January 2020 Summaries

I'm sure you've heard of Conway's law — it's the idea that organizations are fated to replicate their internal structures in the software systems they build, for better or for worse. Companies like Contentful need to be aware of this and design their software with flexibility and adaptability in mind. By building features that support DevOps principles, such as automating content model deployment and treatment of content models as code, Contentful aims to make its platform a tool that adapts with users, not a wrench in the works. The goal is to enable faster development, iteration, and deployment of digital experiences, while reducing manual steps and risk. By incorporating features like space environments and environment aliases, Contentful's platform can streamline deployment pipelines, automate testing and deployment, and support agile content modeling.

Content creators often overlook the importance of creating correct URLs, which can lead to broken links, crawl errors, and poor SEO. Using validated URLs that are easily legible to humans can help avoid these negative consequences. It's essential to collaborate with developers to create logical and organized URL structures that mimic content categories and subcategories. Crawlers like Google Spiders prefer simple URLs without multiple parameters, and using hyphens and underscores can make URLs more readable. The use of the trailing slash is not as critical for SEO purposes, but consistency is key. Utilizing broken link checkers can help fix errors and improve SEO.

Atlassian's ShipIt hackathon provided an opportunity for developers and content editors to collaborate on improving developer and content editor experiences when using Contentful, resulting in two new solutions that will improve productivity. The event allowed participants to build community and develop interesting projects in a comfortable environment, with the combined team discussing ideas and dividing into groups focused on improving editor lives and platform owner experience. Collaboration led to fresh ideas and faster project development, ultimately yielding top prizes at the hackathon. The outcome of the collaboration between Atlassian and Contentful will be two new solutions available to improve productivity for editors and developers.

In Japan, the rail company's punctuality is attributed to dedicated tracks, modern signalling systems, and trained staff following standard procedures. Similarly, in software development, teams need robust infrastructure, automated integration suits, and engineers trained in DevOps principles to deliver high-quality features on time and within budget. However, traditional CMSes often hinder developer productivity by forcing developers to manually migrate data and apply changes to production, leading to psychological toll and grueling deployments. A new content management platform has addressed this issue by introducing environment aliases, allowing developers to build new features in isolation, test against production data, automate migration, recover from bad deploys, and deploy changes instantaneously. This enables teams to adopt DevOps principles and improve software performance, leading to a lasting competitive advantage.

As a non-profit organization, Upsolve uses rich text snippets in Google search results to improve their content's visibility without adding extra work to their writers. They use the rich text field to support semantic HTML, internal page linking, and robust JSON+LD creation, which helps their pages appear first in organic search results. By structuring content with `<section />s` and automatically creating internal page anchors, they make it easier for web crawlers to understand their content. JSON+LD allows them to showcase rich text snippets in SERP, giving them a competitive edge without spending on ads. The use of rich text has enabled Upsolve to generate over 1.5 million unique visitors per year with zero ad spend, beating publicly traded companies in search results.

The Linux kernel's UDP connection tracking issues have caused challenges with DNS, particularly in Kubernetes, where elevated rates of DNS failures were observed under load. A race condition in the kernel causes the loss of response for one or two queries when made in a short period. To address this issue, a new implementation called coreDNS-codecache was developed as a CoreDNS plugin to solve some of the new problems introduced by node-local, which is a Kubernetes extension that solves these issues but also introduces others. The new plugin uses a DNS cache on each node, greatly reducing outgoing DNS queries and upgrading requests to TCP. However, it brings its own set of concerns, including high availability issues and limitations with Alpine Linux containers. To address these concerns, the developers created Coredns-nodecache, a plugin that supports setup in high availability and has been used in production for several months. The solution is still evolving, with ongoing efforts to improve it by delegating the creation of iptables rules and interface to a Kubernetes operator.