April 2022 Summaries

Amy Tom is a Vancouver-born writer and digital marketer who has been working in the tech industry for over five years, initially as a Search Engine Optimization Specialist and later as an Account Manager at Absolute Software. She took a break from work after a snowboarding accident left her with post-concussion symptoms that lasted for two years, during which time she traveled extensively and eventually returned to work remotely. After joining the WFA Movement and working as an Editor and Podcast Host at HackerNoon, she moved to Amsterdam and joined Bitrise, where she will be creating engaging content for the company's blog and community. With a background in digital marketing and technical expertise, Amy is excited to share her knowledge with the Bitrise community and collaborate with industry experts on thought-provoking pieces.

Mobile app beta testing is crucial for product development, with 53% of mobile users uninstalling apps that crash or have errors. Effective beta testing requires careful planning, goal-setting, and recruitment of diverse testers who can provide actionable feedback. A well-structured framework involves setting goals, selecting a beta testing platform, recruiting the right testers, gathering feedback, organizing it, acting on it, and rewarding them. This process helps identify product improvements, application bugs, and ensures stability, ultimately creating an excellent mobile app experience.

At Bitrise, Anna from Hungary joined the company in 2017 as a Tech Writer, where she was able to leverage her skills and interests to contribute to the growth of the startup. She found that working at Bitrise allowed her to learn and grow intellectually, with a supportive team environment that encouraged her to succeed. As she transitioned into product marketing, Anna learned the importance of prioritization, learning, and resilience in her role. With these skills, she was able to navigate the challenges of a rapidly growing startup and make meaningful contributions to the company's success.

In this tutorial, we connect Amazon Alexa Skill to AWS Lambda function to trigger Bitrise builds via a voice user interface. We use the Alexa Skills Kit to receive voice commands from Alexa and pass them to Bitrise API using the POST endpoint to trigger a new build. The code is modified to work with the Alexa Skills Kit by changing the handler and logic to handle voice commands and Skill Kit. A Lambda function is created to connect Alexa to Bitrise, allowing users to trigger builds using voice commands. The integration includes specifying branch names and workflow IDs as parameters using Slots, enabling different values to be used. Additionally, AWS CloudWatch is used to monitor runtime metrics for the Lambda function.

The Java Development Kit (JDK) version 17 has been preinstalled on all build stacks to help improve Android build times, with benchmarking showing speed improvements ranging from 4-20% compared to JDK 11. The key findings include that switching to the Parallel garbage collector results in faster build times for both JDK 11 and JDK 17, while upgrading to JDK 17 alone also shows significant speedups. Additionally, some plugins and tools may need updates to work with JDK 17, and users should upgrade Gradle to version 7.3 and Kotlin to version 1.5.30 to take full advantage of the improvements.

We've adopted Terraform Cloud as part of our effort to enable self-service infrastructure management for teams, allowing them to manage their own resources in a collaborative and automated way. We're leveraging its enterprise features, such as teams and access levels, to provide fine-grained control and scalability. Our internal platform uses Google Workspaces as the identity provider, and we've developed custom modules to manage team composition, access levels, and GCP folders. We've also created a separate workspace for managing our project structure and defined teams using Terraform Cloud resources. To invite team members to the organization, we had to create custom resources and grant special permissions to our service account. With this setup, teams can now access their owned systems' workspaces and start creating resources in a self-served and automated way.

モバイルアプリの配信プロセスを5つのステージに分類しています。各ステージでは、パフォーマンス指標に関する必須の質問と、それを明確にするための任意の質問が用意されています。この調査はモバイルアプリ開発コミュニティに向け、モバイルエンドツーエンドのDevOps実践に関する包括的な比較分析を提供することを目的としており、アプリ開発チームのモバイルDevopsのパフォーマンス、生産性、および成熟度を評価しています。調査終了後、アプリ配信ライフサイクルの各ステージにおいての改善方法について、回答者に詳細な推奨事項を提供します。また、この調査はアセスメントにかかる時間がわずか数分で完了する一方、チームに大きな影響を及ぼす可能性があります。

The Alexa Skills Kit allows developers to create custom voice user interfaces for various skill types, including games, music, and food. To build an Alexa skill, developers need an Amazon developer account, Alexa Skills Kit Command Line Interface (ASK CLI), Node.js and npm, Git, and AWS IAM user. The skill can be created using ASK CLI or the Alexa Developer Console, with options for hosting on Alexa-hosted skills, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda, or self-hosting. Once created, the skill can be edited to add custom interaction models, intents, slots, and sample utterances, which determine how the skill responds to user input. The skill can also be tested using the Alexa Simulator, with options for saving and using sample utterances and commands.

In the early days of software development, anyone seeking to develop a web, mobile, or backend application had to own the hardware required to run a server, which is an expensive process. Then, when cloud computing came, it became possible to lease server space or a number of servers remotely. As a result of this, serverless computing allows developers to purchase backend services on a pay-per-use basis, which means that only what they use must be paid for. Serverless computing refers to the ability to run code without maintaining your own servers. The term "serverless" doesn't refer to the absence of servers, but rather to the fact that the servers, operating systems, network layer, and rest of the infrastructure have already been configured so you can focus on writing the application code. AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You don't have to worry about any infrastructure with AWS Lambda since it's a fully managed service. For instance, you can develop backends using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway to authenticate and process API requests. The Lambda functions can perform a variety of tasks, from serving web pages to processing streams of data to calling APIs and integrating with other AWS services such as CloudWatch, API Gateway, S3, SNS, and more. When a function is created, Lambda packages it into a new container and then executes that container on a multi-tenant cluster of machines managed by AWS. Before the functions start running, each function's container is allocated its necessary RAM and CPU capacity. Once the functions finish running, the RAM allocated at the beginning is multiplied by the amount of time the function spent running. The customers then get charged based on the allocated memory and the amount of run time the function took to complete. AWS Lambda supports a number of the most popular languages and runtimes such as Nodejs, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, and C#. With AWS Free Tier, you can run 1 million requests for free. Also if you'd like to estimate your AWS Lambda architecture cost you can use the AWS Pricing Calculator. To get started with AWS Lambda, you can create, invoke, and manage the Lambda functions using any of the following interfaces: AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS SDKs, or AWS CloudFormation. In this tutorial, I will use the AWS Management Console to create our Lambda function using NodeJS. To implement a NodeJS function to trigger a new build endpoint from the Bitrise API, you need to install different node modules and then create a new file with the name index.js at the root of the project. You can test the function by running the following command: node index.js And if it is successful run, you will find the output like the following: Congratulations, you did it! You created your first serverless function using AWS Lambda to trigger a new Bitrise build using Bitrise API.

Bitrise has simplified the process of provisioning and signing an iOS app, including Flutter-based apps. The company's new "Xcode Archive & Export for iOS" step automates code signing assets, archives, and exports an .ipa file using xcodebuild, a command-line tool that allows users to build, query, analyze, test, and archive operations on Xcode projects and workspaces. To use this step, users need to upload their code signing certificates, connect their Apple Developer Portal account to Bitrise, and configure the workflow by adding steps such as Script and installing dependencies via pod install. The "Xcode Archive & Export for iOS" step can be used in a Flutter-based Bitrise workflow to build, sign, and export an .ipa file, making it easier to manage code signing assets and reduce errors.

The guide provides a simplified process for automating code signing in iOS apps using Bitrise and the Xcode Archive & Export for iOS Step. To use this method, users must first upload their code signing certificates to Bitrise, connect their Apple Developer Portal account, and select an authentication method. They then add the "Xcode Archive & Export for iOS" step to their workflow, which automatically manages code signing assets, archives, and exports an IPA file. The process requires access to App Store Connect and configuration of the Apple Service connection within Bitrise. Once set up, users can save changes and start a new build, which will output artifacts in the Artifacts tab.

The Mobile DevOps Performance, Productivity, and Maturity Assessment (MODAS) is a survey designed to provide insight and actionable guidance for mobile product organizations of all sizes and industries. It assesses a team's Mobile DevOps performance, productivity, and maturity across five stages: Creation, Testing, Deployment, Monitoring, and Collaboration. The assessment provides detailed recommendations on how to improve in each stage and allows teams to benchmark their results against similar organizations. Once completed, teams will receive benchmarked results highlighting areas of strength and weakness, as well as access to a suite of resources to support improvement.

Rob Hedgpeth, a seasoned software engineer and developer relations professional, shares his journey from entering the workforce as an application developer in 2007 to joining Bitrise as the lead of Developer Relations. He recounts his experiences working with various technologies, including MonoTouch, Xamarin, and relational databases, and how these experiences shaped his passion for developer relations. Hedgpeth highlights the importance of community building, empathy, and learning from others in the development process. He expresses his excitement to join Bitrise and contribute to the mobile development community, and shares plans for 2022 that aim to improve the processes of development, testing, and deployment.