December 2021 Summaries

Ably has recently won three 2021 DevPortal Awards for Best Use of API Gateway Integration, Best API Business Model (for the second year in a row), and Best Overall SME Dev Portal. The company aims to enhance its product offering and provide an industry-leading developer experience. These awards recognize Ably's commitment to providing innovative solutions and improving their developer portals. In 2021, they competed against organizations like BT, Algolia, and Twitter. They plan to continue refining the developer experience in 2022 with improvements such as enhanced documentation, onboarding flow, and better observability into product usage.

At Ably, software development is a core part of our identity and we maintain numerous open-source repositories on GitHub. We have been using GitHub since 2016 and have multiple organizational units (orgs) with hundreds of repositories. To ensure consistency across all repositories and orgs, we follow universal conventions and company standards. We also monitor repository settings to identify inconsistencies or potential issues. To automate this process, Ably has developed a tool that uses GitHub Apps and Actions to produce reports on repository configurations. The tool is open-source and available on Github.

This article discusses how JavaScript executes asynchronous operations and reviews different ways to write asynchronous code from Callbacks to Promises, explaining what’s best and why. It also covers the modern and recommended way to write asynchronous JavaScript using Ably's JavaScript SDKs. The text delves into the inner workings of JavaScript, including its single-threaded nature and how it handles asynchronous functions with the help of Web APIs, Message Queue, and Event Loop. It then explores three ways to write asynchronous JavaScript: callbacks, Promises with .then syntax, and Promises with async/await syntax. The article also discusses concurrency of independent asynchronous statements and the case of asynchronous event listeners. Finally, it provides references and further reading for developers interested in learning more about realtime applications using Ably's SDKs.

The "build vs. buy" question is a common consideration in technology development. In the case of adding realtime features to an online learning platform, evaluating third-party vendors like Ably can be crucial for time and cost efficiency. Key factors to consider when choosing a vendor include scalability, integration capabilities, security measures, data compliance, and pricing plans. By using a platform like Ably, businesses can avoid the complexities of building their own realtime solution while benefiting from its fault-tolerant infrastructure, global edge network, and support for various protocols and APIs.