Tech NewsBy Smile Cornerstone Team • Issue #4 • View online
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Maybe some of you hoped we would never ever again send the Dreaded Tech news of death. I’m sorry to say you were wrong 🤯! But that is definitely not for the worse and in fact quite the opposite 🥳 We will not spam you and keep a pace of a mail once a quarter which seems like a reasonable amount of email (that makes 4 mails per year for those having the batteries of their calculator failing 😀) We also decided to merge information from two ≠ organization units (namely CTO & COP) into one which makes even less emails and more summarized content at once 🎉 I take on this opportunity to reinforce the message that we have now in place the CTO Office gathering a group of CTO, one per technology, that will work to - Strengthen our technical vision and technical leadership
- Improve our knowledge transfer
- Enforce development best practices, quality and industrialize
- Enforce and monitor capitalization
- Improve our architectures
You can find detailed information here. For the Communities of Practice, we continue on what has been set up in previous years; they are more and more active and wait for support from everyone to help us stay on the cutting edge for each technology. Important to notice that even if you are not a tech guy you can help by writing articles, participating in discussions and helping shape what we have to offer to our customers. Finally both CTOs and CoP leaders synchronize with the Head of Solution related to the technology they manage. - Fabrice Dewasmes, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer
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⏳ Reading time: 7 minutes
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💼 Client case Modern Apps: Grant Thornton Luxembourg |
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Grant Thornton Luxembourg has trusted us to build their one-stop-shop web portal MyGTexperience. The MyGTexperience portal aims to create a unique access point for all Grant Thornton Luxembourg services. This portal will be available for all Grant Thornton corporate users, clients and clients employees, using a unified identification/authentication system for transparent navigation across multiple 3rd party services. This project allowed us to deliver our first full serverless platform, based on a set of Azure cloud services and NodeJs/Apollo/ReactJs. More details can be found in 2023 - GRANT THORNTON - Service - Design/Build/Run - Extranet - Modern Apps - Custom Development - Azure
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📬Techwatch public version is available |
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The "Tech Watch" newsletter is a publication that is available to the public and provides updates on the latest tech news, trends, and insights. Although Smile employees receive it one week earlier, anyone interested can subscribe and receive the newsletter directly to their inbox. The publication covers a wide range of topics, including cybersecurity, cloud computing, AI, and more, making it a valuable resource for anyone interested in staying up-to-date on the latest tech developments. To subscribe to the "Tech Watch" newsletter, you can share this link with your audience, leads, clients, your 🐕 https://smile-1.eo.page/w1xpf.
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E-Commerce, Drupal & DevOpsDevOps, Drupal and eCommerce: Several people from these CoP are actively working on Docker boilerplates for Magento and Drupal (and more). A discussion on the architecture and modularity is in its final phase. We will open the repositories soon. In the meantime, if you need to start a Drupal project in April, you can contact us ( Simon FARAIL, Nathanaël HANNEBERT) so that we can see the stack together from now on. Symfony docker boilerplate is also in the pipe, expect some updates soon.
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Embedded: Monthly non-technical talksAt Smile, technical and non-technical colleagues work together, and the non-technical colleagues are eager to learn more about the various subjects that the technical team deals with on a daily basis. To address this, the Embedded CoP has started monthly talks on technical subjects specifically for a non-technical audience to help the Sales/HR/Hiring department understand the various technical terms used regularly. So far, three talks have been given, including an introduction to secure boot, a glossary of hardware terms, and a glossary of kernel terms, with more talks to come. These talks are open to anyone interested, and all you need to do is subscribe here to receive monthly updates on upcoming events. Technical people are not the only people working at Smile and our non-technical colleagues are curious to learn more about the various subjects we deal with everyday
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SymfonyAs every year at the same period, SymfonyLive Paris took place in Cité Universitaire de Paris, it's a two day conference, focused only on Symfony. We were present at the event as a 💎Diamond Sponsor through SensioLabs and we also had a Speaker from our CoP! Guillaume LOULIER talked about SQLite, and the replay of the symposium for the CoP will be available soon. Our key takeaway and highlight of this 2023 edition: If you fancy it, you can find slides of all lectures right here. Last but not least, if you've missed it here is a summary of what we’ve achieved in 2020 🚀
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📡 IoT: A serverless design pattern & enhance cloud sustainability with RustAs we approach the final stage of our GRDF IoT platform project, we've opted for a fully serverless and stateless architecture, relying on Lambda functions and Python. We've emphasized delivering a high-quality product by utilizing advanced CI/CD and testing tools, even if it meant postponing some deliveries. Our customer has affirmed that this decision was well-received. Now, our IoT Community of Practice (CoP) aims to repurpose these technical assets for new projects and convert them into valuable commercial offerings. Our first focus is a serverless design pattern tailored for large development teams, followed by a comprehensive CI/CD and testing tool suite, including an IoT device simulator. In parallel, AWS is increasingly adopting Rust as the programming language for many of their applications. One such example is Firecracker, the virtualization layer that underpins Lambda. We believe this presents an opportune moment to explore Rust with the goal of incorporating it into our Lambda functions.
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💧Drupal: Streamline CMSEarlier this year, we began developing a Smile installation profile that offers a streamlined Drupal website with UI Suite integration right out of the box. For the first time, our aim is to create demo environments that enable pre-sales representatives to showcase live Drupal sites to clients, with minor customizations reflecting their respective brands. This highlights Drupal's customization capabilities and administrative features. The project prioritizes the content contributor experience and incorporates standard marketing features, all while keeping design system architecture in mind. Eventually, this installation profile will serve as a starter kit for new projects, or even as a complete solution for smaller-scale projects. Recently, one such demo environment was utilized for the Air Caraïbes pre-sales presentation as an example.
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📊 ElasticSuite DataElasticSuite has been collecting analytics on its open source Magento plugin usage for over a year, resulting in a massive volume of data. This data offers an opportunity to understand user behavior globally or by specific dimensions, such as industries, culture, and season. The goal is to use this data to offer new exclusive services to customers and differentiate from competitors. To manage this data, a dedicated data lake was built using modern big data tooling such as Apache Spark and AWS Cloud scalability. The data lake is the main building block to extract relevant information, achieved through a close cooperation between the ElasticSuite team and Synotis. This data will eventually be used to build recommendation and prediction engines leveraging ML. Want to know more ? please contact Romain RUAUD
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Headless DXP or API-centric architectures are in everyone's mind when it comes down to creating seamless user digital experience mixing personalized content, e-business features and self-care services. Such platforms require highly specific and modular front-ends. How can we improve their technical set-up to allow the team to focus on the business needs design and development? This is where the modular front kit (MFK) comes in: a set of classic components enriched with a few specific ones fitting our clients' recurring functional requirements (ex: document preview, charts, maps). The analysis of 20+ React-based front frameworks and libraries (thanks to Tony, Nicolas and Florent) lead to Mantine.dev selection as the base. Soon enough, a pilot project oriented on ECM key features will be available. You think your project is a good candidate to use the MFK? Please contact Lynn JABER.
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🆕 New ESLint plugin for JS qualityThe Smile ESLint plugin is a useful tool for JavaScript developers working on Smile projects. It provides a preset of ESLint rules that are specifically configured for different project types, including popular frameworks such as Angular, React, Vue, and Next. While it's not recommended to use this plugin on an existing project due to the large number of pre-configured rules, it can be very helpful when starting a new project. The Smile ESLint plugin can help ensure that your code follows best practices and common coding standards, which can save time and improve the overall quality of your project. Overall, if you're working on a new Smile project, it's definitely worth considering using this plugin. Please use, share and don't hesitate if you have any feedback to contact Tony CABAYE!
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Kubernetes : bigger nodes and RWX storage classRancher Kubernetes cluster (in forge): We upgraded the nodes in the Rancher Kubernetes cluster for forge to have more CPU and disk space per node. We also added a ReadWriteMany storage class, backed by a NFS storage. You can use it as per this wiki page. Ping Nathanaël HANNEBERT in this Matermost channel in case of trouble. Because it is not as fast as csi-cinder-high-speed storage class, we should use NFS for assets, statics files, etc. not for databases or tasks that require high i/o.
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