Javier Cervantes

Having worked with Salesforce B2C Commerce (previously Demandware) for almost a decade, I’ve compiled a list of articles to the official documentation on this topic.

A map is not enough to navigate the complexity of the real world, but it can be used as a compass to find the best path forward.

• Development Best Practices
• Development Guidelines and Limitations
• Code Version Best Practices
• Source Code Best Practices
• General Security Best Practices
• Security Best Practices for Administrators
• Security Best Practices for Developers
• Best Practices: Continuous Integration
• Performance and Stability Coding Standards
  • Storefront Development for Performance and Stability
  • Job Development for Performance and Stability
  • Administrative Considerations for Performance and Stability
• Error Page Best Practices
• Page Designer Development Best Practices
• Template Best Practices
• OCAPI Best Practices 20.4
• Replication Best Practices
• Inventory Best Practices
• Managing Inventory Levels Best Practices
  • Standard Inventory Synchronization
  • Extended Inventory Synchronization
• Best Practices for Active Merchandising
• Promotion Best Practices
• Coupon Best Practices
• Best Practices for Import/Export
• SEO Best Practices

Making sure everyone on the team can contribute to a project is fundamental for success. Unfortunately, documentation is usually obsolete or even non-existent in most of the projects.

The broken window theory explains how negative feedback loops can lead to an unsutainable environment in the long run. Teams that need to reverse engineer the code to understand it will have a longer learning curve. Having an updated documentation enables everyone to go faster.

The agile manifesto values “working software over comprehensive documentation”. But a robust documentation will ensure the software can be mantained a year later too.

By leading engineering teams over the last decade I've seen teams thrive by making documentation a first class citizen. I created a Confluence template with the most relevant sections. To keep it updated, documentation can be included as a deliverable for every feature.

Below are the tempate sections, reach out if you would like to get a copy for your personal use:

• Access
• Engineering
  • Architecture Diagram
  • Branching Strategy
  • Coding Standards / Styleguide
  • Data Mapping
  • Deployment Process
  • Most Frequent Error Logs
  • Glossary
  • Go-Live Readiness Checklist
  • Infrastructure Diagram
  • Local Environment Setup
  • Resources library
  • Tech Stack
  • Technical Debt / Improvements
  • Test Plan
• Decisions
  • [Decision template]
• Features
  • [Feature template]
• Guides
  • [Guide template]
• Integrations
  • [Integration template]
• Project Management
  • Discovery / Project Description
  • Onboarding checklist
  • Team
• Meetings
  • [Date] - [Meeting Template]
• Releases
  • [Version] - [Release Notes]
• Retrospectives
  • [Date] - [Retrospective template]

In a recent Adobe Experience Manager project, there were multiple security restrictions with access, so we enabled a repository for each team to work on the project and enable every organization to manage the permissions.

Additionaly, in AEM as a Cloud Service, there is also a Cloud Manager repository that needs to be kept in sync to trigger the deployment to the managed instances.

We used a continuous integration pipeline to ensure the code repositories were in sync. Below is a diagram with the workflow that was implemented:

To make it work we enabled bitbucket pipelines, configured the repository variables and updated the content of the bitbucket-pipelines.yml file:

image: atlassian/default-image:3

definitions:
  steps:
    - step: &sync-remote-adobe
        name: Push to Adobe Experience cloud
        script:
          - if [[ $ADOBE_CM_GIT_SLUG ]]; then
          - git remote add adobe https://$ADOBE_CM_USERNAME:$ADOBE_CM_PASSWORD@git.cloudmanager.adobe.com/$ADOBE_CM_GIT_SLUG
          - git pull adobe $BITBUCKET_BRANCH --tags
          - git push adobe $BITBUCKET_BRANCH --tags
          - else
          - echo "Step skipped, ADOBE_CM_GIT_SLUG variable not configured"
          - fi

    - step: &push-bitbucket-mirror
        name: Push to Bitbucket Mirror
        script:
          - if [[ $MIRROR_GIT_SLUG ]]; then
          - git remote add mirror https://x-token-auth:$MIRROR_TOKEN@bitbucket.org/$MIRROR_GIT_SLUG
          - git push mirror $BITBUCKET_BRANCH --tags
          - else
          - echo "Step skipped, MIRROR_GIT_SLUG variable not configured"
          - fi

pipelines:
    branches:
      develop:
        - step: *push-bitbucket-mirror
        - step: *sync-remote-adobe
      master:
        - step: *push-bitbucket-mirror
        - step: *sync-remote-adobe

Bonus: Sync repositories using github actions

If you’re looking on how to keep different repositories in sync but and the repositories are hosted on github, you can use the mirror-repository action.

Below is a template to configure it with only 2 steps:

1. Commit a file with the configuration:

.github/workflows/mirror-repo-sync.yml

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - develop

jobs:
  sync_to_mirror:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    steps:

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - uses: yesolutions/mirror-action@master
        with:
          REMOTE: ${{ secrets.GIT_REPO }}
          GIT_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.GIT_USERNAME }}
          GIT_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.GIT_PASSWORD }}

2. Create the secrets in the settings screen:

In the last few years, there's been a shift on circumstances regarding how we work with technology. It’s necessary to adapt to the new expectations to perform at your highest potential.

What am I talking about?

• Asynchronous collaboration
• AI tools that can boost productivity
• Flexible schedules
• Less managers and meetings (or none at all)
• More competition and higher standards

Changes have been happening over the last years, but not everyone has adapted to the new reality. It requires a mental and attitude change toward how we understand work and how we organize.

If you want to suceed in today’s landspace take into consideration the following values.

• Trust: You need to foster it and build it by being dependable in every sense.
• Managers of One: Determining what needs to be done, and doing it, without waiting for someone to tell you to..
• Visibility: A steady footprint will allow you to showcase what you're delivering..
• Goal Oriented: Self-organization to delivery results consistently.

Your future will created by the actions you make every day and your ability to collaborate with others. Are you ready?

For a technology professional, it's crucial to have the necessary skills to succeed. Ensuring a strong foundation becomes even more important in today's landscape.

Beyond choosing a tech stack, there are some skills that will continue to be a good investment.

Git

Learn and understand the principles of version control to be able to collaborate. Explore how git works, learn about branching and seek a understading of the git commands.

HTML & CSS

Basic knowledge to build a static webpage will serve as a base to use more complex technologies.

A deep knowledge will help you decide the best approach when solving a problem. Newest versions provide robust features like the nesting, grid layout and flexbox.

Javascript

Ensure you master fundamental concepts, syntaxis, objects, prototypes and advanced features like promises. Learning about design patterns and how the language runs in the browser will put you a step ahead.

Shell scripting

Learning the usage of command line can improve your development experience. Shell scripting will increase your speed and efficiency.

Regular expressions

Regular expressions (or regex) are a powerful way to search for text that matches a given pattern. At their best they are simple, elegant, and useful. Learn regex beyond the basics and build you'll have a powerfull tool for complex problems.

Refactoring

Refactoring is improving the quality of code without changing its behavior. Refactoring is key to increase development speed and making the code more maintainable.

Software Development Lifecyle

The set of steps used to collaborate and create software applications. Understading the fundamental concepts will boost your collaboration with other team members.

New platforms and tools will emerge, but ensuring a solid foundation is crucial as it was 10 years ago.

At Gray Wolf we developed a training program for this skills, reach out if you’re interested.

Over the last few months our AWS cost had been going up, so we created a plan to optimize our spening as much as possible.

After implementing the optimization plan, we were able to reduce our spending by 80%.

Here is a summary of the steps we took to get there:

1. Created a directory of all the resources and how they were being used.

2. Added tags to those resources to identify environment (dev, qa, prod) and the project name.

3. We used the Billing & Cost Management Console to identify areas of opportunity.

4. Created a projecy plan with specific tasks and owners and kept track of the progress.

5. Repeated steps 3-4 until we reached an acceptable threshold.

Some examples of the actions that we took:

• Simplifying architecture to remove unnecessary elements,
• Down size EC2 instances with low utilization.
• Consolidate compute resources to increase instance usage.
• Created and scheduled lambda functions to auto-stop EC2 instances during off-hours.
• Setup alerts & budgets to be more efficient moving forward.

1. Review and document your current release process

Map all the activities that your team makes to deploy changes to your environments. There are no right or wrong answers, your first step is to understand where you are.

2. Generate a release checklist

Create a list of all the steps that need to take place for a release to happen. By capturing all the activities you can define an owner for each of them and make sure you keep them consistent.

3. Define a release cadence (and stick with it)

Having a regular schedule for releases will make you resolve any roadbloacks. After every release make sure you adjust your plan based on what you learn.

4. Build a script to release changes

Compile a list of commands to generate an artifact and push it to a shared enviroment. The main goal is to remove all manual steps from the deployment process.

5. Configure a deployment pipeline

Select a CI provider and translate your script to run in that tool and deploy with it. Jenkins, Github Actions and Bitbucket Pipelines are the more common options.

If you are using EC2 instances, the first thing you can try is AWS Cost Explorer rightzising recommendations to help you identify opportunities to downsize or terminate instances that are being underutilized to reduce costs.

Below is a recommendation example I got to modify an instance:

To enable rightsizing recommendations

1. Open the AWS Cost Management at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/home

2. In the navigation pane, choose Preferences.

3. In the Recommendations section, choose Receive Amazon EC2 resource recommendations.

4. Choose Save preferences.

To access rightsizing recommendations

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Cost Management console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/home

2. In the navigation pane, choose Rightsizing recommendations.

I was inspired in Steve Klabnik A Hypermedia API Reading List, so here are some resources if you want to learn more about this topic.

Articles

• How to GET a cup of coffee
• REST API’s must be hypertext driven
• Nobody understands rest or http
• Rest is over
• My Week With The Hypermedia Cowboys, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
• How much rest should your web api get
• How I learned to stop worrying and love REST
• What the hell is Hypermedia API and Why should I care?
• Hypermedia API’s, part one
• Media Types
• H Factor
• Haters gonna HATEOAS
• Some people understand REST and HTTP
• I invented Hypermedia API’s by accident
• Hypermedia APIs: The New Wild West?

Videos

• The Costs and Benefits of Building Hypermedia APIs (with Node.js)
• Restful Enterprise
• Glenn Block on Hypermedia
• Hypermedia APIs
• Hypermedia APIs – Jon Moore
• HTML Hypermedia APIs and Adaptive Web Design
• HATEOAS Your Cake and Eat It Too
• RPC to REST : Concrete Case on Payment APIs
• The road to REST
• Confreak videos

Books

• Desinging Hypermedia API’s
• Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node
• RESTful web services
• REST in Practice: Hypermedia and Systems Architecture

Tutorials

• Hypermedia API Tutorial, Part 2
• Use Hypermedia-Style Messages to Build Flexible, Durable APIs
• What is REST?

Presentations

• Hypermedia for the iOS developer
• Web Development Techniques
• The Future of Media API

API examples/docs

• Huddle
• Reachably
• Github
• FoxyCart
• Paypal
• Klarna
• Family Search
• Wowzer

Media Types

• HAL
• Collection+JSON
• Siren
• JSON API
• JSON-LD
• Atom
• x/html

Podcasts

• REST done right

Mailing lists

• API-Craft
• REST Discuss
• HAL Discuss

Tools

• Apiary
• HAL Browser
• Roar
• Hyper rest client
• Hyperresource
• Frenetic
• Hyperclient
• Draper
• URI Template
• Sawyer