the role as I had the opportunity to learn something entirely new. For my marketing activities, I was tasked with the responsibility of building a sales funnel and handling our company’s LinkedIn page. A sales funnel is a marketing model which maps out the journey taken by a potential customer towards the purchase of a company’s goods or services. My responsibilities involved building the foundations of the sales funnel, where I was supposed to research for customer names (companies) and fill in details like their sales values, net profit, contact person, LinkedIn profile, etc. The researched companies were divided into two areas of focus, one for No-code development and one for DevOps. 10 companies were researched everyday and this allowed Manas to begin cold calling with these people, thus speeding up the lead generation process.

My other role was handling PRODT’s LinkedIn account and page. I took over this job when the account’s follower count was in the mid-100s and our goal was to increase the follower count to 1000. To increase engagement, we had to consistently post and share content onto our page. We decided to post microcontent. As the name suggests, microcontent is any form of content which can be consumed in less than a minute. Microcontent is generally used to give the audience a representation of a larger piece of work (for e.g. blogs, articles, novels, etc.). It can also be used to convey pieces of information that answer questions or leave a long-lasting impression on the audience. Initially, engagement was low, however, as the amount of content increased, more people were attracted to our page. With consistent blog and microcontent posts going out, our follower count has hit 950 in 3 months, and we are on track with our goal.

Overall, I have enjoyed my new roles in the company. I was looking for activities to help me get out of my comfort zone and the new roles have helped me do so. The more you challenge yourself and succeed, the greater your confidence in your ability to do it again next time. Challenge doesn't just help you grow your skills and knowledge, it helps you grow your belief that you can!

Slack is today’s digital headquarter, where people across the world work collaboratively. Slack is an all-purpose communication platform which includes instant messaging, voice and video calling, and a suite of tools to help groups share information to work together. Slack has standalone applications for Windows, Mac, Android, Linux and iOS.

Slack Integrations‍

Integration is the process of enabling independently designed applications to work together by sharing processes and business data among each other. It is one of Slack’s most powerful features. Slack allows easy integration with other apps including Google Drive and Dropbox, to streamline file sharing. It uses a variety of bots to handle other tasks, such as pulling in data from external tools or creating quick surveys. These app integrations make the platform more versatile than other apps dedicated solely to communication. Thus, it saves time by streamlining daily tasks on Slack. The entire team can join video calls, manage their calendars and collaborate on files without switching tabs.

Slack is also designed to work with the internally built solutions and processes. Now users can integrate Slack with other applications to harness more value out of it. Teams can use it for creating workflows and bringing data from any application.  ‍

Benefits of Slack Integrations‍

Integrating Slack with an in-built application can improve communication among the team along, save a lot of time and boost productivity. When your app is connected directly to Slack, instead of logging into the app to complete an action, you can directly do the needful from Slack. There’s no closing down tabs or switching between applications. This feature provided by Slack could be used to:

• Benefit from continued use of an app while providing users with a slick experience inside Slack.
• Integrate your sales app to handle accounts more efficiently while spending less time doing so
• Directly access the messages on Slack when an event occurs in sales CRM
• Build and modify objects directly from Slack.
• Integrate your employee portal with Slack to send reminders to submit attendance which can be done directly through Slack without going to the company’s portal everyday in the morning, to apply for leaves or to receive pay slips.
• Integrate HR module with Slack to receive notifications about leaves, approve/decline leaves, generate pay slips or view dashboards and reports.
• Integrate Jira with Slack to monitor an entire project or an entire instance from within Slack
• Integrate Zoho CRM to manage sales, marketing, contacts, customer support and other business functions.

Integrate your custom app with Slack‍

Slack allows easy integration of your custom app to send direct messages to the private, public and direct channels of an organization's workspace.

The following steps give an overview of how you can easily send data from your custom application to Slack channels through your Slack App. Here, the application has been designed in the WEM Modeler.

1) First step is to create an app on Slack with the basic instructions provided in the documentations on Slack. The following credentials can be found in the basic information section of the newly created app.

As a small-town girl, after finishing my post-graduate studies, I enrolled in a few programming courses and began looking for work, but I didn't get any good opportunitiesAfter a few months, due to the covid-19 pandemic, I had to return to my hometown.I had the opportunity to work with PRODT during the pandemic. During my selection process, I was interviewed by the Company's HR and the CTO. The interview process was very smooth and comfortable, which helped me forget about my nerves. Fortunately, I was chosen as an HR intern and began working for the company on June 17, 2021.The next day after I started, there was a meeting which we call “Hangout Meeting'' where we play games, communicate to get to know each other better, and participate in various activities to unwind from our daily work routines and strengthen team bonds. So, I met all of the ProDT employees in that Hangout meeting. I was nervous because I had been told that the CEO of the Company, Mr. Sanjeev, would be present at that meeting. But he greeted me with a big smile and quickly dispelled my fear.And that’s how my PRODT journey started.

This was a completely new field for me, so I made many mistakes, but my colleagues, leaders, and CEO supported me throughout my journey. This internship has taught me a lot about what it takes to be an HR professional. I gained not only valuable experience, but also knowledge, confidence, and the ability to be patient. Furthermore, my communication skills improved, which aided me.Today, I’d like to share a personal story about how I dealt with work stress.

As part of my recruitment work, I sometimes manage only one or two criteria, while other times I manage several. The HR Manager assisted me in allocating responsibilities amongst ourselves and operating accordingly.All of a sudden I was in charge of 4-5 requirements, I was having difficulty concentrating. I used to work late into the night to complete this task. My mind was racing with ideas for work tasks or problems I needed to solve the following day. These things began to have an impact on my mental and physical health.

The Company’s CEO and HR began to notice my stress, and they aided me in how to deal with stress by advising me to engage in my hobbies and remain calm in stressful situations. A brief talk with them inspired me and helped me better manage my time and increased my productivity at work. In order to manage my time, I understood the importance of scheduling. While doing so, I started making a to-do list to finish daily assigned targets and so managed to focus for 2 hours on each requirement as well. And guess what? We filled 3 positions in less than a month. I received positive feedback from Sanjeev, which I was pleased to hear.

I am grateful to PRODT for creating a stress-free working environment for me. ProDT has a welcoming and open culture that encourages employees to share their concerns without fear of being judged. ProDT has aided my personal and professional development, and I continue to learn on a daily basis.

Industries, both IT and non-IT, have undergone a Scrum revolution in the recent past. The Scrum methodology was introduced in 1995, and before that the industry would work on the waterfall model (since 1970).

I have executed projects with Waterfall and Scrum models. With Scrum methodology, we can deliver products faster, and change requests can be accepted.‍

What is Waterfall Model?‍

In the Waterfall model, the sales team discussed the timeline for project delivery with the management and shared details with the client without deep analysis, as per scope.

The sales team shared product details with the business analyst, Once the stakeholder made an upfront amount.

The business analyst is the single point of contact with the stakeholders. He involves the project manager if there are any technical difficulties or understandings(of the stakeholders) required and understands requirements to create a detailed requirement document. Once the stakeholder approves the requirement document, the project can be started. Sometimes, it can take more than a month.

The business analyst kicks-off the project and explains the detailed document. The developer may ask some questions and get clarity on the project. This is the first and last time the cross-functional team communicates together with a business analyst.

After that, the cross-functional team estimates the delivery with the project manager and shares a delivery date with the business analyst.

Development starts and the developer shares daily updates with the project manager. The business analyst does not have any idea of development and whenever the development team has any impediments, they need to discuss it internally with the project manager. The project manager needs to ask the business analyst to explain the document if needed. If required, business analysts discusses with stakeholders and updates documents.

The cross functional team may take 2-3 months or more to deliver the project. Sometimes, the business analyst and sales team divides development into two milestones to show the progress to stakeholders. Within 2-3 months, some stakeholders may drop ideas, go out of pocket or come up with different ideas/change requests.‍

Change requests in waterfall‍

If the stakeholders come up with different ideas or change requests once the team completes a milestone of work or completes the project, then the business analysts can ask to add the next phase (after the end of the development). Sometimes stakeholders requested change in the same phase to remove or add task. It takes a high amount of time because effort increases when development is near to completion and maximum projects get on hold or cancelled because of change request efforts.

Without scrum, projects can fail due to business goal and requirement uncertainty along with implementation/technology uncertainty.

To increase certainty for business goals, requirements, implementation and technologies, maximum organisations adopt scrum.‍

The Scrum Framework‍

Everyone respects the product owner's decision, including stakeholders. As per the scope, the product owner and stakeholder decide the depth and breadth of the project. There are five events introduced in scrum: sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, sprint retrospective and the sprint. Every event is conducted in the sprint.

Once the sales team agrees on the scope and terms & conditions, the product owner adds the first level requirement in Jira with epics, stories and tasks. Once the product owner creates sufficient tasks for the sprint, the project gets started. The product owner is able to start development within 3-4 days.

                                         Every type of work has its pros and cons and the same can be experienced with work from home. These work from home jobs were a rarity before the pandemic was hit but after a nationwide lockdown, businesses started dealing with major losses in COVID-19 and began their work from home mandatorily. Now, 70% of people are working from home and this gives employees resilience which is missing in the workplace. You can cultivate better resilience by adjusting your mindset and habits.It has also blurred the lines between home and work leading to increased employee stress and diminished overall well-being.We can set our own time to start/end the work as this is easier because we can work according to our comfort.

In today's fast-paced business world, organizations need to streamline their operations to remain competitive. One way to achieve this is through business process automation (BPA). BPA involves using technology to automate repetitive and manual tasks, resulting in increased efficiency and productivity. BPA has numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes. In this Blog , we will explore some of these benefits.

Recruitment is the process of sourcing, short listing and selecting the right candidate for the right position. There are lots of techniques for recruitment like external advertising which includes most of the ads you see on a daily basis such as signs or displays and print advertising includes newspapers, magazines, etc. Social media advertising is the practice of online advertising that focuses on social networking services and many more. Most of the companies utilise social media for recruitment. Being active on social media allows you to find the appropriate candidates in lots of ways.

In this blog, I will discuss some of the ways of social media recruitment.

Participate in the right conversations:

- LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the most frequented social media platform and world’s largest professional network. Being active on LinkedIn groups is a great way where you can find candidates and select the right ones. Using hashtags is another way to get your job openings in front of the candidate. Hashtags on LinkedIn are used to reach as many candidates as possible including those not connected to you. Using hashtags will make your content discoverable.

It is a well known fact that a person searching for vacancies will always always look into every opportunity he gets, but it also means that there will be a lot of competition for recruitment. It is very important that along with the job description, you mention the perks of working in that organization. Never forget that an employee always considers his future when joining an organization so make sure that the job you post for, shows the promise for their career growth as well.

It was a busy Thursday (3 June 2021) at 5pm and while I was still getting the hang of my new job at PRODT and understanding the concept of No Code, my phone rang and a voice said, "Manas, there is an emergency project for one of the largest hospital chains in India. This is for a social cause but the project needs to be delivered in 3 days! It's a 3 step workflow, so are you game for the challenge?"

As a first reaction, I was completely blank. Did I really hear 3 days? We are almost at the end of the day on a Thursday and have one working day left! How is this going to happen! In the back of my mind, my experience of delivering applications using code based platforms was pushing me to say "no." A project of any size requires a proper planning, requirements and  understanding before we commit to anything. Nevertheless I said "OK" - "Let’s understand what needs to be done here."

Within the next hour, an 8 member squad consisting of the hospital's application and infrastructure team and PRODT, teamed up to discuss the requirements. A mockup application created by the hospital’s application team was shown as the baseline requirement.

The requirements given were:

1. An inventory manager for COVID vaccinations that stores inventory and rates.
2. Create campaigns where the inventory gets allocated and a unique URL for distribution is generated for each campaign.
3. Integration with a payment gateway and API integrations with the hospitals HIS (hospital information system)
4. Customer booking workflow to choose the vaccines, book a timeslot and confirm the order.

Another challenge given was IP tunneling to connect with the hospital's HIS system hosted on a private cloud. Luckily, we had our very own battle tested DevOps team by our side.

After the presentation, a few quick decisions were made by the technical architect and head of DevOps after which we sent a message saying "We are On!" For the next 3 days, 2 members from the application team and a DevOps engineer jumped into action. There were about 15 individual pages to be created and integrated for an end to end workflow. My past experiences from code based deliveries kept hinting me to say - how is this going to happen?

Meanwhile, the DevOps team raised up a server on Azure and started setting up the IP tunnel. The IP tunneling was a complex job and had to comply with all restrictions on the hospital's private cloud policies. It was a Sunday evening and with some support from the hospital’s infrastructure team, the DevOps part of the job was done.

The application team was not far behind, they pushed themselves hard and by Monday afternoon the entire workflow (as shown in the presentation) was ready. My thoughts went from how will this happen to how did it happen! I had never seen an enterprise grade application built that fast and ‘NoCode’ was a new revelation to me!

We published the application to the hospital for acceptance testing and then a second round of efforts started which included - testing of boundary conditions, some issues with the payment gateway integration and a plethora of change requests. We hit a roadblock with the payment gateway issues, however we got top notch support from the NoCode platform’s engineering team who nosedived into this and helped us resolve the issue.

Now when I reflect upon this delivery with the past deliveries of my other projects, it seems that NoCode could be the next gold standard in application development.

• These platforms are able to fulfill almost all requirements that can be done using a traditional code.
• They offer integration capabilities at par with code based platforms.
• They are great for people like me who understand the business process but don't know how to write complex scripts using coding languages.
• They save you a lot of time and cost. On this project we deployed only 2 resources (probably due to the time constraint). If we had more time, we could have delivered with one resource itself.
• You don’t need a separate UI or a backend team as these platforms offer both front and backend development through simple drag drop options.
• There are no syntax errors, and no chances of the script going wrong.
• These platforms comply with the global data security policies (like GDPR) and other industry acceptable security standards and practices.
• Managing a change is sometimes as quick as redirecting the connections from one workflow to another.
• Single click deployment capabilities. All you need to do is push a button to get your application from development to environment to production.

Today as I write this blog, I see 25000 successful transactions on the vaccination drive application we have built and after reflecting on the delivery, I now understand how this has  happened!

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The database is one of the primary components of any application and database migration is a demanding task that is performed to change your database vendor, change the database software, or move your database to the cloud.

Challenge:There are many tools available in the market today which can be used for migration but the key concern is performing the migration without affecting the application’s performance or user experience.The ultimate goal is to perform database migration quickly and securely, without any downtime.

Solution:AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database.

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What is the reference data type?

Reference data type is used to denote a row of a particular list.

For example, if I say I have a reference field of “employee list” and that field has some data assigned to it. This means that the reference field is denoting some row of “employee list”.

When we say data type, It often comes to our mind as a format of data with certain rules and standards. In general programming, we define the datatype of variables and then save the value assigned to it. Likewise for reference data type variables (fields), if there is no data assigned to the field that means it is not denoting any row of the particular list and vice versa.

In short

Reference data type field with data assigned to it  -> Denotes a row of the particular list.

Reference data type field with empty value  ->Does not denote any row.

Structure of reference data type fields

When we define a reference data type field it requires a list associated with itself and a name.

For example, if I want a reference field of “employee list” I’ll select that list whenever I’ll be defining the reference field. Like all the fields you also need to provide a name for the reference field.
If I have to define one reference field of “employee list”. I’ll write the name of the field as “employee” and select ”employee list” as the associated list.

How to get row data from reference fields

We can get any data of the denoted row of the  “employee list” using the “->” operator.

For example “employee list” has multiple columns like employee name, employee no, employee activity status etc. If I want to access the employee name then I can just write an expression like employee(reference field) -> employee name and it will fetch the employee name. If the field is empty then you won’t get any data. (if you are wondering how to assign data to a reference field then I should let you know that part will come later.)

Before learning how to assign data to a reference field we should understand the concept of Row positioning.

Row positioning is clearly defined as the selected row of a list. It is also referred to as the current row of the list in WEM.

Row positioning is dependent on many events which are listed below

1. Datagrid click(row click, button click inside the row)
2. Repeater click (div, button)
3. List action node(add, go to first node, go to next node, reset row position, go to last node, go to previous node)
4. Loop node (on each iteration of loop row position changes)

Note: If you navigate to a different page using the navigation menu the positioning will be reset which means there will be no row for the current position.

Assignment of reference field

Step 1: Set the row position using above listed events in the “row positioning section”.

Step 2: Select field as assignment node in the flow and then for that node choose “set to current row” option

Eg: let’s say I have a reference field of the employee list named “Emp”. I need to find an employee using employee ID and get the reference and assign it to the reference field “Emp”.

We will take a list action node. Select the “goto first row” action. Apply condition for “goto first row that matches”. The condition will be that the employee ID you want to match should be available in the column of employee ID in the employee table. So we can write something like employee ID field from input = employee ID column of employee table.

Flowchart

Businesses across the globe are experiencing unparalleled change today across operations, services, fulfilment and customer experience, at the core of which is technology. Yet, not many businesses harness the power of technology fully and continue using legacy systems. Legacy systems are simply systems that are outdated but still in use. Legacy software and hardware are not reliable and run slowly or may not at all be supported by the vendor. In this article, we talk about why and how you can harness the power of the cloud for your business.

What is cloud migration?

It simply is the process of moving digital operations to the cloud. It’s like a physical move, but instead of goods, data, applications and IT processes are moved and much like a physical move, a lot of advance work is required but it ends up being worth the effort by resulting in high savings and flexibility. Sometimes it might also mean moving from one cloud provider to another for added benefits.

What if I am creating a new system?

In that case, a business should opt for a cloud-native approach. Cloud-native is an approach that exploits the benefits of the cloud delivery model. It is more about how the applications are created and deployed rather than where, which is implied to be the cloud. Cloud-native uses open-source software stacks in a containerised fashion. The architecture is more micro-service oriented for agility and maintainability. Using these modern tools in an agile fashion improves the performance of your system by many folds.

Different strategies of adapting to the cloud

Gartner, a technology research company, lists 5 strategies for businesses to migrate to the cloud, commonly known as “5 Rs”

Re-host - Re-hosting is having the same applications on cloud-based servers. Companies doing this select a cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services or Digital Ocean and recreate the application architecture on the cloud provider. In terms of a physical move, this means shifting your office to a new but empty flat and recreating the interior just as before.

Refactor - Refactoring would mean that companies use the existing code and frameworks but run it on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider. In our office shifting analogy, this would be something similar to telling an interior designer to make a similar office for you, but not doing the work yourself. This makes the process of deployments abstract and makes the developers more productive.

Revise - This strategy includes partially rewriting or expanding the code and architecture then deploying using re-hosting or refactoring. This will help in addressing the limitations and drawbacks of the current system and tapping the advantages of the cloud system. If your new physical office had 100 sq ft. of extra space, your new plan would obviously take that into consideration.

Rebuild - Rebuilding would involve starting from scratch as the name suggest. The entire application must be rearchitected and rewritten from the ground up making it a tedious process, but this process ensures that the application is written in a way to exploit all the features of the cloud. This would mean breaking down the new office you buy entirely and make it in a newer design for more benefits.

Replace - Here, you discard your current application and switch to an existing Software-as-a-Service solution. This would mean shifting your office to a fully managed office space or moving to a co-working space.

Benefits of moving to the cloud

1. Improved customer experience: Customers don’t care about what goes on under the hood. In the end, they want a reliable system with maximum features. Developing on the cloud makes releases faster and more scalable. Better monitoring techniques also help in lesser downtime in case of a failure. These factors improve the customer experience many folds.
2. Lower Costs: Cloud saves you cost in maintenance and upgrades since the provider takes care of them. Cloud also releases you from the shackles of vendor lock-ins that traditional providers have, charging you by the minute instead, thus giving you more predictability of costs. Using modern methods of deployment such as a microservice architecture and containerization further lowers costs.
3. Easier compliance: With new privacy and data protection laws coming up in each country, it is extremely important to comply as soon as possible to serve customers in those countries. Major cloud providers already comply with standards such as GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 1 and more to take that trouble off your heads.

Depending on your needs, you need to create a strategy to move to the cloud. Some companies choose a single cloud provider, for simplicity, others use multiple providers to get the best of all worlds and yet others have a hybrid cloud-on premise model, which might need tight integration. Regardless of the strategy, you choose, we can handhold you during the transition and till a point of self-reliance. Comment below which strategy you think would work for your business and feel free to reach out for more guidance.

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Introduction

In a recession, businesses are likely to face many challenges. You may even find it difficult to sustain your business financially. One of the ways in which you can manage this is by using technology and automation as much as possible. DevOps tools can help your organization run smoothly without any hiccups or delays.

How does DevOps help in a recession?

Given current economic trends right now worldwide, because of a recessionary environment, prices do go down over time. But not nearly rise fast enough after periods where inflation rises sharply mainly because supply hasn't kept up with demand.

DevOps can help your business reduce costs. It can also help you get more done with less time and money. The most obvious way it does this is by reducing the cycle time for development, testing, and deployment. This means that you'll be able to release faster than before when there's an economic downturn in your industry.

Using DevOps practices in your organisation can help improve the quality of work and increase productivity across all departments within your organisation. Your business will have increased financial benefits such as lower costs per unit produced or improved margins on sales made during times of high inflation rates by using DevOps practices.

Automation and DevOps in a recession

In a recessionary environment where jobs are scarce, automation can help you to improve your business's ability to deliver products on time. For example:

Automation can reduce costs, increase productivity, and speed up delivery. Automated processes will save time by eliminating human error (which is often costly).

Automated workflows can be designed so that they do not require any manual intervention from operators or users; this means less overhead for everyone involved in the process.

With DevOps, you can increase your resilience to the economic impact of a recession. DevOps helps you to be more resilient by increasing the speed of change, response, recovery, and innovation for your business. That’s because DevOps allows you to make changes quickly in order to stay ahead of the competition or respond effectively when something goes wrong, as it gives you access to new tools and processes that are available through automation software such as Ansible or GitHub Enterprise Integration Platform (GitHub EIP).

You can also use this approach if there are problems with your infrastructure or applications at any given time.

Using the right technology can lead to stability during economic decline.

DevOps is a practice that helps you build a more resilient business. It can help you to be more productive, efficient, and agile.

An example of how DevOps can help your company be recession-proof is that it allows developers and operations staff in the same building to collaborate more effectively on projects. This means they can work faster than if they were isolated from each other; this also means fewer errors in code because everyone has access to all materials at once (including source code).

With DevOps, there are fewer bugs due to automated tests—which means fewer manual fixes after deployment has been completed successfully! This also results in higher quality products/services because developers know exactly what goes into them before testing starts.

Conclusion

So, what does all this mean? First, IT teams should be prepared for a recession by learning from those who have been through one. Second, they should consider the possibility of an economic downturn and work on their own resilience during this time. Finally, they should look at how automation can help them build better infrastructure and operate more efficiently than ever before while still providing good customer service to their clients.

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Introduction: What is DevOps?

DevOps is a collaborative approach to making the Application Development team and the IT Operations team of an organization seamlessly work together. To keep up with the increased software velocity, the idea of DevOps came into the picture. Vast advancements in the agile model have raised the requirement for a more holistic approach to software delivery lifecycle. DevOps is visualized as an infinite loop comprising the following steps: plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate and monitor. DevOps aims to bridge the gap between development and operations departments while allowing the cross-functional teams to have full ownership of the software product.

4 Reasons Why DevOps is the Future

What are OKRs

Goals and objectives are the backbones of how a company succeeds. They represent the most crucial aspects of a company's strategy. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a popular strategic planning method that helps teams and companies set goals, make progress, and drive results.

Large organisations like Netflix, Amazon, and Google all have adopted OKR planning and have been able to achieve their planned outcomes

Benefits of OKRs

1. OKRs help you to write down precisely what are your short-term and long-term goals that you want to achieve in a given time period and at the same time.
2. Every OKR has specific measurement criteria that helps you measure the success of your actions.
3. OKRs give you the flexibility to change your direction based on your interim measurements and outcome analysis. For example, if you have planned to measure the outcome at the end of each quarter and if you identify that the outcomes are not as expected, you have the freedom to modify the OKRs and reset to another direction to achieve the goals

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How to write OKRs

OKRs can be written at the individual level, team level, or at organisation level. The structure of an OKR contains an objective written at the start and about 3 to 5 or 6 supporting key result areas against each objective. Key results describe the various checkpoints that are measurable and help you analyse the achievements.

For individuals, it refers to what is the goal for an individual person. Example:

Objective: Learn skills to become a full-stack developer by Sep 2022.

Key Result Areas

• Join a training institute.
• Practice coding skills for 4 hrs every day..
• Create a project with new skills.
• Build a portfolio.

For teams, it refers to what significant goals they want to achieve. Example of OKR for recruitment team:

Objective: Reduce the overall lead time to interview by 30%.

Key Result Areas

• Manage all candidatures in the application tracking system.
• Agree on a pre-decided interview panel for each job profile.
• Confirm interview session within 4 hrs of acceptance by candidate.
• Conduct an interview within 48hrs with the candidate.
  

For an Organisation, OKRs define the directions and objectives the company wants to achieve.

Objective: Achieve Sales Turnover of $1M in the current financial year.

Key Result Areas

• Automate online lead generation activities.
• Increase leads by 30% month on month as compared to last financial year.
• Hire 3 senior sales representatives with 10-15yrs experience in enterprise sales.
• Generate a minimum $500,000 value worth of pipeline month on month.
• Get closures worth $100,000 month on month.

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OKR Visibility and Transparency

OKRs are not just for the senior management of the company. OKRs are planned in collaboration with the execution teams, making it extremely important that the OKRs are shared across the board.

1. Visibility of OKRs enables a sense of ownership at both individual and team levels.
2. It aligns all teams and individuals towards the goals set and moves in the direction of achieving the key results.
3. OKRs bring transparency within the execution by different teams and build a collaborative environment since everyone contributes in the direction of the goals defined.

Conclusion

Planning OKRs is a great start to visualise and track the progress of your objectives. OKRs have been in practice since the 1970s and have grown in popularity over the years. Google was introduced to OKRs in 1999 which became a part of their culture. OKRs bring agility to teams and make the employees push themselves and perform better. They offer flexibility and freedom to pick the direction and speed at which the objectives need to be achieved. The most significant aspect of OKRs is that they give you clear measurement guidelines in terms of your targets vs achievements. The best part is OKRs can be applied to any large, small, short term or long term goals. Now that you know what an OKR is let’s have some fun! Write in the comments your key results for the objective: Road trip to the beach!

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Software Engineering

Software Engineering at its core has always been a decentralized process where each individual is responsible to deliver the outcome via code. However, this starts to fail and break with increasing software scale, size, complexity, and business demands. In order to address the ever so increasing challenges, either software is broken down into smaller manageable chunks or size of the teams is increased.

Managing complexity in software projects

Not long ago, software team members used to collaborate at a specific time /date /periodicity to merge their changes to the code, compile the required software and release it for downstream lifecycle processes. With each slice to the software or addition of a team member, we now add the complexity to manage an increasing number of variables of a software project i.e. scope, time, cost, and clutter the execution. Increasing the risks to the success of software projects, changes, and outcomes. We now have to manage and spend a significant amount of time ensuring that the process of collaboration is institutionalized, executed, adhered to, followed, etc. So teams are now spending more time on the process, and governance rather than scope and scale. So now we are trying to fix the process and risks rather than the required outcome on an ongoing basis.

Build a Digital-First mindset into your organization.

Digital Transformation is a company's transformation from a product-centric organization to a customer-centric one, by embedding digital experiences at the core of the company's culture.  It is an ongoing process that has at its core a commitment to making a company's customer experience as simple, as personal, and as satisfying as possible.

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Starting is always the most difficult part, whether it is a simple chore at home or restarting your career after a long break. Inertia always plays tricks and you might feel like you lost the flow in your career after a career break. You might also feel unmotivated and might be struggling to move forward.

Story of my previous experience - From where I started and briefs about my experience

I started my career in 2013 with the PHP platform as an intern, then I felt like it is the only platform that I have to continue further. So after completing my internship, I searched for a firm that works with PHP and continued my career in the same. I have been working for around 4 years with the PHP platform, in between, I switched 2 companies for my financial growth.

In 2017, a sudden change happened. Just like everyone has to go through an unexpected situation, I had to face one. At the time of my pregnancy, I had to leave my job in the 7th month because of some health issues. Till that time I was not thinking of any career break, but I had to take a 5 years break. Yes, 5 years break.

Problems I faced while restarting my career

In 2021, I started thinking about restarting my career. But I had to face many problems like,

• Which firm will allow me to join with my previous experience with a long gap in my career.
• I had to brush up my skills, as I forgot each and every syntax(not the logic behind coding, just the syntax).
• Nowadays most firms choose candidates who have updated knowledge of any platform or who have the latest skills knowledge. So I was not in that category.
• I had to think about upgrading my skills to rejoin.
• I had to enroll myself in any course which is in the trend for hiring candidates. For that surely I had to pay course fees.
• I had to search for only those firms which are providing work from home facility, to balance my work and mother's job.

How ProDT helped me in my career

After facing that many issues, I finally found a firm that allows me to restart my career after 5 years of career break. Thanks to ProDT for giving me the opportunity.

With the WEM no-code platform that requires more logical reasoning than specific syntaxes, I could quickly step back into development. Its reusable components and drag-n- drop functionality helps develop applications quickly. If required UI can be easily customized by adding few lines of codes. Its rich built-in components help create complex applications too that require third party integrations.

Why choose no code platform for restarting your career?

1. A no-code development platform is a platform where you can create applications without having prior knowledge of coding.
2. You can create any application by using graphical visualisation and drag and drop method.
3. It is becoming a very popular and promising platform day by day.
4. It is an alternative to traditional software development for programmer and non-programmer business users allowing them to create their full-fledged applications.

Pros of restarting a career with No code

1. Working in the field which you like can transform your life.
2. You will get that much-needed, elusive job satisfaction and which will also boost your confidence.
3. A restarting career will throw completely new challenges at you, which will benefit you to engage yourself in your willing field.
4. If you have enough knowledge in development then why waste it, use it in the right way after restarting your career.
5. The sudden blow of the Covid 19 pandemic has made us all realise the uncertainties in many fields, and joining the IT industry is the most secure option as it provides flexibility in time and space.

Conclusion

Anyone can start or restart their career with a no-code platform, as it will not ask you to write code. That means any prior code experience is not necessary to choose this platform.

No-code platform will provide you with a drag-and-drop facility and you have to use a graphical interface to create any kind of website or application. Because of the use of drag-and-drop functionality, the time required for creating any website will be less as compared to coding platforms.

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Why DTC Is a Necessity for Omni-channel Retailers

The shift in consumer behaviour towards online shopping has been well-documented. The trend of e-commerce is on the rise, with a total of $1 trillion expected to be spent on digital channels by 2023. Changes in consumer behaviour have made DTC now a necessity for brands in today's market as it allows them to stay ahead of competitors while still appealing to customers who prefer shopping online than traditional retailers.

D2C is integral to your omnichannel strategy because it allows you to target specific customer segments and provide them with the exact products they need, whether through a mobile app or website. It also allows you to offer more personalized experiences and engage with customers on a deeper level than ever before.

Why should you need to start thinking about Direct-to-Consumer?

Your customers want it - this goes without saying but studies show that many people prefer shopping online or want more personalization options than those offered at traditional retailers.

More commercially viable now than it used to be - with falling costs for e-commerce software and tools, many businesses are able to create beautiful online stores in just half the time, it would have taken before D2C.

New technologies that make merchandising easier - new AI-based systems help select products based on your customers' preferences so you don't need an army of people doing this work.

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Application testing can be defined as going through the way the software works, finding out error areas also called evaluation of software for satisfying end-user requirements. This can be explained as testing, analyzing, or examining the working of a software/application before launching it for users, to resolve any bug or a mistake is a crucial step included in the aim of getting a positive response from users.

As a person responsible for testing different applications it is important to  understand Testing lifecycle which can be shown as follows,

1. Requirement Analysis:  Determining Expectations and needs.
2. Test Planning:  Setting up the test environment & tools.
3. Test case development:  Creation of points that are to be tested.
4. Test Environment setup:  Where the test will be executed software/hardware.
5. Test Execution: Use the application and check performance.
6. Test Cycle Closure: Report generation based on the above points.

Included in these lifecycle events there are some phases that are to be considered for performance testing they are shown as follows

1. Web Application Testing.
2. Desktop & Mobile Application Testing.
3. Testing functionality on different browsers, and screen sizes.
4. UI, Performance, security, and different system requirements.

Application Testing Types

1. Manual: The manual testing approach is used more frequently by developers in the initial phases of development for testing specific features.
2. Automation: Ready-made tools or software are used to test performance and output also without human errors.

Challenges in Application Testing

In the basic arithmetic calculator application numbers are taken as the first input, second comes the operator it may be (add, subtract, multiply, etc.) and third is the number with which the first number is to be operated.

So, it is the responsibility of a tester to confirm the working by using multiple input combinations for example: do testing for 1+1, 2+3, 10+101, 12.30+8.90, etc.

This may showcase any errors like,

1. Getting wrong answers.
2. Decimal calculation issue.
3. Not refreshing previous answers after adding new numbers.
4. What if the user did not select an operator and press the show result button.
5. How a large number is displayed as an answer.

Similarly, for video viewing applications such as YouTube or Netflix, Checks have to be done on all possibilities the user will use to watch a video and the test cases are,

1. Is the exact video selected by the user viewed or something else
2. Is the video selection mismatching for multiple users,  

Example: If “user-A” selects “video-A” to watch, and “user-B” selects “video-B”, but the tester should confirm that “user-B” should not see “video-A” by mistake instead of “video-B” and vice versa.

1. Is the duration showing correctly?

Testing must also include if all the breakpoints, and contents added only for debugging purposes are completely removed from the code before launching an application.

So finally, all the possibilities are to be checked by a tester as well as a developer by becoming a user for an instance, this will obviously take the progress graph up.

Software Application Testing Tools:

So to overcome the above given challenges we can have some tools that will help QAs to manage and regulate the test process. But now the problem is which tool is to selected be used, let’s see some examples,

1. Selenium: Cross-browser compatibility can be checked.
2. Cypress:   Useful for effective and asynchronous testing.
3. Percy:   Visual testing / UI appearance on multiple screens.
4. Appium:   Helper for testing  Android and IOS platforms.

Having different screens/browsers/operating systems in one place cannot be that easy so the solution is to use available tools some of which are mentioned above. There will be new r&d’s every time and the list will get updated with more options.

Conclusion:

Today it has become essential for businesses to leverage effective mobile test automation to get scalable, robust, and high-performing applications, for delivering a great experience to users worldwide.

So just by following the life cycle procedure, and using different tools one can get rapid growth in fast delivery to market, effective usage, and positive reach to customers.

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I am sharing my first project experience, where I had the role of a business analyst – managing the project in Jira as SCRUM. My roles and responsibilities are communicating with stakeholders across the board, including customers, business managers, and the development team to make sure the goals are clear and the vision is aligned with business objective.

In times of disruption, businesses, especially small and mid-sized ones need to come up with resilient business models to drive through the challenges and be ready to leap on to growth opportunities

UX (User Experience) design is the process of designing (physical or digital) products that are useful, easy to use, and engaging to interact with. It’s about enhancing the experience that people have while interacting with a product and ensuring that they find value in what you provide.

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