August 2019 Summaries

The event brought together new colleagues from different locations, including Berlin and San Francisco, for a 48-hour gathering that included workshops, one-on-one sessions, and team-building activities. Despite initial worries about feeling out of place, many participants reported feeling welcomed and connected with their new colleagues. The event focused on gathering input on the company's culture and values, allowing new joiners to share their perspectives and get a deeper understanding of the organization. Through these interactions, participants formed meaningful connections and found themselves talking about personal issues and interests in a way they rarely do with friends or colleagues. The overall atmosphere was described as warm, welcoming, and fun, leaving many feeling excited about joining the company and looking forward to continuing to learn from their new colleagues.

SEOmonitor, an SEO platform, approached Bejamas for help in modernizing their website's tech stack and design, aiming to improve user experience and make it easier for non-technical users to update content. The new stack consists of Gatsby, styled-components, Contentful as the content platform, Netlify for hosting, and i18n-react for translations. Bejamas used a linter with husky to order code, format it, and check for errors during development. The new design features pixel-perfect layout with improved loading times, reduced from 5-6 seconds to 400ms, thanks to the use of static site generation, CSS pseudo-elements, and Contentful's ease of integration with Gatsby. The project aimed to provide a fast and developer-friendly solution for content management, empowering users to create beautiful pieces of content effortlessly.

The use of strong and unique passwords is no longer sufficient to protect accounts, as the standard has shifted to at least eight characters with numbers and symbols. To further enhance security, tools like "Have I been Pwned" can be used to check for compromised passwords, while Contentful uses this tool to disallow any compromised passwords. This service checks passwords against a database of over 320 million leaked passwords, keeping users informed if their password has been compromised. Additionally, using a password manager is crucial to protecting digital privacy and security by generating complex passwords and monitoring accounts for security breaches.

B&O, a luxury audio-visual design and production company, struggled with a monolithic ecommerce and CMS platform that was not meeting their customer needs. They wanted to connect with customers in different regions and languages on various devices and in-store displays, but lacked the tools to achieve this. A microservice stack with Contentful at its center has enabled them to design and implement seamless customer experiences both online and in-store. By merging their two websites into one and connecting ecommerce and IT systems, B&O has seen significant improvements in load times, conversion rates, and average order value. This transformation is a testament to the flexibility and scalability of Contentful's headless CMS and Commercetools' ecommerce solution.

There is ongoing debate around headless Content Management Systems (CMSes), which refer to CMSes that lack a presentation layer, instead relying on APIs and independent interfaces. A headless CMS enables distributing content through multiple channels at scale, making it suitable for various platforms and applications. Decoupled CMSes also offer similar benefits but are not necessarily the same as headless CMSes, with some overlap in their features and functionality. Headless CMSes cater to non-technical users by providing a user interface that allows them to work with content in the database, while developers can access content through API endpoints for customized front-end experiences. Scaling and content organization remain concerns when using traditional CMSes as if they were headless CMSes, whereas headless CMSes are designed for flexibility and growth. The best CMS choice depends on the project's needs and the team using it, with a key factor being content organization and collaboration among team members.