https://www.cloudfoundry.org/community/summits/program/cfp/?summitId=10016
Any platform is going to have a multitude of different users with different needs. As the number of users and applications on your platform grow, it will be increasingly difficult to support all of them. Cloud Foundry provides a consistent base for your users to deploy to, but there is still a lot of work that needs to happen around any particular production application: CDNs, logging, vulnerability scanning, alerts, and on and on. In other words: it is still too easy for your users to build fragile, non-production-ready applications.
In this talk, Aidan Feldman will cover how platforms can better support the needs of their users by building in best practices, providing smart defaults, and making the “correct” path the easy path. We will look at concrete examples built into Cloud Foundry, and show some choices made the building of cloud.gov to reduce the cognitive burden on developers, and better ensure the success of what they ship.
18F practices a user research-driven approach to developing software, and really, platform offerings should be no different. How can teams think about better serving the needs of their users, reducing their effort, and promise better results in the end? Rather than thinking about all of the ways that a user might want to customize particular settings, what if there were additional focus on removing the decisions for users where they shouldn’t need to care? With any luck, this talk will shift the perspective of platform operators to seeing the platform through their users’ eyes.
Aidan Feldman is a developer by day, modern dancer by night, based in NYC. He works at 18F, a 100% open source development shop in and for the U.S. government, helping build cloud.gov. He has given talks and training at OSCON, Campus Party Brazil, SIGCSE, CodeMash, and the Business of APIs Conference, has appeared on the CodeNewbie and Giant Robots podcasts, and published a book on Backbone.js. When not coding or writing documentation, he organizes meetups for people learning to code, teaches at NYU, and bikes.