August 2022 Summaries

In June, July, and August across the world, Bitrisers celebrated Pride month, a time to celebrate diversity, inclusion, and acceptance. The company was founded in Hungary, where LGBTQIA+ rights are limited, but employees worldwide shared their perspectives on what Pride means to them. Employees from various departments and backgrounds emphasized the importance of self-acceptance, inclusivity, and the need for laws that protect individual freedoms. Bitrise employees also highlighted the significance of being an ally to the LGBTQIA+ community, with many expressing their desire to promote diversity and inclusion in their work. The company aims to continue standing against laws restricting LGBTQIA+ rights and promoting equality in its hiring practices.

This demo showcases how to run a static analysis tool called MobSF on an AWS EC2 machine using Docker. The prerequisites include having a free AWS account, a free Bitrise account, and a free GitHub account. To start, users need to launch an Amazon Linux instance, install Docker, and update the security group to allow HTTP access. They then pull the MobSF Docker image and run it on their EC2 machine. Next, they use the MobSF API from Bitrise to upload an Android APK to be scanned by the tool. The demo shows how to integrate MobSF with Bitrise using API endpoints to mark builds as failed if there are security issues. Additionally, users can save scan results to a database or implement dynamic analysis on the VM without Docker.

Meet József Erős, a talented and experienced software developer who joined Bitrise as part of his final semester internship and has been with the company ever since. He currently works on the website team at Bitrise, where he continues to learn and grow as a developer. Along the way, József has learned valuable lessons about collaboration, problem-solving, and the importance of being open to new ideas and approaches. As someone who values constructive feedback and respect in the workplace, József emphasizes the need for patience and time when tackling complex challenges. He attributes his success at Bitrise to using the product himself, even in small sandbox apps, which has helped him develop a deeper understanding of its capabilities. Through personal projects and video tutorial courses, József finds the best method for learning and staying up-to-date with new skills and technologies. His experiences at Bitrise have been instrumental in shaping his career journey, and he is now sharing his insights and expertise with aspiring developers who are looking to join the company.

Every month of the year seems to be associated with some sort of celebration for different marginalized groups in the world, making it a perfect time for companies to advocate for their employees and customers by creating supportive campaigns. However, this trend has led to "performative activism" where companies use social injustices to benefit themselves without advancing the causes within these movements. Companies can avoid performative activism by being transparent about their workplace diversity, publicly declaring meaningful goals, dedicating time and funding for hiring and retaining employees from marginalized communities, and adding financial support. Before launching a social activism campaign, companies should ask why they're doing it, whose voices are they uplifting, and what they can do to help the cause internally and externally. Engaging in "true corporate social activism" can bring benefits such as stronger returns for shareholders, greater brand value, and creating pressure to change laws and policies through collaboration with social activists and corporate interests.

Success in engineering teams is difficult to measure as it encompasses various aspects beyond just outcomes and output, especially for DevOps teams. The Mobile DevOps Assessment Survey (MODAS) provides insights into team capabilities by comparing outcomes with output, focusing on the Change Failure Rate (CFR) concept, which measures the efficiency of a team's development process. CFR is calculated by dividing the number of failed deployments by the total number of deployments and indicates the velocity of a product, translating to value delivered to users. Measuring CFR examines code changes in production environments and deployment management, providing insight into velocity and stability. By understanding why failures occur, teams can implement improvements such as creating a culture of QA and testing, improving MTTR, making smaller deployments more frequent, and knowing when to automate. The MODAS assessment takes less than 15 minutes to complete, offering valuable insights for elite Mobile DevOps teams to improve their end-to-end performance and stability.

During Pride month, businesses can show support for the LGBTQIA+ community by incorporating Pride into their mobile apps, which can be done in ways that are genuine and long-lasting. While some companies may performative activism or "rainbow washing," there are better ways to celebrate Pride, such as building functionality into the app for everyday usage. Microsoft is an example of a company that incorporates Pride into its app, allowing users to update their color themes to inspired by LGBTQIA+ flags, while also amplifying the voices of LGBTQIA+ community members and allies. Other companies like Uber and Strava have also incorporated Pride into their apps in meaningful ways. To truly support the LGBTQIA+ community, businesses should prioritize building inclusivity, educating people on LGBTQIA+ issues, and supporting local organizations. By doing so, they can make a lasting impact and show genuine commitment to promoting equality and diversity.

The finance industry is shifting its focus to mobile finance apps due to growing demand for banking services. To scale these apps, Mobile DevOps and mobile CI/CD become crucial. A Mobile DevOps platform like Bitrise helps optimize release strategies, build more secure apps, and shorten build times. By leveraging Bitrise's extensive pre-built Steps and Workflows, finance teams can streamline their CI/CD pipeline, introduce access control, automated security tests, regression tests, code signing, and more. This enables them to roll out new iterations faster, give their team the information they need to react quickly to user feedback and bugs, and ultimately build a more secure app.

As the traditional idea of accessibility is being challenged to fit modern times, mobile app development teams are recognizing the importance of making their apps accessible to a wider range of people despite their differences. By prioritizing accessibility, businesses can tap into the vast and diverse user base that may be alienated if not included. To start addressing accessibility, developers can focus on contrasting text and background colors for visual impairments, adding representation through language translation, avatars, and cultural themes, and incorporating inclusivity by evaluating their app from LGBTQIA+ users' perspectives. By adopting an accessibility-first mindset, developers can create a more inclusive technological world with diversity and inclusion at its core.

In this episode of Mobile DevOps, Sudeep from Neo Financial shares his insights on how the mobile team behind Canada's main challenger bank approaches release strategy, evolving from ad-hoc releases to a stable bi-weekly release train. He discusses how to streamline the release process using today's tools and technologies, increase efficiency with limited time and resources, remain agile in heavily regulated environments like finance and banking, hire trusted engineers, and ensure fintech apps are ready for the future. The podcast aims to learn from developers' processes and share knowledge on mobile development productivity and app building, inviting listeners to submit questions and topics for future episodes.