Kong Kongcast: The API Connectivity Series, 1 Nov 2021

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Using GitHub Actions to Build With the Language You 💗 With Ben Greenberg | Kongcast Episode 3

Description

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to developers. In this Kongcast episode, Ben Greenberg, Developer Advocate at Orbit, chats with us about building better engineering communities and focusing on the outcomes rather than technology. At the end, he shows us how he leveraged GitHub Actions to create a copy-and-paste workflow that integrates services, no matter the language they’re written in.

Check out the GitHub Actions Templates Ben referenced: https://github.com/orbit-love/github-actions-templates

Orbit is hiring engineers globally: https://orbit.love/careers

Subscribe to get email alerts for the latest new episodes and see which guests are coming on the show next: https://bit.ly/3zQV71e

▬▬▬▬▬▬ TIMECODES ▬▬▬▬▬▬
0:00 Kongcast Show Intro
0:28 Welcome, Ben!
0:50 How Ben Became a Developer Advocate
4:00 What Does Orbit Do?
7:00 Establishing Developer Communities
10:47 How Orbit Consolidates Community Platforms with APIs
17:00 Raw APIs vs. SDKs
21:10 Exotic APIs in the Financial Services Industry
24:20 Problems Orbit Has Solved With GitHub Actions
27:57 Demo: Integrating Services in Any Language with GitHub Actions
46:00 Book Recommendations from Ben
47:16 Thanks for Joining, Ben!
47:35 Kongcast Show Outro

▬▬▬▬▬▬ ABOUT KONGCAST ▬▬▬▬▬▬
Hosted by @ViktorGamov and Kaitlyn Barnard, we interview software developers and technology leaders at the top of their game every other week. We’ll also give you the tools, tactics and strategies you need to take your distributed architectures to the next level. Kongcast goes beyond the buzzwords and dissects real-life applications and success stories so that you can tackle your biggest connectivity challenges.

▬▬▬▬▬▬ KONG COMMUNITY ▬▬▬▬▬▬
⭐ https://github.com/Kong/kong
🐦 https://twitter.com/thekonginc
🌎 https://konghq.com/community/
🍻 https://www.meetup.com/pro/kong
❓ ️https://discuss.konghq.com/
💯 https://konghq.com/kong-champions/

#GitHub #GitHubActions #Developer #DeveloperAdvocate #DevAdvocate

A

And today,, I'm super excited that I have ben greenberg,.

A

Developer advocate from orbit. and ben here to talk to us about some language, agnostic.

A

Tools and how they use github actions and orbit. ben, welcome to kongcast.

A

Thank you so much for having me, victor,. I am so delighted to be joining you on.

B

Kongcast., this is going to be a great conversation.

B

awesome., so before we start, before we jump right into the topic about all this.

A

Automations and all these things, can you talk a little bit about yourself? like,.

A

What do you do and how you end up in the world of developer, advocacy? and like,.

A

It's going to be a little bit meta podcast, because orbit helps developer advocates and.

A

The community leaders and other specialists who engage with the, you know,, live audience.

A

Of developers with system administrators in all sorts of people around the communities.

B

That is a very good question,. I feel asking any developer advocate how you ended up in developer.

B

Advocacy could always be a fascinating question to ask, because we all have our own journeys,.

B

How we ended up in this bit of a particular and a little bit of a niche role,, which I.

B

Love., it's one of those favorite things. I've ever done in my life.

B

So I ended up as a developer advocate.. I was a developer for a bit at a financial services.

B

Corporation in new york. and I,, you know,, it was great work building algorithms to calculate.

B

Residuals and a lot of sql,, more sequel than I ever want to do again in my entire life. and at.

B

Some point, I discovered there was this role where you could take off the headphones once in a while,.

B

Get away from the keyboard and communicate with other developers and understand their needs.

B

And feed those needs back into the products that you're working on and help inform the engineering.

B

And the product teams and iterate on the products from that perspective of the developer.

B

In essence, you can be the developer user number zero in a in the product cycle of development,.

B

And I discovered this role and it was called developer advocacy., I'm like,. This is amazing.

B

And so I applied for a few roles and I ended up at a communications api company for about.

B

Two and a half years, working on their voice, api product line and on their sms api product line.

B

And I got to do some amazing stuff with sdks and met thousands of developers and.

B

Open api specifications and all kinds of fun stuff, like that.

B

And now I ended up here at orbit and we build tooling to help communities grow.

B

And understand the insights and data around their members,, how to really fully.

B

Understand who their community is and build a unified picture of of that community growth.

A

That's that sounds exciting.. It's also very, very much aligned with the thing how I like.

A

To see developer advocacy., it's exactly like developer zero., it's kind of like a patient zero.

A

Exactly that we like to talk about this one before engineers will engineer, will engineer, features.

A

Like it's going to be, awesome, is going to be amazing., but I like to say that we have this like.

A

A unique position where we can influence. some of the,, you know, developments,, because we know.

A

Usually, we know how the people use our software, right,. So that's why that's why we're here., so we also partially technical, partially technical.. I had this conversation, this week...

B

Sometimes technical... yeah,, I had to to show my credentials that I'm also technical., I'm not just a.

A

Talking face. so and yeah,, and the many things that we do is is all.

A

About learning our users. learning what they do and how we can help them, better. and specifically,.

A

You know, how we can help the better. We need to understand their problem. First,. You know, what,.

A

And how we can understand the problem., there is a plenty of ways where the people go in.

A

Complaining in the internet, right? and the orbit actually helps to aggregate those places.

A

Where the people complain, so we can understand where we to find the available information,.

B

Exactly where they complain,, where they discuss things,, where they share feedback and ideas. so.

B

If you...one of our fundamental principles that we believe in at orbit,- and I think this will really.

B

Resonate, is that community doesn't just happen on a single platform,. Right? community happens.

B

On a twitter thread., it happens in discourse,, it happens on discord., it happens on stack overflow.

B

Questions and answers. it happens on reddit subreddits.. It happens on comments on youtube,.

B

And it can be really hard., and this is something I get actually a lot of feedback on.. It can be.

B

Really hard to understand a single member of your community across all the different places.

B

That they exist on., and so one of the cool things that orbit does is it gives you that aggregated,.

B

Collated member unit across all those platforms., so it's a single member with multiple identities,.

B

And that's actually kind of language we use, right?. So it's a one to many relationship.. You.

B

Have a single member and they can have an identity on stack overflow, an identity on.

B

Several blogging platforms, an identity on github, an identity on gitlab identities, all over the.

B

Place. and we bring those all together for you and offer analytics and reporting to help. You engage.

B

And understand their...their particular needs and a bit more of a,. I would say, coherent fashion.

A

Yeah,, it sounds like a very much a real world implementation of this meme, where.

A

We see kind of a bunch of pictures like "this is me on twitter." "this is me on.

A

Github." "this is me on linkedin." "this is me on instagram." and the different photos that.

A

Show you different ways. like you,, you know, go, and I don't know, like it, looks professional in the linkedin picture,, but like more on the on the beach with the glass of some some drink on instagram picture.. So that's exactly what orbit does, essentially.

A

Based on our discussion,, based on our conversation. and one of the things, that's.

A

Good about the show is that we will get to show you what ben was talking about., so it's...like.

A

Stick, stick around and stay with us.. We will demo with some of some of the product features,.

A

So. what...so, how long have you been with orbit at this point?.

A

So, as you know, there's human years and there's developer, advocate years, and they're not exactly.

B

The same. I've been, in human years, I've been at orbit for about six months. and in that six.

B

Months, we have done so much,. You know, we're a very fast paced, nimble startup.. When I joined,.

B

I was employee number 10 and now we're we're on the cusp of about twenty five employees or so in.

B

The past six months,, which in real terms, is a lot of growth, really fast. and it's been a it's, been.

B

An adventure. so six months in human terms, quite longer and developer advocate terms.

A

So, like the the reason for this question,, it's kind of like a build up like I want to understand,.

A

Like what did you learn?, maybe like some of the three fascinating facts about where the people.

A

Interact more,, where developers interact more.. What would be...say we're talking to.

A

Some prospects and we're telling them, "hey, you know,. These are some of the some of the.

A

Communities that you need to be engaged on, stack overflow or reddit." or,, you know,.

A

"Forget about reddit, it will not fit in your profile on your organization, because your.

A

Users, usually nothing out there.. Maybe your users will hang out on github discussions in twitter.".

A

So like something,, you know,, maybe you have someone like eye openers and some of the things.

A

That you learn and say, wow, I yeah,. I did know that like before I started doing this research.

B

Yeah,, it's actually quite interesting.. What I've discovered is that there isn't really.

B

A one size fits all perspective when it comes to this. and actually every kind.

B

Of niche developer community has its own.

B

Niche platforms in which it's existing on and preferential spaces that they kind of occupy.

B

And, you know, without over generalizing too much., but you know, there's something to be said about.

B

Game devs kind of occupy certain spaces: more than,, you know, financial services developers.

B

Might occupy. and, you know, communities that run developer tooling, might occupy different spaces.

B

And then that's kind of like the macro level., but even on the more micro level,. Even.

B

Different product lines and different, even different tooling, within the same.

B

Kind of space will have different emphasis,, depending on what they do. and actually,.

B

I would say a lot of that depends on where you as a company or you as a product community.

B

Initially, invest in creating spaces. and so,, you know, a lot of initial product communities.

B

Do a bit of a scattershot approach when they're first starting., and so they they are a bit of on.

B

Everywhere, they're everywhere at the same time., so that means you've created a lot of disparate.

B

Spaces for people to exist, on., and so then it becomes a bit more challenging. As you grow,.

B

It gets actually exponentially harder, as you keep on growing, to manage all those different places.

B

That's one side., the other side is you., you may have been very focused initially, and you may.

B

Say I only want to really generate conversations on,. I created a discourse instance, for example,.

B

And that's my that discourse instance is where I really want questions and answers and community.

B

Support. but then your members start going on twitter all the time and raising questions.

B

And they get feedback on there. so they're getting they're getting that sense of like.

B

Responsiveness to those questions. and suddenly twitter becomes a more active space,.

B

Even in ways you haven't or didn't necessarily anticipate or even necessarily want desired.

B

Some of it is, you lead the community and others. The community is leading you and you have to kind.

B

Of be in the moment with them and understand where it's happening or where it's growing organically.

B

So that didn't really fully answer that question the right kind of answer without answering.

A

No, no, no. that's actually perfect answer., and this also will give the perspective for our.

A

Listeners as well. there is like when you tried to build a community,. It's it's not like. You will be.

A

Surprised in terms of you trying to people like steer somewhere, but the to quote jeff goldblum.

A

"Nature will find a way," from jurassic park. nature will find a way...the user will find a way.

A

How they can organize., what's what's important for...to understand, is that like, you know,.

A

If they self-organized somewhere just need to help them. so do not try to,, you know, break this habit.

A

And try to steer them somewhere., just be there where they are.. That's your purpose, essentially.

A

So true., if they're, not where you want them to be,, you know,, eventually they will be., but that requires trust and patience.

A

It's so true.. That's such a good point. yeah.

B

So that's that's my kind of like a.

A

Rule of thumb, thinking about like where to interact with our users.

A

So, since we're talking about all these communities and all these things, like.

A

Integrating this stuff would be really hard.. You need to manually parse the html pages.. You need.

A

To do all these kind of things, right?, so that's how you do in the modern days.. Just like start the.

A

Right,, the the boat and start scraping the pages and analyze these pages, right?.

B

Exactly, you know, it's kind of a bit of a of a big proposition that the product took was that you.

B

Give us data and we will help consolidate it, aggregate it and present it to you in a way.

B

That's meaningful through reporting and analytics.. That's a huge proposition to take,, which means we.

B

Need to be capable of absorbing and offering you multiple pathways to bring in that data.

B

From what is honestly, an ever growing list of community tools.

B

You know, so when I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned in the past six months,.

B

There are so many community platforms that are popping up all the time.

B

I'll give you one example, which, from my own ignorance,, I didn't even know about it until.

B

A few months ago was a platform called circle.. I don't even know if you're familiar with it?.

B

No, I haven't heard about it.

A

But I had no idea about it. right., so I didn't know what it was,.

B

And suddenly I was getting community as a product coming and asking about how we can.

B

Create integrations and connectivity between the interactions happening on circle and feeding that.

B

Into orbit to help give a more comprehensive picture of their users and user engagement.

B

And I didn't know what circle was,, so the first thing I had to do was go to my search bar.. I'm.

B

Like, "what is circle?" and then,. You know, that reality tv show from netflix popped up. First, like.

B

The circle dating show., I'm like, no,, not that circle. a different circle. and it's a really...

B

Naming is incredibly hard. you know... naming is ingenious. Sometimes.

A

Right. you know, early, like early web 2.0,. We kind of like understood.

A

That the start up or like the service or something is actually from the web.

A

Point 2s era.: it should have something like er at the end. twitter, tumblr...

B

A

Other other things. and usually you know, you're throw in some of the some of the letters there,.

A

So it look cool., but now it's it's getting ambiguous. I would say right.

A

With the circle. like,, what is that like?.

B

What is that?, you know,, I remember the 90s and everything had to have an e in front of it,.

B

You know, to a real digital service.

A

You know like eshop., I still remember writing some of the ibm computers and with server side.

A

Ready for e-business., oh okay., it's no fun here.! It's just the only business, here, so.

B

A

Integration this this services, like integration of this platform,, like I, was joking,.

A

Like for the people who was like thinking like victor's, looking about like scraping the internet.

A

I was actually joking because it's a podcast about connectivity, podcast, about apis.

A

You know, and we're living in the world, post-web 2.0 era. and one of the the factors,.

A

One of the kind of like the components of the service that would belong to web 2.0 is like.

A

Exposing the apis, so users can create the more user generated content based on some of the data.

A

So that's why I was I was so we were looking to integrate to the certain systems through sets.

A

Of apis. and that's where we want to spend some of the time discussing this type of stuff., so.

A

Does the circle thing has an api, so you can easily integrate with with your platform?.

B

Circle does have an api using that example,, which I think is a really good example, of.

B

Kind of I would say, and I'm sure you agree with me on this, sort of like the.

B

Evolution of saas products now in days. they all, as you just said,- have to have an api that goes.

B

Along with them, that's externally, accessible and available., so here's a new, relatively new.

B

Community platform that offers a lot of value to its members, and they want to integrate that data.

B

And immediately out of the box,, they offer api functionality to their users.

B

So you don't have to scrape the website., you know,, you don't have to try and use nosql,.

B

Or something to try and find the html tags and get the data.

B

There's a rest api that you can use, and sometimes it's a rest api, and sometimes its a graphql api,.

B

Kind of depends on the engineering team and their their preferences,, but.

B

Whatever it is,, it's usually there and it may require oauth or require a bearer token,.

B

You know,, they all kind of do their own thing and the structure they're trying to figure out.

B

As long as it's secure is really what's most important at that point., but it's there. yes.

A

And what's most important with the emergence of the protocols, like oauth.

A

Is really not about security,, but about? I would do like a little bit more like philosophical,.

A

It's about like understanding like what access you, as a user, are providing to the.

A

Service provider. like,. I like the some of the presentations when the people start explaining.

A

Oauth and they often they bring up this old times of,. What is that like yelp?, when the yelp,.

A

We're asking you to enter your email and password in order to them to send emails about this.

A

New cool service called yelp to your contact list. and the protocol, like oauth,, actually helps users.

A

To understand what kind of data apis will be able to share. so like when you connect to these.

A

These platforms, those api levels will be graded. By,, you know, certain access.. You can access to.

A

Certain api, so you can have access to certain api.. You can restrict this you as a user and the owner.

A

Of this data,, you will be able to restrict and tell where this stuff is coming. From.

A

And most importantly,, who will be able to see it., and this type of things is becoming more.

A

Important than the recent years based on the,, you know, the things that happened in facebook and.

A

How this data was used., and so all this kind of information is very important in terms of like...

A

There were issues with facebook?...[laughs], I don't have issues with facebook., I do have a facebook, but, like I do, have a facebook,.

A

But I don't really, I don't really use it. Recently, and I kind of have been happy about this.

B

Your life is probably a bit better for it.

A

Yeah, yeah., but like still cannot give up twitter. it's my., it's my my thing.

A

So speaking about the api., so what's your what's your take on the api?, you prefer.

A

Raw apis or you prefer sdk?, since you have a view to this point as an expert.

A

Being the the the the the engineer and the developer advocate, who work with the company who.

A

Provides api. now you work with the company who consumes the api.. So what is your take on this?.

B

So actually, we do a bit of both, right?, we we consume apis and we provide an api.

B

So we're kind of in that middle space..

B

I actually think you have to answer that question by asking another question,.

B

Which is what is the need that you are trying to provide for your users? and an api is a tool to.

B

Help accomplish a need, right?, and so you have to first wrestle with that primary question.

B

And I think at the most fundamental level, the answer to that primary question is you're.

B

Trying to help your users accomplish and solve problems as expeditiously and as painlessly and.

B

Maybe as enjoyably as possible., so if those are my goals,, if that's what I want to accomplish and.

B

I have a few tools in my tool. Belt,. I think I need to solve that with the tools I have.

B

And my goal as a developer advocate is to help, and I think you might agree with this,.

B

Is to help my users do that. solve things, expeditiously,, painlessly and joyfully.

B

And so sdk is kind of what they do is abstract. A lot of that work out of you, out of the domain.

B

Of the developer, building something they don't have to worry about, the peculiarities of the api.

B

Or figure out pagination because you know, every api does pagination a little differently.

B

They don't need to think about all those little nuanced details.. They only need to think about.

B

Is,, I need to solve this problem.. What is the function or the method that I can invoke in.

B

This sdk to accomplish that for myself? and does the sdk help me do that in a way that's faster,.

B

More expedited, easier than just making the http calls the api myself?. If the api only makes http.

B

Calls to an sdk and that's all it does,, I would actually argue it- doesn't really serve a purpose.

B

You could...most developers can write http calls in whenever language they're.

B

They're developing in an sdk's goal is to actually do a lot more about that.. It's to wrap that.

B

And provide another layer of handling errors and handling pagination and thinking about,. You know,.

B

What goes wrong and how to handle when things go wrong and all the different kind of questions.

B

And problems. and take that out of the off the shoulders of the developer, building something.

B

So they can focus on what they're, building and less about the tool they're building with.

A

Yeah,, it makes it makes total sense. sometimes,, and I, like your answer about like because it's a.

A

Little bit of both., sometimes when the people just starting to do some things,, they want to have,.

A

Like a fast track to get something done. so in this case,, the sdks, like properly designed.

A

And the sdk that will have some of the idiomatic constructs that the people will easy to grasp in.

A

The language that they use., but we do have like 10x developers who have opinions about this and.

A

Like they start looking, ok,, so this sdk is using some library that I don't like, because blah...

A

Because it's not reactive.- or maybe it's too reactive, or...and people,, I'm exaggerating here- do.

A

Not go and start typing comments and saying what you're talking about., there's no too active thing.

A

What I'm trying to say that the api allowed them...so sdk should not do more than you can do.

A

With api., so everything that you consume still needs to be available through.

A

Through api., if people decide to come up with some alternative implementation or whatnot.

B

Absolutely. yeah,, sometimes like like, like ben, mentioned, the convenience in the idiomatic...the framework use,.

A

I think, is one of the most important selling points of the of using sdk versus api.

A

Yes. so let's talk about this a little bit., so you you've probably seen that different apis.

A

Come in different shapes and forms., you've already mentioned some of the services exposed graphql,.

A

Like github version 3 api is exposing graphql now., which, in the previous versions,.

A

They were exposing just a rest, like a traditional rest, api.

A

What's the most exotic thing that you've seen? in terms.

A

Of what service is exposing some...maybe, some service still exports soap or like xml grpc rpc.

A

Type of thing...I believe the wordpress still exposes xml rpc, right for for publishing, stuff?.

B

I believe that's correct,, you know, honestly,. Nowadays, you don't. I don't.

B

Really find a lot of those exotic apis, so much. they've kind of like they've kind of.

B

Standardized,, you know., I don't know, how about you, victor?. Do you still see any of these exotic things out there in the wild too much anymore?.

B

So I think we tell you this about a little bit when you were talking about like a financial.

A

Services and things like that. unfortunately,, not every bank, is still exposed. the apis. That.

A

We want to consume. like there are some of the banks that still require you, instead of using.

A

Oauth, in order to you kind of as a user logged into to your website,, you still need to do,.

A

You know, provide these username and password. and after that,.

A

Some of the services will be able to connect to your bank.. That's unfortunate.. There is actually,.

A

You know, fellow developer advocates,, I think, and business owners in the financial industry.

A

Think about this., it's it's a huge opportunity: too. but,, you know, the banks and financial.

A

Institutions,, the more they they always were, more conservative about, like use of technology.

A

They they were dealing with,, you know, big stuff here.. So that's like most exotic things that I.

A

See in the real world, and I'm still "really? in 2021,, you cannot provide the normal api?".

A

If I actually, if I see, like, if I see that kind of abnormal authorization patterns like almost.

B

Like dark patterns or anti-patterns nowadays, it kind of like throws me off, and I don't I.

B

Actually will stay away from that api. because what else is going on wrong there? you know,.

A

I don't want to. I don't want to talk too much about working in the financial services industry.

B

Because I have a lot of things to say about it., I probably can't by legal contract, but there's a.

B

Lot of stuff that happens under the hood that you see as engineer working in one of these companies.

B

That would make you second guess doing business with the financial services world.

B

At large. not to say not to say any one specific company just at large. but having seen that,.

B

It's kind of like when you're a cook in a fast food restaurant you never want to eat in the fast.

B

Food place ever again., you know,, so it's it's kind of a similar experience,, but those are red flags.

B

For me,, you know, when I see those anti patterns for authorization, because they they make me think,.

B

"Well,, what else is happening if that, if that kind of bad behavior is happening, there?".

A

Yeah, I agree. it's. It sounds like a really., not enough investment into the modernization...but.

A

Anyway,, I think, there's opportunity there and there are totally leaders.

A

Who understand this and they also, you know, the finding their ways to provide.

A

To the make the world a better place in the financial services., so let's talk about the some of the technicalities.. Let's talk about how you would integrate this. and you can talk a little bit about.

A

Just like overall technology that you use. and we will, when we move to our demo part,.

A

We can expand on this more., but since many of our listeners know that we do kind of like an interview, part enough, that we do a demo part. So we can- or we can do kind of like a move to demo part also like if you like, more more fluently from from the conversation,, so whatever you prefer.. So I can set up the problem first.. The problem that we address was or a.

B

Couple of problems we wanted to address. one was: we wanted to enable people to build tooling, to connect third party apis and their data.

B

To orbit.- and we wanted them to be able to build that tooling.

B

In whatever language that they wanted to build in., so if they were a node.js helper.

B

Build to build an npm package, if they were a python developer, built python, packages,.

B

If they were a ruby developer to build ruby, gems, right?, we didn't want to privilege and say,.

B

You have to build this in in this language if for dotnet and c-sharp and dot net, and it's.

B

All we're going to accept or only go or whatever., so that was one problem.

B

And the second problem is we wanted these integration tools, right,.

B

Essentially, these integration libraries to be as accessible as they possibly could be.

B

Understanding that our audience encompass people from the most senior developers, principal level.

B

Developers, to people who are just opening a code editor for the first time in their lives to.

B

People who are kind of in that, like no code, low code and indie hackerspace who, you know,, may be.

B

Have varying levels of comfort with code or know, comfort with code, and yet.

B

Need to integrate this data for either personal reasons or professional reasons.

B

So we wanted to build something that would accomplish all of those goals,.

B

And those goals all seemed kind of hard to to be able to accomplish at once.

B

But we were struck actually by,, you know, a relatively,.

B

It's a bit not so new anymore,, but still kind of new in the lifecycle of like software.

B

You know, the the service offered by github called github actions,, which, if you're not familiar with.

B

It or if any listeners are not familiar with it,, it's basically a runtime environment provided by.

B

Github., it's provided to every account 2,000,. I believe, runtime minutes a month,.

B

Which is quite a lot. unlimited, runs,, unlimited repos, you can run it on in your.

B

Github organization or github account., and you can do a lot with github actions. you know, most.

B

People who have seen github actions will have seen it in the context of workflows, running their ci/cd.

B

Deployments. so like, you know, ci, checks, testing, suites, maybe,, you know, managing release, flows,.

B

Things like that., but there is actually so much more. You could do with github actions.

B

The really, there's really no limit to what you can do with github actions.

B

It's pretty agnostic as far as what you choose to do with it, and we decided.

B

That we would make github actions one of the prongs.

B

Of our tooling., because you know,, what's really cool about github actions, viktor, is that,.

B

Like the runtime environment supports almost every language, a developers going to write in today.

B

So that accomplishes that first problem, right?, so you can write your tool in basically any number of.

B

Languages. basically any...maybe not cobol,, but you can write your tool any language today and.

B

Be happy and be and enjoy writing, and it can run on an actions, runtime environment., so we're.

B

Not going to say you have to write these tooling in x, y or z. you could do whatever you want. So.

B

That accomplish that first step,, which opens it up to the devs to write in whatever they wanted. To.

B

And the second thing which was making it accessible, what we could talk, about,.

B

About how we made it accessible., but we did that essentially by offering actions.

B

As a third way to to use the libraries.- and we can show that I could show that in the.

B

As we walk through, like exactly how we did that.

B

yeah,, I think I think it's a good segue., so so for people who listen to us in the podcast, you're missing out a lot, not watching this on youtube, because we're going to do a demo right, now., so. and before we go into demo, I'll, we will say goodbye to our listeners in in our podcast. ben,. If you want to tell something to our listeners where they can find you or where you can find more about orbit, in. well, this kind of things.- that's that's your time..

B

We also will put all the links in our show notes and we description and our youtube and take it away for for this yes, podcast listeners,. It was so great to be talking to you.. I hope you come and join us on the video as well and get the live demo. If you're interested in more information, you can find on orbit at orbital love,, and we are actually in a bit of a hiring spree right now for engineers.. So.

A

If you want to be working in the intersection of of helping, sustain and grow communities of all shapes and sizes around the world,- and you want to do that with really cool tech and solving really big, interesting data science problems,, we would love to have you.. We are a remote, first globally distributed company.. You can work from anywhere in the world and you can find more about that at orbital love, careers., look forward to hearing from you. awesome. and as always, you were listening, comcast,, the podcast about cloud connectivity and kong..

A

My name is viktor germov and, as always, have a nice day. all right,, and now we go into a screen sharing mode and thanks for sticking around with us, and now this exciting part where the band will demo some of the cool integration with us when taken away.

B

Awesome., so what you're looking at right, now, my screen is as if I can make it a little bit. Bigger.

B

What you're looking at is the home page for github actions., so I wanted to start with this home page.

B

So that you had a sense of what we're talking about as the way they promote it. On, you know,.

B

For lack of a better term., their marketing site for github actions and what basically lets you do.

B

Is is create automations for any kind of thing that you wish to automate.. You can run it on.

B

Multiple containers, linux, windows, mac os., that is actually very helpful,. Let's say for the ci,.

B

Your testing suite use case.. So when I build ci workflows on github actions,, I always run them on.

B

As many operating systems as I can, if I'm building an sdk., so I want my sdk to able to.

B

Make sure that it can work and the test pass in a mac environment, in a windows, environment and.

B

A linux environment so that I know that my users for using nas environments can. it works right?.

B

You can build actions in numerous languages,, as as I mentioned, and node and python, java,.

B

Ruby, php, go laying,, rust net and more,, which is really cool, because that basically means that.

B

Whatever language you prefer and we all as devs, have a language we prefer,.

B

It may be a bit idiosyncratic and maybe we may have hard times explaining it.

B

But there's some languages, we, like writing in., and so you could do that.

B

And github actions and read it on actions., so I want to show you what our standard ci.

B

Build looks like on github actions., so what you see here is one of our community integrations.

B

This one connects linked in community data from your linkedin organization and brings it into.

B

Your orbit workspace. and this integration has a ci, suite,, right? and I, every time. I.

B

Push to the main branch or I open a pull request,, it runs the ci suite and this.

B

Is the presentation of that ci suite and a table view. so, for example, you know,.

B

I incremented the version here on my way to release a new version of the gem.. You can.

B

Click through on any one of these, and you can actually see the built and you see,. I ran it.

B

On ubuntu and I ran it on mac,, right? and ruby's, two point: seven and ruby and ruby three, trying.

B

To keep support for across different versions of the language., I can click through to one of them,.

B

For example, and I can see that everything was successful instead of the job successfully.

B

It's set up the language successfully the ruby environment and installed all the dependencies.

B

Of this particular gem successfully., I can look into that and make sure it looked ok,.

B

And it ran the test suite,, which in this case, was our spec and ran the 10 tests successfully in.

B

There were zero failures., the job is complete and it's done.. What's cool as well with this? Is you.

B

Can actually add this as a tag to your read: me, right?. So if I go to the read me and there, it is,.

B

And I see the ci was passing,, which is really neat.. So that's a bit of instruction to get up.

B

Actions on. that's most common use, case,, which is a ci.. What we've done in orbit is. We have taken.

B

Github actions and created a way to use all of our community integrations., so we have community.

B

Integrations for things like stack, overflow,, meetup,, linkedin,, reddit,, youtube,, circle,, all.

B

All other sorts of pipedrive,, which is a crm, all other sorts of platforms, and we've created.

B

Integrations for them. notion as another example I see here and et cetera., and what we've done is so.

B

Like most packages,, so whether it's a ruby jam or an npm package or what have you, you can integrate.

B

That package into your code, normally. so I'll, go back here for a second.. You can integrate that.

B

Code normally into any application, you're building., so this one happens to be built.

B

In ruby., so let's say you're building some ruby library.. You can just put this in your gem file.

B

In a ruby context and require it and then use it. write, every of one of our integrations also has.

B

Its own cli,, so you can run the package from your command line and do the data integration that way.

B

So I can run on a command line,. Maybe can make my own bash script and put on a one time schedule.

B

And have it run on my computer and be fine and happy.? The third way,, which is what we're going to.

B

Talk about now, is the scheduling, automation with github., and the advantage of this is that whoever.

B

You are, no matter what skill level you come from, you can integrate this with github actions.. It.

B

Requires very little actual coding, experience. in fact,, no coding, experience. what?. You need to.

B

Do is learn how to open an account on github.. You know, learn how to sign in and create an account,.

B

How to create a repository all throughout the ui. and then how to copy and paste what we provided.

B

For you. and github actually takes care of the rest., so these are the templates, right? and what.

B

We tell you is,, so this is your first time using it here.. You need to create a give account, create.

B

A repo and add your credentials and then pick the workflow.. So let's say I wanted to run with the.

B

Meetup one, for example,, so I would click through to the meetup one, and I see two files in here.

B

I see a yamal file., all the workflows on github actions are yamal, right?. So I see a yamal file.

B

Called by html- and I see a read me and I'm looking at the read me and read me- tells me.

B

That this checks for new event are recipes for a meetup group and adds them to orbit.

B

So it tells me I need to copy the meetup file into my own github repository inside this folder path,.

B

Get doc github workflows, and then I need to add the right credentials to my github.

B

Secrets and my repository. so, you know,, so I need to find go here to the settings in my github.

B

Repository. click down to secrets and then add a new repository secret. and in this case, I need.

B

To add the url? Name of my meetup group.- so if my meetup group is meetup group test, one two three,, I.

B

Need to add that, as a secret into my repository secrets, because those are used as an environment.

B

Variables in the workflow. and then I go to the yamal and I can see the yamal here,.

B

And I essentially copy this., I entirely paste it into a file in my own repository. click save. make.

B

Sure my secrets: are there the right ones? I need. put them in that right place where we showed you.

B

And then this is set to run at midnight, once a day, every day, and it will automatically run for.

B

You and automatically import the data and you'll see something like this.. So here's an example of.

B

An open source community using the integrations. I found them on github public search on github.

B

I found that they run them and they're actually running two of our integrations.

B

One is for the dev blog and one is for youtube,, and you can see it looks very similar to the ci.

B

Checks, I showed you before,, but here it's actually doing these integrations., so this one was run 13.

B

Hours ago., it was successful., it checked for new dev interactions and added them to orbit.

B

This one check for a new youtube comments. add into orbit.. I can click through to it,.

B

I can see it, and I can even check it out here and see that there was no new comments in this run,.

B

So it fetches zero comments and provide a time frame.. But that's ok! If looked for them,.

B

Didn't find any., that's great., but you know you could search for on github, for these integrations.

B

And find all kinds of communities already using them,, which is really cool., and you can click.

B

Through and see the workflows now. if you're, not an owner of the repository and it's open, source,.

B

You can't actually run the workflows, right? clearly,, but you can look at them.. It's all.

B

Open source., if you were the owner of the repository,, you could also click through.

B

And run these workflows manually to whenever you would like,, which is pretty cool.. So I would. and.

B

If we look at the actual workflow,, what you see is for a github actions,, a pretty standard workflow.

B

We provide it with a name, we tell it on when we want it to run,, which, on this case, we want it to.

B

Run. in two different instances,, one is called schedule.. This is all in the github actions.

B

Documentation, by the way, and the schedule is a current astrong, cron schedule. there's a lot.

B

Of open source tooling, which helps you build these expressions out if they're, you know,.

B

No one should be to fault if they can't remember exactly how to write cron expressions., and this.

B

One is called workflow dispatch,, and this is what lets you run it manually from the ui whenever you.

B

Want.- and this is the actual job, and we call it a workflow for new comments or new meetup.

B

Interactions. we say we want to run on the ubuntu environment.. It could run in the mac environment.

B

Also, you run in the linux environment.. We set up the right programming, language, environment.

B

In this case, it's ruby and the other ones., it might be a node environment.. We install the jem.

B

Meetup orbit and then we run it., and this is the cli command, right?, so we're running the cli.. This.

B

Is as if you're running the cli in your command line,, but now we're running it in github actions.

B

Command line, instead. right., that's basically the difference.- and this is the important part.

B

Where you pass in your credentials and you pass them in in the form of repository secrets., this.

B

Is the syntax for it dollar, sign,, curly, brace,, curly, brace secrets dot the name of the secret.

B

So there's three., there's always two that are needed: always. and then,, depending on.

B

The integration, will be different ones., so in this case, you just need to meet up irl name,.

B

But you always also need your api key from orbit and you'll need your workspace id from.

B

Orbit a where to post these things, to. and then,, as I mentioned, you'll, see them post and they'll.

B

Happen by themselves, every single day or whatever the schedule is, and we'll get added to your it'll.

B

Get added to your workspace. what this actually looks like., so we've been talking a lot about.

B

This or workspace. what is that?, so this is a test workspace.. This is minimal amount of.

B

Data., this is a kind of one of my playground, workspaces. I use just to kind of experiment.

B

With and make sure things are working.. So when you come onto your workspace for the first time,.

B

What you'll see is kind of high level view of all your activities across all the different platforms.

B

That your community lives on., and this is a high level. View. you'll see some really important.

B

Segmentations of your community here,, like your most active members in the past week, the new and.

B

Promising members, people that are kind of rising up who are just joining. and this one,, I think.

B

Is quite important,, which is people who, over the past 30 days, are starting to drift away,, meaning.

B

Their rate of engagement based on their prior rates of engagement,, it's starting to drop off.

B

This list is important for you, as a community manager to really stay on top of. so, for example,.

B

You know,, you take a look at this., here's this here's one of that member! That's drifting away!.

B

And you get their user name,, you get some contact information.. This is their meetup id,, but it.

B

Could also be in here, all their identities.. You would see their linkedin profile name,.

B

Their stack overflow user name,, their github profile,, whatever you've integrated with and their.

B

Timeline of all their activities. again,, this is just a test workspace,, so you don't have too much.

B

In here and and this right here, you can create a note., so I created a. temple note,. This is.

B

Not any meaningful data,, but you can create a note about the person at them,. But what I want.

B

To show you for the purpose of this demo is this: is the meetup integration right, here., so this.? I.

B

Will zoom in a little more.? This is pulling from the meet up api.. I happen to pick the docker.

B

Bangalore has tons of events all the time. very active, meet up user group,, which is just helpful.

B

If you're trying to build a meet up integration to find one, that's having tons of events, all the.

B

Time., if you're anywhere near bangalore,, I probably would recommend going to them.

B

They look like awesome., I haven't been there yet,, but it's on my list of things to do, and you see.

B

That vinod has our for devops india conference, twenty twenty one, right?, so we've added his rcp,.

B

Which,, if this was a full functioning, workspace, would be incorporated with all of his other.

B

Activity. and that's interesting because that's another element of his engagement, right? and.

B

These all are based on these integrations.. Let me make this zoom out a little bit based on all these.

B

Integrations., so this is the community ruby one for linkedin,, but this could also be the meetup.

B

One,- and here is the circle one and the code for it., you know,, you don't have to know too much,.

B

Ruby, but essentially the code for it is I've abstracted all of the http calls to.

B

The orbit api and in this case, in this one here, the circle api,, except in the meetup api,.

B

Whatever. and I do all that work for you and I've done that work by I'm starting to build.

B

A suite of modularized sdk libraries, instead of a kinship sync sdk, that abstracts a lot of the http.

B

Calls. so, you know,. This is called the ruby orbit activities,, which is, you know, part of a suite of.

B

Modular sdk libraries., and this one here manages all of the activities endpoint of the orbit api.

B

And essentially you tell it what you want to do,, which is in this case,. I want to add.

B

A new activity,, right? and ok, when it's a new activity,. I want to call a new activity.

B

What is a new activity?? It's a method which invokes the post method., I kind of grab the http.

B

Post method- and I rewrite it a bit myself,, which is something beautiful you can do in ruby with bit.

B

Of meta programming and to provide it with the url,, the user agent,, the api key and the actual.

B

Body of the new activity., so if I would go here,, I would see that I have this thing called post.

B

Somewhere in here. did I skip over it?, I did. it's right there, and it's essentially a relatively.

B

Straightforward post, method, right? anyone who's written up calls. This will look very familiar.

B

Specify that you or I, you know,, create a new post instance.. It's a json, except json,.

B

The typekit json., the authorization is ibaraki and the body is the body., and I also go through and.

B

Make sure to handle rate limitations of the api for you and take care of that work for you. and.

B

I also validate the payload for you and make sure if there's any errors,, I present the errors to you.

B

In a way, that's manageable., and if it's not,, I just present to you the response body., that's a.

B

Bit of the run through., so these are being used out in the wild,, which is really cool to see..

B

This is where it is.- these are really cool to see., and the way I search for this, by the way, is as.

B

Easy as this I looked across all of github., I know this is the name of the gem that does,, let's say,,.

B

The dev community to orbit integrations., so I just search for that all across all of github,. I find.

B

Forty one instances of code where it's where it lives,- and I found this- this wonderful repository.

B

In the open source, that's using it., I also see,, you know,, that we're using it,, which is great,.

B

And I see that this company is using it,, which is great and another one is using it,.

B

And I can click through to it, so I can click right. There.! Here's deep note,, which is, I think, an ai.

B

Machine learning python based company., I can look at their actions and I see.

B

One hour ago they ran for reddit, two hours ago for reddit, three hours ago for reddit. they're.

B

Running reddit, quite a lot.: let's take a peek at one of them., see if there is any data in it.

B

Uh. and not data in that one,, it says fetch zero, post,, but,.

B

You know,, it looks like they're running it for nine different jobs, for nine different.

B

Subreddits, I see here. data science, machine, learning., learn, python,, learn, machine learning.

B

Deep learning, visualization data is beautiful.. You know, victor data really is beautiful. Sql and.

B

All of it. we're looking to this to this demo.

A

And the things what you can do in the open internet., it's really beautiful. and this data.

B

Isn't that amazing., I love the open source world that I can search for something.

B

On github, and I can come across worlds of communities using the same kind of package,.

B

The same thing and get insights into into,, you know, their processes. and we're all sharing.

B

This., so that's a bit of a walkthrough of what we've done. and what I love about this is. I.

B

Exactly where I came ever right, now., but there's a great thread where, in one of the integrations.

B

Where a user opened an issue and said,, I'm not a developer, and I love what you've done.

B

Here, because what you've done is enabled me to do this, like you created a path where I'm not a dev.

B

I don't know how to write code.. I don't know how to run things on a command line.. You know,.

B

You open a terminal in your computer and you feel it's easy for me.. That's intimidating,.

B

Right?, but I want to have this kind of connectivity and you've made that possible for me.

B

And honestly, like as an advocate,, that's one of the best feelings.

A

Exactly. yes,, it sounds like a really great, you know,. Maybe it will be sound like a marketer,.

A

But it's a serverless automation, platform, right?, so essentially, basically pane.

A

Anything., if you're doing this like this small integrations,, you don't need to.

A

Manage your service, servers, clusters and things like that., but you can do a lot of things.

A

Even with the free tier., you said,, like 2000, calls per day,.

B

20 minutes a month, which is quite a lot., run ten minutes. yeah, for most communities,. That's a lot.

A

Yeah, yeah. and it's exciting that you already provide like a dashboard where this information.

A

Can be integrated and this information can be aggregated and is a is a community manager.? It's a.

A

Product manager. as a developer advocate,. This is like a very useful tool to to understand where.

A

Your users are and where you can meet them, you know, and try to see how you can help.

A

To solving their problems, to solving or helping them solving their business tasks or their their.

A

Business problems and things like that.. I think it was a very exciting and.. I think it's an inspiring.

A

The last quote that you mentioned that the person who reach out and ask how we can do this and it's.

A

Pretty cool that you don't need to pretty much know: anything,, it's integration. copy, paste and.

A

Once you hooked,, then you will be excited to learn more and dig a little bit deeper. and after that,.

A

You will explore how there's a terminal. oh, there's some stuff that they can do also locally.

A

And develop something.. I want to change the format how this data would be referred. To.

B

How do I can do that? exactly? yeah,, that's kind of like a rabbit, hole. right?

B

and as I said, so I tend to write mine in ruby,, but they can be written in anything.

B

And we have a whole other suite of them in node as well. and python, and I just happen, you know,.

B

I'm a bit biased towards ruby., and so that's what I'm writing in., but it could be anything.

A

That's the point., whatever language make you productive,, you use this, this language,. These.

A

Tools, like., so that's that's totally fine. ben,! Thank you! So much.. It was super exciting thing.

A

To to talking to you. thanks so much for being the part of comcast. one last question,, it's kind of like a little bit exclusive thing for our watchers on youtube.. I usually ask my guests about the book.

A

That they were reading recently. that necessarily needs to be, you know, technical book.. It can be.

A

Technical book,, but it can be fiction, science fiction.. It can be business like self-improvement,.

A

Self-Development,, whatever you. breathe., not necessarily,, you can recommend,, but something that you read, and it sparked some of the emotions in you.

A

That's a oh, ok,. I read a lot of books,, I'm sure you do, too., the most I had,. I just finished.

B

One novel,, which was phenomenal., it was called the midnight library.. Have you seen this yet?.

B

No,, not yet., it's it's really. It's. I think it's a bit new and it's really good.. It raises some in a store in the.

B

Form of a story., it raises a lot of questions. Around,, you know,. If you could go back in life.

B

And redo things, would that make things better? basically, like, is it? and it dives into that.

B

Question through a story and makes you think like,, you know,, you often think to yourself,. If only I.

B

Had another chance,, I would have done it this way or that way., but is that really the right question.

B

To be asking yourself?, and would that have made you a happier,, more satisfied person that you.

B

Could actually go back? really thought provoking, short novel.. You can really sit and read through.

B

It and run one sitting,, but you'll sit with it also for a long time after you're done reading it.

A

Yeah,, that's awesome.! Thank you! So much for recommending this., ladies and gentlemen, ben greenberg, from orbit.love.

A

Check out some of his examples of this github automation.