Shipt is a membership-based online grocery marketplace delivering fresh foods and household essentials through a community of shoppers and a convenient app

Shipt

shipt

Your code smells because there are likely many instances where it could be edited or improved. Most of these smells are just hints of something that might be wrong. Therefore, they are not required to be fixed per se… (You should look into it, though.) Previous Code Smells You can find all the previous code smells (Part I - XLII) . here Let's continue... Code Smell 211 - Tab over Spaces TL;DR: Don't use Tabs. It is not a "personal style decision" Problems Mixed Standards Readability Compilation errors in some languages Mixed Standards Solutions 1.  Use spaces. Always. 2.  Use automatic tools to prevent tabs in the code. Context Developers might see using tabs or spaces for indentation as a matter of personal preference or team convention. it is generally recommended towith the chosen method of indentation within a project. There are a few advantages of using spaces over tabs. Spaces will always look the same, no matter the text editor, font spacing, or IDE used. Tabs can vary in width, which can lead to inconsistent indentation when code is viewed on different platforms or in different editors. Spaces are more consistent in terms of alignment and readability, particularly when it comes to code that involves a mix of spaces and tabs. Spaces are more predictable and easier to read, which can help to reduce errors in code. Some screen readers and other assistive technologies may have difficulty reading code that uses tabs for indentation, particularly when tabs are used inconsistently or when tab width is not uniform. Sample Code Wrong def calculate_average(numbers):

total = 0 

count = 0 

    for number in numbers: 

total += number 

        count += 1 

    average = total / count 

return average 

numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

print("The average is:", calculate_average(numbers)) Right def calculate_average(numbers):

total = 0 

count = 0 

for number in numbers: 

    total += number 

    count += 1 

average = total / count 

return average 
numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
print("The average is:", calculate_average(num Detection [X] Automatic We can enforce a policy to avoid tabs. Tags Standards Conclusion Bad indentation can make the code difficult to read and understand and can cause errors if the indentation is not consistent throughout the code. Using spaces for indentation is generally recommended for consistency, readability, and accessibility. Relations Code Smell 164 - Mixed Indentations Code Smell 48 - Code Without Standards Credits Photo by on Faisal Waheed Unsplash It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly. Joshua Bloch Code Smell 212 - Elvis Operator Your code is not safer using this operator TL;DR: Don't propagate nulls. Problems propagation NULL Harder to read code Hacky code Solutions Remove the nulls. If you can't remove it, deal explicitly with them. Context The Elvis operator is also known as the null-coalescing operator or the null-safe operator. It is a shorthand operator used in some programming languages to simplify null-checking. The Elvis operator takes the form of ?. and is used to access a property or method of an object only if that object is not null. If the object is null, the operator returns null without attempting to access the property or method, thus avoiding a potential null reference exception. The nickname "Elvis operator" originated from the visual resemblance of the operator to the famous singer Elvis Presley's hairstyle. The symbol "?:", with its round shape on top and a curl underneath, vaguely resembles the pompadour hairstyle that Elvis Presley was known for. Sample Code Wrong val shipTo = address?: "No address specified" Right val shipTo = if (address != null) address else "No address specified"

// This keeps the billion-dollar mistake error Detection Automatic [x] We can detect this operator usage and replace them with more strict checks. Tags Null Conclusion The code can be difficult to follow and may require additional comments or explanations to make it clear what is happening. The operator hides potential errors or bugs in the code. For example, if an object is null and the Elvis operator is used to return a default value, this may mask the fact that there is a problem with the code that is causing the object to be null in the first place. In several languages, such as Common Lisp, Clojure, Lua, Object Pascal, Perl, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, the OR operator (typically || or or) has the same behavior as the above: returning its first operand if it would evaluate to true in a boolean environment, and otherwise evaluating and returning its second operand. When the left-hand side is true, the right-hand side is not even evaluated; it is "short-circuited." This is different from the behavior in other languages such as C/C++, where the result of || will always be a boolean. Relations Code Smell 149 - Optional Chaining Code Smell 06 - Too Clever Programmer Code Smell 12 - Null Code Smell 140 - Short Circuit Evaluation More Info Wikipedia Null: The Billion Dollar Mistake Credits Photo by on Susan Mohr Unsplash You can't communicate complexity, only an awareness of it. Alan Perlis Code Smell 213 - Hoisting You can prevent undefined TL;DR: Declare your variables and look after the scope Problems Readability Least Surprise Principle violation Variable Shadowing Solutions Be explicit on declarations Use when possible. 'const' declaration Declare variables at the beginning of the scope. Use strict mode Context Hoisting allows variable declarations to be moved to the top of their containing scope during the compilation phase. Variables declared with var and function declarations are "hoisted" to the top of their respective scopes automatically in several languages. Sample Code Wrong console.log(willBeDefinedLater); 
// Output: undefined (but no error)

var willBeDefinedLater = "Beatriz";
console.log(willBeDefinedLater); 
// Output: "Beatriz" Right const dante = "abandon hope all ye who enter here"; 
// Declaring a constant 'dante'
// with value "abandon hope all ye who enter here"

console.log(dante); 
// Output: "abandon hope all ye who enter here"

dante = "Divine Comedy"; // Error: Assignment to constant variable Detection Semi-Automatic [x] We can perform mutation testing to check if changing the scope of the variables brings unexpected results. Tags Mutability Conclusion Hoisting is yet another magic tool some compilers provide to favor lazy programmers. But if it fights back in debugging time. Relations Code Smell 116 - Variables Declared With 'var' Code Smell 42 - Warnings/Strict Mode Off More Info Wikipedia Strict Mode Credits Photo by on Ash from Modern Afflatus Unsplash The best error message is the one that never shows up. Thomas Fuchs Code Smell 214 - Duplicate Parameter Names Two arguments of the same type. Two equal names TL;DR: Turn on Strict Checks Problems Unexpected errors Ambiguity The Least Surprise Principle violation Portability Solutions Enable strict mode Use role-naming arguments Context Most compilers forbid duplicate parameters since they are a common mistake in a large parameters list Sample Code Wrong function addNumbers(a, b, a) {
  console.log(a + b);
}

addNumbers(2, 3, 4);

// Outputs 7 (2 + 3 + 2) Right "use strict";

function addNumbers(a, b, a) { }
//                          ^
// SyntaxError: Duplicate parameter name not allowed in this context Detection Automatic [x] By enabling strict mode, the compiler will warn us Tags Naming Conclusion Enable the stricter modes you can find on your compilers. Try to and catch errors as early as possible and leave the hard and dumb work to the tools. fail fast Relations Code Smell 188 - Redundant Parameter Names Code Smell 65 - Variables Named after Types More Info Sonar Source Mozilla Org Fail Fast Credits Photo by on Caroline Veronez Unsplash One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is avoiding duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase. Martin Fowler Code Smell 215 - Deserializing Object Vulnerability Metaprogramming is always a problem TL;DR: Don't allow remote code execution Problems Security Solutions Validate and sanitize input Avoid executing code. Input only data Apply sandboxing or isolation Context Deserializing objects from an untrusted source is indeed a security-sensitive operation. Suppose you have a web application that accepts serialized objects as input from user-submitted data, such as in an API endpoint or a file upload feature. The application deserializes these objects to reconstruct them into usable objects within the system. If an attacker submits maliciously crafted serialized data to exploit vulnerabilities in the deserialization process. They might manipulate the serialized data to execute arbitrary code, escalate privileges, or perform unauthorized actions within the application or the underlying system. This type of attack is commonly known as "deserialization attacks" or "serialization vulnerabilities." Sample Code Wrong import pickle  # Python's serialization module

def process_serialized_data(serialized_data):
    try:
        obj = pickle.loads(serialized_data)  
        # Deserialize the object
        # Process the deserialized object
        # ...

# User-submitted serialized data
user_data = (
    b"\x80\x04\x95\x13\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8c\x08os\n"
    b"system\n\x8c\x06uptime\n\x86\x94."
)
# This code executes os.system("uptime") 

process_serialized_data(user_data) Right import json

def process_serialized_data(serialized_data):
    try:
        obj = json.loads(serialized_data)  
        # Deserialize the JSON object
        # Does not execute code
        # ...

user_data = '{"key": "value"}'

process_serialized_data(user_data) Detection Semi-Automatic [x] Several linters warn about deserialization points. Tags Security Conclusion Metaprogramming opens doors to abusers. Relations Code Smell 189 - Not Sanitized Input More Info Laziness I - Metaprogramming Sonar Source Credits Photo by on Towfiqu barbhuiya Unsplash Whenever possible, steal code. Tom Duff Next week, 5 more smells

How to Find the Stinky Parts of Your Code [Part XLIII]

MODERN PROPHECIES

Online grocery platforms are witnessing rapid growth in the eCommerce industry. With the widespread grocery trends, the market value of the eCommerce grocery industry has doubled. There is no doubt in the fact that people nowadays feel much ease in purchasing groceries online. The main objective of online grocery stores is to deliver the best quality products directly to their customer’s doorsteps at competitive prices. Great website features are crucial in running an online grocery platform. And in a world full of advancements, supermarkets must provide their customers with a seamless shopping experience. And for that, an online grocery platform should have a wide variety of features to offer products to customers; the platform must make the products easily accessible. In a nutshell, one should make a website as simple as a physical store. Undoubtedly, the rapid growth of online grocery has created a lot of interest in the grocery eCommerce market. This blog post aims to help entrepreneurs better understand how an online grocery marketplace works, the top software to build a grocery marketplace, and the critical features of a successful online grocery marketplace. Top Market Players in The Grocery Industry According to the Research and Market reports, the global online grocery market rate is expected to reach USD 2,1583.53 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 25.3% from 2022 to 2030.  With the growth of the online grocery industry, the preferences of customers are also changing. Many online stores offer services like placing and collecting orders on the same day, which helps in the market's rapid growth. Business Founded Founder Investors Funding Peapod 1989 Young Lee Ahold $73M Instacart 2012 Apoorv MehtaMax MullenBrandon Leonardo Sequoia CapitalCoatue ManagementKhosla Ventures $2.7B Shipt 2014 Bill Smith GreycroftHarbert Venture Partners $65.2B FreshDirect 2002 David MclnerneyJason Ackerman David MclnerneyJason Ackerman $280M Farmigo 2009 Benzi RonenYossi Pik BenchmarkSherbrook Capital $26M Types of Grocery eCommerce Software Grocery software is a fast and reliable turn-key solution equipped with features to efficiently and easily launch an online supermarket. These are convenient and less expensive because they come up with purpose-built features and pre-integrated APIs. This software doesn’t require any coding from your side. There are two types of eCommerce grocery platforms for online merchants to choose from which are: Hosted Grocery eCommerce software Self-hosted Grocery eCommerce software Hosted Grocery eCommerce Software They offer ready-made eCommerce Software for creating a store for your business. It runs on a server that the solution providers fully manage. This means you can easily create an online store without worrying about hosting/storing files/data on the cloud and all technical details. Examples: Mycloud Growcer, Mercatus, Unata, Shophero Self-Hosted Grocery eCommerce Software These platforms allow full access to source code to build a full-fledged online grocery marketplace for businesses. The self-hosted grocery eCommerce solution is one where the business owners are responsible for the hosting, which will give them full freedom to implement their online grocery marketplace according to their business needs. Examples: Growcer, ZielCommerce, Yelo Top 5 Grocery Software to Manage Marketplace Effectively As we have already elaborated that grocery software is essential for a successful marketplace. So, here we have put together a list of the top 5 grocery software that will help supermarkets to enhance their business growth in the eCommerce industry. 1. Growcer Growcer is a self-hosted, readymade grocery software that is fully equipped with a set of multiple features and functionalities which help in not only the start-up of an online grocery business but also other businesses like online pharmacy delivery, liquor and wine delivery business, food delivery, supplement delivery, online pet food delivery, and many more. Its inbuilt inventory module provides real-time inventory tracking and also helps with order management, pickup management, tax management, and much more in one place. Its latest version, with enhanced features and functionalities, helps you to launch your hyperlocal marketplace with minimum effort. In addition, Growcer also offers you a lifetime license for experiencing complete ownership through a one-time payment process. Key Highlights: Define Radius Offers limitless scalability Auto-order completion BOPIS (Buy online, and pick up in-store) 2. ZielCommerce Zielcommerce comes with a one-time payment option and customizable software that helps you build an online grocery delivery website and app. Zielcommerce supports both single-vendor as well as multi-vendor online grocery businesses. It reaches customers globally with its multi-currency and multilingual options. Zeilcommerce is a great website builder for online grocery marketplace, providing complete solutions to online grocery retailers and engaging consumers through customized shopping. Key Highlights: Customization One time cost End-to-end support Fully ensure 3. Mercatus Mercatus is a feature-rich eCommerce software that empowers online supermarkets to run successfully. Its configurable front end allows sellers to build their online grocery marketplace, offering an in-store experience with multiple product options. This flexibility of this software allows you to monitor stock as there is a convenient dashboard that shows all the inventory reports. Its user-oriented UI supports better customer engagement, and the software also enables good revenue through its entire management tools. Key Highlights: Offers order management Multipayment channels Smooth integration with CRM, loyalty program, and many more Inventory management 4. ShopHero ShopHero is a popular platform which makes it easy to launch an eCommerce grocery marketplace. Its retail success platform consists of three main modules – eCommerce, POS (point of sale), and buyer engagement. Their logistics technologies also offer independent grocers cost-effective home delivery services without a considerable investment in technology or delivery infrastructure. In addition, it is a platform that offers an automated marketing system, reports & analytics, and much more. Key Highlights: Inventory management Loyalty Program Intuitive UI/UX Convenient payment experience 5. Yelo Yelo is a multi-vendor marketplace SAAS software that allows you to create a website and mobile apps to sell groceries online. The entrepreneurs are offered a complete tech suite to run and automate their business operations in terms of ordering, delivering, and marketing. Furthermore, Yelo also offers more than 50 integrations in payment, accounting, and marketing. Apart from delivering groceries to doorsteps now, they also provide facilities for drone delivery. Key Highlights: Promotion management SEO management Return management Provide a facility for drone delivery Essential features for Online Grocery Business With the help of the above-mentioned grocery software, you can build a fully loaded website with a set of unique features that will make your marketplace website easy to use and mobile-friendly. Here, we have compiled a list of some features that you must include in your online grocery marketplace to attract vendors and buyers. Product Catalog System Grocery eCommerce marketplace must have this feature to create and manage lists of products in terms of import/export, categorizing them, inventories, and much more, easily. Order Management Because of this feature, vendors can easily manage multiple order requests at once. This feature gives them full details about total delivered orders, pending orders, cancelled orders, order history, and much more. Inventory management An online grocery marketplace integrated with this feature helps to provide real-time location and regulate track inventory status so that customers can collect all details regarding stock availability. Radius Calculation An online grocery marketplace must provide this system which helps customers get all the details of the nearest store just by typing the address. It is also preferable for delivery partners as they will get a specific radius within which they can do deliveries Multiple Payment Options Make the purchasing process as simple as possible for the customers by including a variety of online payment options in the shopping cart. The availability of multiple payment options like COD, card payments, eWallets, and other payment methods on your marketplace, gives your customers more reasons to continue buying from you. Scheduled Deliveries An online grocery marketplace must use this feature to provide schedule-based deliveries. This feature helps customers to get a clear idea of the delivery schedule by knowing the availability of vendors and delivery partners. Pick-at-Store Options These services are becoming very popular nowadays in an online grocery marketplace. Integrating this feature in an online grocery marketplace allows buyers a convenient self-pick-up facility. This enables customers to shop online at their convenience by visiting stores whenever they want immediate delivery or a combination of both. Conclusion Customers have started utilizing online grocery platforms, and with the rapid growth in the eCommerce grocery industry, starting an online grocery platform can be a profitable business option. Furthermore, to experience the success of your online grocery business, we have created a list of top grocery software that can help you make the most of your online grocery business by choosing the best software for your marketplace based on your business needs. So, try to gather as much information as possible by considering everything you’ve read above in this article.

Top Software To Build an Online Grocery Platform in 2023

The Wimblehurst Apprenticeship

Customers’ buying behavior keeps changing often. To make a business run effectively, you need to understand your buyers and also the latest trends and technologies in the market. The online grocery business is gaining a higher reach in recent days. When compared with other eCommerce industries, grocery eCommerce platforms assure same-day delivery and in some cases 2 – 3 hours delivery. With a wide range of customers and unlimited product categories, the industry is showing steady growth. Let us have a clear understanding of the online grocery business with its models, its features, and also let us analyze the top, leading grocery eCommerce platforms in the market. Types of Online Grocery Business Models Before launching your own grocery ecommerce platform you need to analyze your business model and should develop your online grocery store that suits your business well. Let us understand the types of online grocery business model in detail. – a single grocery platform that allows several vendors to get associated with it and allows them to sell their products through the platform is the multivendor grocery platform. Multi vendor Grocery Platform – meeting out the customers’ needs through local offline shops through an online marketplace is called the hyperlocal marketplace platform. Hyperlocal Grocery Platform – selling our own products through a single digital platform and attracting more customers to the marketplace is the single vendor grocery store Single vendor Grocery Platform Here is the list of top 15 most popular Online Grocery Platforms 2022 For Building App & Website 1. Zielcommerce – The #1 Solutions To Build Grocery  Ecommerce Platform Zielcommerce is a cost-effective grocery ecommerce software that can be along with lifetime license and one-time payment. The platform provides multifacted grocery solutions like multi vendor, hyperlocal and single vendor. This platform has been integrated with more than 50+ third party APIs. Platform Highlights Zielcommerce is flexible ecommerce grocery store that acts as a one stop solution for all business demands. The platform comes with multilanguage and multicurrency support that will make you reach the global customers easily. The platform has all necessary marketing tools that are essential to promote the . grocery ecommerce platform A Detailed Key Highlights of Grocery Ecommerce Platform The excellent admin dashboard makes this online grocery platform more reliable and helps to enhance the business. Streamline your order flow with an effective order management solution. A flexible commission set-up for multi vendors grocery store Multiple payment gateways integrated in this online grocery store software. By purchasing Zielcommerce with minimum investment you can get the amazing returns Explore Zielcommerce Grocery Ecommerce Platform 2. Ownmyshop – Personalized Online Grocery Store Software Ownmyshop enables you to expand your brick and mortar grocery store software to an aligned digital grocery eCommerce store. With this grocery ecommerce platform, you can analyze the shopper's data and their behavior. This will help in personalizing the customer's online experience. Platform Highlights Ownmyshop delivers the best grocery ecommerce website that has all essential and comprehensive features to uplift your online grocery store and make it a big success. The platform has inbuilt advanced search facility that will enable the users to find their products easily. The user-friendly platform will retain the customers with your business. The power-packed features of this grocery eCommerce website: Manage deliveries with the grocery delivery management system that is pre-built in this online grocery store software. Optimize your route for delivering the products with the help of Google Mapping. Delivery agents will get an exclusive delivery agent app that will help them to have a clear picture of their tasks. Explore Ownmy shop online grocery ecommerce solutions 3. Zemez – A Trustworthy Grocery Ecommerce Platform Zemez is trusted by more than 20K businesses. This online grocery platform will let your customer have end-to-end real-time delivery tracking. This grocery store software is developed with the latest technologies that can give a user-friendly experience to the customers. Platform Highlights Zemez is a well-known software that can fulfill all online grocery shopping demands. The elegant design and user-friendly theme grabs the attention of the visitors and helps in easy conversion. Zemez provides wide range of payment options that can facilitate the buyers to decide on purchasing the product without any hesitation. The ultimate features of this grocery ecommerce website: Zemez is integrated with business intelligence that can give you a clear insight about your business. Get the advanced reports and statistics with this grocery eCommerce platform. No extra cost is required to promote the platform as the ecommerce grocery platform is SEO-friendly and will get you organic traffic with less effort. Have a detailed product description catalogue for managing your products. Explore EMEZ Grocery Store Software 4. Rocketbazar – A Reliable Online Grocery Store Software Rocketbazaar, a leading grocery eCommerce platform, lets you manage your business effortlessly. This grocery eCommerce store software will provide solutions for multi-store grocery shopping and delivery. Customers can explore the products using advanced search options. Platform Highlights Rocketbazar has become a powerful ecommerce grocery software after undergoing tremendous market analysis. This market segmentation has made this platform a perfect choice for any startups and fits into any business type. The grocery ecommerce platform provides various options for revenue generation. The exclusive features of this grocery eCommerce  Platform: Customers can either pick-up the groceries from the store or can even have door-step delivery. Scheduling the delivery of the groceries is possible with this online grocery store software. Live grocery order tracking is an advanced feature that is enabled in this grocery ecommerce website. Explore  Rocket Bazar Online Grocery Platform. 5. IONWE – Customizable Online Grocery Platform IONWE has a dedicated central admin that can manage the overall grocery eCommerce platform. This eCommerce grocery store software has a perfect inventory management that allows the store owners to be well informed about the stock details. The store owner can fix the pricing for the groceries and also can have offers and discounts that will delight the customers. Platform Highlights Users can carve the grocery store according to his product and service as the platform is 100% customizable. The efficient product search of this grocery software will simplify the shopping experience of your customers. Users can gain greater reputation in the digital market by launching Zielcommerce as their renowned grocery platform. The notable features of this online grocery store software: A reliable financial accounting system than can keep a perfect track on store earnings The real-time tracking feature will facilitate the customers to track their product easily. Customized menus for various grocery franchises. Please contact IONWE grocery ecommerce solution for custom plan pricing. 6. Essitco – A Reputed Online Grocery Store Software Essitco is backed by robust and scalable tech-architecture. The deployment of this grocery eCommerce website is faster compared to other online grocery store software. PCI compliance is quite assured with this online grocery platform so there will not be any issues on security. Platform Highlights Essitco is a challenging ecommerce grocery store to all competitors who are in this field. The platform never fails to impress the visitors with its advanced features that makes the ecommerce grocery store more lively and helps in easy order conversion. One can get more returns by installing Essitco as their ecommerce grocery software. The advance features of this online grocery ecommerce platform: The whole grocery store software is developed by keeping the best SEO optimization for apps in mind. Scheduling, payment and live tracking are added features. Can easily manage various grocery delivery operators and drivers through the app. Can run referral campaigns on both the grocery ecommerce website as well as on apps. Contact Customizable plans for enterprise users with greater needs Essitco 7. Mycloud Grocer – A Renowned Grocery Ecommerce Website Mycloud Grocer provides you with an effortless storefront administration and management. The effective delivery management of this grocery eCommerce website allows the customers to select their convenient time for delivering the grocery items. You can harness the power of product ratings and reviews mainly to redefine the online shopping experience. Platform Highlights Mycloud Grocer is a versatile ecommerce grocery store that can easily get adapted to your business model and business style. You need not worry about getting traffic to your ecommerce grocery website. The platform comes with complete SEO and social media integration that can easily get you more traffic to your website. The extraordinary features of this online grocery platform: With dedicated mobile apps, you can have a mobile presence. Through retail management system, you can easily organize your orders This grocery eCommerce platform is well integrated with payment gateways. Admin can push messages to store owners, drivers and customers. Please contact their mycloud grocer sales team for custom pricing. 8. Shophero – A Robust Online Grocery Platform Shophero is well optimized for the web and mobile grocery ecommerce platform and comes with free installation and setup. Customers will experience a user-friendly front-end and the admin enjoys a perfect back-end. Vendors can have both web and mobile apps for their processing. Platform Highlights Shophero has attracted numerous users with its salient features. The users so far have never faced any complaints while using this ecommerce grocery software. No technical knowledge is needed to use this platform and it is easy to customize and can fit it into your theme and style. The unique features of this online grocery store software: Customers can avail a convenient payment experience. Admin can manage SMS gateway from back-end and can send SMS to the customers as well as to the vendors. Customers can call and place orders with their favorite grocery store software. Admin can manage the complete activity log. Please contact shophero directly for a more information 9. Mobicommerce – An Incrediable Grocery Ecommerce Website Mobicommerce is one of the most famed grocery ecommerce platform that can build your brand and let you reach your target audience. The store owners can make profitable decisions by quickly analyzing the web analytics data of the online grocery store software. Customers can easily detect the delivery person’s movement through real-time tracking. Platform Highlights Mobicommerce is one of the trustable grocery ecommerce platform that has a separate customer base. The platform is highly secured with proper SSL certificate configuration. This makes users feel safe to purchase with your platform. So you can expect good conversion and can also acquire more new customers to your business. The remarkable features of this grocery eCommerce platform: Gain multiple location access through this online grocery store software. Vendors can earn commission that mutually benefits the store owner and the vendors. Delight your customers with fast delivery time with the help of delivery management systems. Mobicommerce plans include all the basics for starting your web-based grocery ecommerce software 10. Ecommercesite – An Ultimate Online Grocery Platform Ecommercesite provides a one-step solution for all your grocery demands. This grocery ecommerce platform is designed and developed to assist the commoners. Ecommerce site gives you the grocery ecommerce website that can help you to handle the stock and will take care of the delivery of the products. This online grocery platform gives you the ease of managing the accounts and can have a hassle-free transaction. The demanded features of this grocery ecommerce platform Well-integrated payment gateways that facilitate the customers to buy the products 24/7 customer support that can simply delight your customers. Real-time tracking feature to keep your customers at ease. An exclusive dashboard is given for each grocer. Contact custom grocery solutions for yokart team 11. Shipt – An Outstanding Online Grocery Store Software Shipt comes with all advanced features that are essential for grocery store software. This online grocery platform meets all the latest technology demands in the field. You can enjoy the scalability and the flexibility and can make your grocery software to give an ultimate shopping experience to the users. The true features of this grocery ecommerce platform You can customize the online grocery platform as per your business requirements. By paying a one-time payment you can own this grocery ecommerce platform. Enhanced payment options in this grocery ecommerce store software can provide a secured payment transaction Shipt could be an option for your grocery ecommerce platform 12. Mercatus – An Integrated Online Grocery Platform Mercatus Online grocery store software gives you a unified shopping experience. This  platform has user-centric UI that supports better customer engagement when compared with other online grocery stores. The responsive design of this grocery platform never fails to attract and impress the audience. Platform Highlights Mercatus allows you to deliver your grocery products with the reliable online grocery platform that can fit in all market size. The grocery ecommerce website holds a unique potential user interface and ensures the users to get a seamless shopping experience and can get you good returns in sales and revenue. The real features of this grocery eCommerce website: Avail 24/7 technical support that can back your online grocery store software and its functions. The platform is highly configurable and also scalable. Gain operational efficiencies in all the back-end processes of your grocery eCommerce platform. Mercatus is completely secured and fully PCI compliant. Contact Mercatus directly for custom pricing. 13. OurHarvest – A Supreme Online Grocery Platform OurHarvest is a single solutions that can give all grocery ecommerce platform. You can easily turn your offline grocery store software and can enter the online grocery ecommerce platform by trusting OurHarvest grocery ecommerce software. This online grocery platform is rich in all features that are needed and demanded by the buyers and the grocers. The salient features of this grocery ecommerce website The excellent admin dashboard makes this online grocery platform more reliable and helps to enhance the business. Dedicated apps for admin, delivery agent and the buyers will delight the grocers as well as the buyers. Flexible order management will let you to manage your orders efficiently. 14.	DelivX – a multivendor online grocery platform DelivX allows you to explore the new dimensions of the grocery store software. You can give a contactless delivery and can build your customers’ support through this online grocery platform. The unique UI and UX give the customers a seamless grocery shopping experience. The significant features of this grocery ecommerce website: The advanced search option will let the buyer to search product-wise and also store-wise. The scheduling and payment feature of this online grocery store software will let the buyer to schedule their delivery time and can pay with the available payment options. In-app wallet is well-integrated with this online grocery platform. 15. ShopurGrocery – A Remarkable Grocery Ecommerce Platform ShopurGrocery will help you to create your own personalized cloud platform. You can use this grocery ecommerce platform in both web and as an app. This online grocery platform provides high accessibility to the users. The grocery software is well-integrated with finest delivery management system and gives an awesome shopping experience. The intense features of this grocery ecommerce website: Customize the way you like the grocery ecommerce software to be. The mobile app will give customers a personal shopping experience. This online grocery platform is completely device compatible and can be used well in both IOS and android platforms. Must Have Features for a Profitable Grocery eCommerce Platform – narrow down the options that your customers are searching for with advanced searching and filtering options built in your grocery platform. Easy search – let your customers and vendors know about the order status in your online grocery store and allow them to easily track their orders and get status. Order tracking – delight your customers by providing special discount and coupons that will make them buy again and again through your grocery ecommerce platform Coupons and discounts – facilitate your audience to utilize your payment option to buy products from your and ensure them that your grocery platform is a highly secured one. Secured multiple payment option ecommerce software – never miss an opportunity to get your customers’ feedback about your grocery platform service and product quality. This will enhance your online credibility. Reviews & rating Conclusion The global online grocery platform is facing healthy growth. You may have realized the importance and now know what the leading grocery ecommerce platform is that you can rely on for your business. Check what features that are essential to run your online grocery store software and listed above. Good luck! choose the best grocery ecommerce platform suited to your needs from the options

15 Best Grocery Ecommerce Platforms to Build Your Grocery Website & Apps

Uber has quietly changed the way it pays drivers in several major cities across the U.S., using a new feature it’s calling “Upfront Fares.” Instead of paying drivers for trips based on just time and distance, it’s now to calculate the fare. using an algorithm “based on several factors” What all of those factors are is unclear. Uber has to determine how much passengers pay, which is one of the reasons riders sometimes see vast price fluctuations. long used an upfront pricing algorithm The company says the new feature provides drivers with more transparency. They see more details of a prospective ride before accepting it, such as the fare and pick-up and drop-off locations, which is something drivers say they’ve been asking for. In the past, most drivers wouldn’t receive this information until after they accepted a ride. Uber spokesperson Harry Hartfield said upfront fares are about giving drivers “more control and choice” but will include a “balancing” of payments. That means, he said, drivers will make less money for longer trips but should earn more on shorter trips. Some drivers say, however, that they’ve mostly seen lower earnings overall since the change. On top of that, they say, it seems like Uber is taking a bigger cut of fares. “Before, you could guestimate—back of envelope calculate—and see that [the trip is] this far and this long and figure out you’ll make this much,” said Sam Vance, who’s been a full-time UberX and Lyft driver in Columbus, Ohio, for more than four years. Now, “it’s not based on anything. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.” Uber has long said the average amount it . But Vance shared screenshots with The Markup of two recent trips he did for Uber that show the company took far more. takes from fares is about 25 percent One shows a customer paid $30 for a 20.9-mile trip, Vance earned $14, Uber got $13, and the rest went to sales tax. The other trip, which was 8.8 miles and included an airport drop, the customer paid $22, Vance got $6, Uber took $9, and the remainder went to airport fees and sales tax. When asked about its take from Vance’s trips, Uber’s Hartfield said these trips were not necessarily representative of Uber’s usual take. Vance said that Uber often takes around half the fare. 2. 3. Before Uber’s change in pay structure, Vance said he’d normally average around $1 per mile once time and distance were calculated, especially if he was driving on the highway. So, the 20.9-mile trip would have earned him about $21, and the 8.8-mile trip would have brought in roughly $9. “Some drivers are really looking forward to this because they think it’s going to be a positive change,” Vance said. “But it’s not what you think it is.” The Rideshare Guy blog (which partners with Uber and receives commissions for signing up new drivers for the company) was the first publication to . Reuters additionally . detail Uber’s new pay structure reported on it last week According to both sources, Uber has in states including Texas, Florida, and throughout the Midwest. It appears the company initially started about six months ago, including Columbus, where Vance lives. rolled out upfront fares to a total of 24 U.S. cities testing the pay structure in a handful of cities “Black Box Algorithms” Uber isn’t the first gig company to experiment with algorithms to calculate driver earnings. A few years ago, Instacart, DoorDash, and Shipt started calculating pay for their delivery couriers using what workers call “black box algorithms.” Anecdotally, many couriers for those delivery companies have said the have made it . They also say over time. seemingly arbitrary fluctuations of the pay algorithms harder to predict and figure out their earnings they’ve seen their pay decline Worker advocates say using concrete factors, like time and mileage, helps drivers and couriers better assess if a trip is worth taking and understand how they’re being compensated. The more opaque the fare calculations, the more drivers, regulators, and the public have a hard time holding the gig companies accountable to fair and transparent pay standards, said Amos Toh, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch who . studies the effects of artificial intelligence and algorithms on gig work “Uber didn’t come out and say this is going to be algorithmic, but the criteria that they are using—a range of factors and things that aren’t specified—could indicate that the fares are going to disappear behind a black box algorithm,” Toh said. “When you put a fare calculation behind a black box algorithm, it’s possible to have the capacity to learn from driver behavior … and actually for a ride.” learn what is the lowest rate a driver will take “We don’t have any evidence that Uber is doing this,” Toh added. “But the real problem is the secrecy, because it makes it impossible to verify.” Uber’s Hartfield didn’t respond to questions about why Uber changed its pay structure in these markets, when the pilot first began, or whether it plans to take it nationwide. He also didn’t respond to questions about what cities currently have upfront fares or how Uber’s algorithm calculates driver fares. When asked for all of the factors that are taken into account to calculate drivers’ fares, Hartfield said in an emailed statement, “Rather than just the time and distance of the trip, upfront fares are based on a much more comprehensive set of factors including base fares, estimated trip length and duration, real-time demand at the destination, and surge pricing. While earnings are subject to seasonal demand patterns and the types of trips a driver chooses to take, we haven’t observed an earnings impact due to this pilot in cities that have had upfront fares for more than six months.” He didn’t respond to questions about whether this was the complete list of factors or whether there were more factors. Hartfield said The Markup could “learn more about the pilot” from the by The Rideshare Guy and also sent a by Uber about upfront fares, saying, “It’s worth looking through the comments under the video, most of which are from drivers saying they’d like to see these changes in more markets.” blog post link to a YouTube video The video has several comments from drivers saying they’re happy to see more trip information before accepting a fare. Other commenters say they don’t like the idea of being paid less for longer rides. Several Reddit threads and comments on driver forums have also popped up, with drivers who’ve tested the feature saying they’ve often seen , , and an . lower fares confusing fare drops during rides overall decrease in rides Along with upfront fares, Uber has also rolled out a companion feature in those 24 cities called “Trip Radar.” The way it works is that Uber shows a trip to several drivers at once, and whoever accepts the ride first gets it. Vance said he usually only has a second or two to see it and click, so he doesn’t have time to see the upfront details right away. “It’s kind of a moot point because it comes up so fast on the screen, and there are four or five other drivers tapping on it,” Vance said. “It’s like Hungry Hungry Hippos, and everyone is tapping.” Hartfield didn’t respond to request for comment on drivers not having time to see upfront details with Trip Radar and having to compete for rides. Vance said recently, in his haste to accept a ride, he got stuck on a five-hour round-trip drive to Cleveland. For that trip, he earned just $90. Before Uber instituted upfront fares, Vance said he liked doing longer trips. Back then, he said, a trip to Cleveland would usually net him at least $140. “Because there’s no longer a rate card, that’s interrupted the way drivers drive. Your strategy just has to be different,” Vance said. “Now you have to stay out longer, and it takes a lot more to make money, and you don’t make as much.” Credits: Dara Kerr Photo by on Barna Bartis Unsplash Also published here

Uber's Secret Algorithm to Calculate Fares

Algoritmo secreto de Uber para calcular tarifas

L'algorithme secret d'Uber pour calculer les tarifs

किराए की गणना करने के लिए उबेर का गुप्त एल्गोरिथम

運賃を計算する Uber の秘密のアルゴリズム

Algoritmo secreto do Uber para calcular tarifas

Thuật toán bí mật của Uber để tính giá vé

优步计算票价的秘密算法

10 Features Where Coda Is Better Than Notion

On her first day as Instacart’s new CEO in early August, Fidji Simo, a former Facebook executive, acknowledged the tumultuous relationship the grocery delivery company has at times experienced with its workers. Publishing an , she offered change to delivery workers, whom the company treats as independent contractors, not employees. open letter “I want to be a thoughtful and open partner,” she wrote.  She added that workers could email her suggestions on improving working conditions, saying, “My team and I will read every note, and I’ll respond to as many as I can.” But members of , a group of more than 13,000 gig workers that formed to advocate on behalf of app-based food and grocery delivery workers for companies like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Shipt, say little has changed at Instacart. Gig Workers Collective “We were optimistic that there was positive change on the horizon,” said Willy Solis, an Instacart worker and lead organizer with Gig Workers Collective. “But our initial optimism was dashed.” Instacart, founded in 2012, has . amassed $2.7 billion in venture capital funding During the coronavirus pandemic, the company said business boomed, with the number of orders , prompting it to . going up by as much as 500 percent hire more than 500,000 new delivery workers While it’s , and grocery delivery businesses overall have begun to slump, the company has indicated it before the end of the year. unclear how profitable Instacart is plans to go public Yet, advocates say, Instacart workers are not seeing their pay improve—the fundamental issue at play in a new #DeleteInstacart campaign launched by Gig Workers Collective. The group is asking customers to support delivery workers by until it (“Shopper” is Instacart’s term for delivery worker). The collective also , asking workers to avoid delivering for the company. boycotting the company “rectifies the genuinely inequitable manner in which it treats its shoppers.” planned a walk-off on Oct. 16 “We take shopper feedback very seriously and remain dedicated to listening and learning from our community to improve the Instacart shopper experience,” said Natalia Montalvo, Instacart’s director of shopper engagement and communications. “While historically the actions by this group have not resulted in any disruption or impact to our service, our relationship with all shoppers is incredibly important and we’re deeply committed to doing right by them.” Rebecca Givan, an associate professor at Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations, said the labor clash is not unique to Instacart workers—she’s seen an overall uptick in gig-worker-led boycotts, strikes, and walk-offs. “As the workers are squeezed more, they start to learn successful organizing strategies” - Rebecca Givan “As the workers are squeezed more, they start to learn successful organizing strategies,” Givan said. “The workers are explicitly asking for customers to use another option. This is something that is a little bit different when we’re talking about gig workers, because it’s frictionless for both the workers and the customers to switch to another app.” Instacart workers have taken various forms of collective action against the company in the past. In the beginning of the pandemic, workers demanded ; and before that, they protested and . hazard pay and access to paid sick leave over low pay how the company allocates workers’ tips In this latest round of unrest, Gig Workers Collective has , which focus on working conditions and Instacart’s pay structure. The group in mid-August. five specific demands published this list in an open letter to Simo Simo has been “consistently reading and responding to emails” and has conducted “a number of one-on-one conversations” with workers, Instacart’s Montalvo said. But Solis, from Gig Workers Collective, said individual workers he’s spoken to have gotten “canned responses” from the CEO, and the collective has yet to hear back. “At the end of the day, it was nothing more than lip service,” Solis said. “We need more than placating banter.” How Much Are Instacart Workers Paid? Workers say that as pay has declined over time, their earnings have become harder to predict and understand. When Kelly Harris started working for Instacart in Columbus, Ohio, in 2017, her pay would fluctuate based on what Instacart said was customer demand. She said that back then it was easier to predict what her pay would be: $0.40 per item in each order, plus a set price per order. That price would go up or down . depending on what Instacart deemed busy times In 2018, Instacart changed its pay structure by getting rid of “busy”-time pricing and the $0.40 per item payments. The company started to calculate pay. Workers would get at least $10 per order, and the price could go up from there, but workers say how much and when seemed to be arbitrary. Harris said she began earning less. relying more heavily on its algorithm Then, in 2019, Instacart changed again—lowering the minimum pay from $10 to and bundling up to three orders together for that $7 baseline (or whatever price the algorithm had set). $7 per order “The kind of money that I was making in 20 to 30 hours then, I would probably need to work 100 hours now,” said Harris, who’s relocated to Steubenville, Ohio. “I’ve seen a 70 percent pay cut over the years. It’s really not worth it; it’s not reliable anymore.” “I’ve seen a 70 percent pay cut over the years. It’s really not worth it” - Kelly Harris Montalvo didn’t respond to questions about how the company’s algorithm calculates worker earnings but said, “There are many considerations for every order that needs to be taken into account when determining batch pay—including the volume of customer demand, geographic profiles, retailer mix, items, weight, and projected delivery times.” When workers open the app, they see available “batches” (Instacart’s nickname for grocery orders), which show a set commission price plus the customer’s tip. If the batch is higher-paying, workers have around 30 seconds to decide whether to take it before it disappears. Workers say the $7 and other lower-paying batches tend to sit there. Harris said batch prices can be all over the map. “I’ve seen batches with 90 unique items for $7, and I’ve seen batches for 12 or 13 items for $7,” Harris said. “There’s no sense to it.” Harris provided The Markup with several screenshots of batches in late September. One, for example, was for 107 grocery items and offered $14.92 total pay with no tip. Another was for four items for $22.94 and a $3.33 tip but included a 28-mile drive to the customer’s home. Several other screenshots also showed long drives, two batches bundled together for the same price or orders with more than 100 items (which can take up to two hours to fulfill). All payments were within a $7 to $22 range. Some Instacart orders are for more than 100 items, which workers say can take up to two hours to fill. In its demands, Gig Workers Collective is asking Instacart to reinstate three of its previous payment methods. It wants workers to be paid per order and the company to stop bundling batches together. It wants the per item payment reestablished since orders with a lot of items take more time. And it wants Instacart to restore the default in-app tip to 10 percent, rather than 5 percent, where it’s set now. (Customers can choose their own tip amount; the default is a suggested prompt.) We “removed the ‘none’ option in the customer tip settings, requiring customers to manually change their tip to $0 if desired and making it less likely that a customer will remove the shopper tip altogether,” Montalvo said. She added that, “We have a customer tip default setting which allows customers to save their default tip based on their last order.” Montalvo didn’t comment on Gig Workers Collective’s other demands around pay. In the past, Instacart has said it because it “serves as a baseline for a shopper’s potential tip and can be increased to any amount.” When the company changed its pay structure and , it said that was to “provide clearer and more consistent earnings” for workers. wouldn’t raise the app’s default tip stopped the $0.40 per item payments “Over time, it just started to deteriorate,” Solis said. “We feel those [demands] are reasonable…. They’re stuff that we had before, and we just want them back.” What Else Do Instacart Workers Want? Along with changing how Instacart pays workers, Gig Workers Collective is asking the company to adjust the . Currently, customers rate workers on a five-star basis, and Instacart can . Workers with lower ratings can get offered less lucrative batches. rating system by which customers evaluate delivery workers reward high scores by giving those workers first dibs on orders “Shoppers’ access to batches is determined by a number of factors, including customer demand and shopper location,” Montalvo said. “If there are more shoppers than there are available batches, we’ll use additional criteria like timeliness, accuracy, and customer rating to determine access to batches.” Workers say customers often ding them for things like sold-out grocery store items and slower delivery because of long lines or traffic. According to a Los Angeles Times article, some customers , and Instacart tends to blame the delivery workers in those situations. report missing or damaged items to get free or discounted groceries “Even when we provide photos of deliveries, Instacart can either lower our rating (which prevents us from seeing good offers for weeks) or deactivate us from the platform entirely,” Gig Workers Collective wrote in its open letter. “Instacart’s inability to properly investigate customer complaints should not result in blame unfairly placed on shoppers.” Montalvo said in cases when the company determines a customer has been fraudulent, the worker’s low rating in that instance may be “forgiven.” Workers in , , and on often complain of being unfairly deactivated. Some say it’s possibly because their ratings dipped. Others say maybe it’s because they requested too many times. Facebook groups Reddit threads Twitter extra pay on heavy orders A couple of workers say they thought they were deactivated after their , which they believed Instacart thought was a fraudulent selfie check (something the company occasionally requires). phone accidentally took a photo in their pocket Gig Workers Collective’s final demand is for Instacart to provide workers with occupational death benefits—to help their families if something goes wrong. They say working for the company can be dangerous. Not only have workers , but they’ve also been , , and . Lynn Murray, one of the , was working for Instacart at the time. tested positive for COVID-19 robbed assaulted had guns pulled on them people killed at a supermarket during a mass shooting in Boulder, Colo. Montalvo said the company offers “ ,” which “includes coverage for certain medical expenses, disability payments, and accidental death benefits.” She said workers can file claims directly with Instacart’s insurance provider.  Montalvo didn’t respond to questions about how many workers have received the benefit. Instacart workers who spoke with The Markup said they’d never heard of the program. Shopper Injury Protection Because Instacart , they don’t have employee benefits, like life insurance, health care, workers’ compensation, and sick days. classifies its workers as independent contractors “This work is becoming increasingly dangerous,” Solis said. “We feel like we need basic protections.” What Could Boycotts, Protests, and Strikes Accomplish? Such collective actions have happened before, to mixed results. When thousands of Instacart workers in March 2020 over , the , “We’ve seen absolutely no impact to Instacart’s operations.” announced an emergency walk-off inadequate personal protective equipment and sick leave company told reporters Yet, days before the strike, it changed its policy—pledging to send workers PPE kits and confirming 14 days of sick leave pay for those diagnosed with COVID-19. Similarly, a year before, when Instacart workers filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for , founder and former CEO Apoorva Mehta and ended the practice. subsidizing their wages with customer tips issued a rare apology The case was resolved as part of a class action settlement. Workers have seen other changes because of their protests. At one point, Instacart had , and the company raised those types of prices after workers spoke out.' paid some workers as little as $1.50 per order “The companies never want to admit that if they change a policy, it’s because workers are demanding it,” said Rutgers’ Givan. But “Instacart workers’ organizing skills get sharper and sharper as they build a movement.” While Instacart has made concessions in the past, however, workers say they still haven’t seen the structural changes they’ve long demanded. “With our protests, they don’t have the immediate effect that we want them to—but they do have an effect,” Solis said. “That’s why we continue to do it.” Written by: Dara Kerr This article was and was republished under the license. originally published on The Markup Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

Discover the Reason Why Instacart Workers Want an App Boycott

This article is part of my ↗️ where I share insights on building things in tech. Join me :)‍ Note: resource newsletters 👋 I’m , a product builder. I’ve built multiple apps using the method: , , , , , , +more Zoe Chew rapid MVP sneaker app personal FAQ meal kit app virtual event app SaaS tracker food delivery content app At , I’m on a quest to understand the and how we can improve other people’s lives through product creation. I analyze with revenue potential — at the intersection of Internet culture, consumer tech, and platform economy. VentureScale future of the Internet startup opportunities Today’s post is about increasing lifestyle experiences. In this venture report, I break down 3 market opportunities: Helping home-based entrepreneurs to sell online (Consumer marketplace) Unlock luxury experiences for everyday people (On-demand app) Increase employee motivation and talent retention (HR tech) Below is the PREVIEW of the report with research-based tech trends , product frameworks, revenue models to help you make better decisions on building your next big thing. Trend #1: Vertical B2C Online Marketplaces Existing B2C e-commerce giants like , , and are going after the — by offering products that span multiple categories and cover a wide audience scope. Amazon eBay BestBuy horizontal approach New B2C online marketplaces are created to cater to specific types of communities, creating and focus on a particular segment or vertical to grow. For example, unique buyers/sellers experiences is a marketplace for buying and selling sneakers. GOAT is a marketplace for home furniture driven by a community of interior designers & home improvement enthusiasts. Houzz allows you to buy, sell and trade luxury watches online, driven by communities of watch collectors. Watchbox As continue to rise, more vertical-specific marketplaces will emerge to help small business owners to make money from home. online businesses 🚀 Takeaway Any hobbies can potentially be a vertical marketplace opportunity. Connect people who want to as an at-home business. See — Startup Opportunity #1. monetize their hobbies Trend #2: New On-Demand Platforms Will Emerge The on-demand economy has to ordinary people. What used to be “only the rich could afford” are now accessible for everyday people through an app — anytime, anywhere: unlocked “luxury services” Chauffeurs → , , , Uber Gojek Lyft Grab Personal grocery runners → , , Instacart Shipt FreshDirect Today, on-demand services have exploded — transportation, shopping, food delivery, home cleaning, etc. to help people save time and eliminate hassles. across different industries New on-demand services will focus on in different aspects. — get a personal stylist service. — get massages, facials, and lashes done at home by professionals. enhancing our lifestyle experiences Stitchfix Urban 🚀 Takeaway Help people to curate and make money as a business. See — Startup Opportunity #2. lifestyle experiences Trend #3: Reinventing Employees Experience and Creating Talents Moat Remote work is (HR) practices forever. changing human resources Interviewing and new employees are no longer done in face-to-face meetings. is becoming distributed around the world. is conducted through Zoom. onboarding Hiring Team-building New problems that are born out of remote work practices are still awaiting solutions. How can you from multiple countries? How to build great company virtually? How to ensure the of employees? How to create workplace ? manage payrolls culture mental health engagements The future of HR will be focusing on leveling up remote — onboarding, employees reward, elevating motivation, diversity, and personal values: employees’ experience helps leaders build highly engaged teams remotely. Lattice consolidates employee rewards and recognition processes in one place. Fond helps managers build trust with their team members. Officevibe The will be the . Companies are fighting for the best engineers & designers by driving up wages. Those who can and satisfy their employees will drive out talent competition and for their businesses. next Internet world war tech talent war retain talents create defensibility 🚀 Takeaway Help companies maximize through rewards. See — Startup Opportunity #3. employee satisfaction 👉 Download full version of this report Startup Opportunity #1: Wood furniture marketplace An online marketplace for buying and selling handcrafted wood furniture, woodworking products, and tools — driven by a community of woodworking enthusiasts, furniture makers, artists, and designers. For Who Builders, designers, and home-based furniture entrepreneurs who want to start selling wood furniture online. Handcrafted wood furniture makers. (📥 Full version) 3 more target audience descriptions. Problem Horizontal platforms like , , and aren’t built specifically for wood furniture enthusiasts; therefore, they generate for wood furniture sellers since these platforms are targeting a wide range of industries and audiences. Wayfair Ikea Etsy, The Home Depot diluted interests and lower sales volume (📥 Full version) 2 more problem definition examples. Solution For sellers: list your handcrafted wood furniture (new or second-hand) and start selling online; create a seller page, upload product photos, pricing, and description. For customers: discover wood furniture made by wood furniture makers; shop by category (e.g., living room, kitchen, bathroom, outdoor, decor); filter search by furniture colors, sizes, prices, materials, or free shipping. Online store for wood furniture. (📥 Full version) 4 more solutions and feature examples in detail. Revenue Model Take a percentage cut from the buyers-sellers transaction. Marketplace commissions, 2% to 5%. (📥 Full version) 1 more revenue stream to add to your pricing strategy. Venture Scale E-commerce, Furniture, Home Decor, Online Retail (1) Industries: E-commerce, Online Marketplace (2) Business Model: High (3) Market Potential: ◼️◼️◼️◼️◻️ Global are on the uptrend and will reach by 2024. retail e-commerce sales $6,388 billion of all businesses in the United States are now and will continue to rise in a post-pandemic future. More than 50% home-based (📥 Full version) 2 more research evidence to prove the validity of the market (4) Execution Strategy: Go to Etsy, search for “ ” keywords. Manually curate wood furniture products and . Look for top sellers on Etsy — for example, has 1.9K+ sales and DM the maker. furniture list them on your website busywood (📥 Full version) 3 more strategies to gain traction and acquire customers To create a profitable consumer marketplace, layer defensibility around your business to drive out competition. (5) Moat: (📥 Full version) 2 ways to create business moats for this marketplace platform Want more? Get the full version of this single report: 🔑 Breakdown of (Helping home-based entrepreneurs to sell online / Consumer marketplace) Startup Opportunity #1 🔑 Breakdown of (Unlock luxury experiences for everyday people / On-demand app) Startup Opportunity #2 🔑 Breakdown of (Increase employee motivation and talent retention / HR tech) Startup Opportunity #3 All 3 ideas combined, you will unlock: 🔑 3 startup in 1 report opportunities breakdown 🔑 7 definitions target audience 🔑 12 definition examples problem 🔑 13 and feature examples in detail solutions 🔑 6 you can create to monetize your startup ideas revenue streams 🔑 17 on each startup idea — how to prove market potential and create competitive advantages in-depth evaluations 🔑 10 ways to these startup opportunities execute 👉 Download full version of this report [1] Find me on: Personal Site / Twitter / LinkedIn 🔥 [2] Get teardown insights in your inbox — Click here to join my newsletter 💌

3 Ways to Monetize B2C Marketplaces, On-Demand Economy and Employee Motivation

In 2014, when Instacart launched, nobody imagined that the newly started grocery delivery and pickup service would grow to become the toughest rival of Amazon and DoorDash in the U.S. and Canada. With robust marketing strategies and appealing business plans, Instacart is making headlines in the grocery delivery business segment. As of 2020, so far, the company net worth valuation grew to 13 billion from 2 billion in 2016. Much of its credit goes to the coronavirus pandemic, no doubt. However, the change (in consumer buying behavior) may remain unchanged forever, at least from the founder and CEO of Instacart, Apoorva Mehta’s point of view. In her press release, she said, “COVID-19 created a massive shift for the grocery industry and forever changed how people view the necessity of on-demand services.” According to a , the company earned 10 million U.S. dollars in April 2020. The large number of consumers turned out, buying more than $700 million worth of grocery products each of the first two weeks of April 2020 using its service. report published on Forbes Some other interesting facts and figures about Instacart Instacart is operational across all 50 states of the U.S. 85% of the U.S. households use Instacart mobile app 70% of Canadian households use Instacart Instacart possesses 57% of the online grocery market share Instacart has partnered with more than 400 retailers across more than 30,000 stores in the U.S and Canada So, if you are an entrepreneur or a startup and looking to start your own business, then you have many things to learn from the online grocery delivery service provider like Instacart. Right from creating an effective mobile app business plan, proper implementation, feature integration to management, you have many things to learn from Instacart. What is Instacart Instacart is an American company providing grocery delivery and pickup services across the U.S. and Canada. The online grocery delivery service provider is widely popular for its great services to customers. In this article, we shall go through the changes and implementation it did for its business and how it got into limelight. What Brought It Into the Limelight? Even though COVID-19 came as a nightmare for people and businesses, for instacart it came as a boon. 1. Proper utilization of Opportunities COVID-19 is not at all good for lives and livelihood, but some businesses, including Instacart, turned this adversity into opportunities. Grocery products became an essential service overnight, Instacart sensed the opportunity at the earliest and implemented many new things that helped the grocery delivery service grow. It not just served the customers with responsibilities but also kept expanding its business across the states. It is now operational across all 50 states of the U.S. As a result, Instacart witnessed an unprecedented growth as compared to its competitors. Here’s a quick recap; The app daily downloads surge by 218% which was 58% more than Walmart and nearly double from Shipt. Take a look at the Statista findings; The one thing which all entrepreneurs and startups should learn from Instacart is that it kept giving more priority to its customers and its people at the time of adversity. The sudden growth came as an unexpected thing for the company. Still, it came as a responsibility, more than just a business opportunity. People trusted Instacart and expected that the grocery delivery service would deliver daily essentials safely and reliably. It stood by its customers through the pandemic peak. Most importantly, the company had (still has) not just a challenge to provide safe and reliable delivery to customers, but it also had to take care of its staff's health and safety. 2. Flexibility with “leave at my door delivery” During the pandemic peak, people were panicking, looking for safe and contactless delivery services for everything they ordered online. Instacart adopted the change very quickly and started offering “leave at my door delivery service.” Customers looking for no contact delivery can check the box “Leave at my door if I am not around.” The new changes enable customers to receive grocery orders without having to interact with their Instacart personal. No human contact reduces the spread of the virus and protects Instacart staff as well as customers. 3. Fast & flexible and order ahead Instacart is committed to enhancing and improving customers' experience by making changes in its business plan and strategies. Customers get the flexibility to place orders for groceries either ahead of a couple of weeks or simply order in advance to get the products delivered with first available shoppers. So, no more scheduling specific delivery windows. The new strategy changes have shown that the delivery windows capacity can be increased by 50% and fasten the delivery process. The new enhancement also helped Instacart go beyond restricted time slots, reducing the limitations that often used to occur by its gig workers’ availability. 4. Infrastructure scaling and AI improvements Instacart consistently worked through expansion at the time of peak performance. The app worked on its infrastructure development, such as upgraded its customer-facing app, shopper app, admin app, enterprise software, and advertising engine. It helped the grocery delivery service provider add more new store locations and partners. For example, in March, Instacart indeed 2,500 new store locations and more than 35 new retail partners. 5. Started Prescription Delivery Service Prescription delivery service, at the time of the pandemic, added value to the business. When people were not allowed to step out of their homes to contain the virus's spread, Instacart stood by their needs. The grocery delivery service provider partnered with Costco and launched a new prescription delivery service. At the same time, it also increased the workforce, such as: It doubled its customer care team (from 1200 to 3000) Hired 300,000 additional shoppers (as independent contractors) The hiring process is continued (aim to hire another 250,000 employees) 6. Excellent business management Instacart has deployed three shoppers for every ten new users. This came as an opportunity for people looking for a chance to earn money during the crisis as demand grew by 1,000% pandemic. Instacart recorded an unprecedented record with 141K downloads on April 8th. The overall download exceeded 3.2 million across App Store and Google Play in the US 7. New feature integration As the demand for grocery delivery was rising, the challenge was to manage the traffic and provide comfort to users. Instacart did it successfully by integrating some of the value-added features, such as “My Door Delivery” and “Mobile Checkout.” Rolling out new features helped Instacart streamline business processes and provide simplified delivery service to customers across the USA and Canada. 8. Responding to Shoppers There were times (during its early days) when Instacart was criticized for not responding to its workers. As the scenarios changed and now Instacart announced many welfare schemes for its workers, they include; Paid leaves part-time workers (those diagnosed with COVID-19) Bonus program for shoppers Bring changes in employment policy led to a sudden spike in shoppers app download surge. Things which entrepreneurs should learn is that taking care of the staff will help boost productivity and gain more business opportunities. That means keep your workers happy, provide competitive compensation packages to attract workers. Instacart revenue plan Instacart makes money through for revenue channels, they include; Delivery fees Grocery store partner fees Markups Placement fees Ad Delivery fees: Instacart charges $3.99 for two-hour delivery and $5.99 for 1-hour delivery from its users. The grocery delivery service provider also offers express delivery options to its regular users at cost-effective delivery options. For example, the Instacart Express Delivery plan needs to pay $149/year for unlimited delivery throughout the year. Grocery store partner fees: Instacart has partnered with grocery stores across the U.S. and charge a percentage of sales revenue. 90% of orders are placed with partnered stores. And if it collects 2% or 3% from its partners per order, it makes around $2.25 per order. Markups: According to an article online, Instacart charges around 15% on Costco products in certain regions. However, the benefits depend on the order frequency and demand in particular areas. Placement fees: When a manufacturer wants to promote its products to customers through Instacart, the delivery service provider will charge a fee. Manufacturers would send samples to Instacart to deliver to customers for free. A certain amount of expenditure would be given to Instacart. Ad: Instacart also allows grocery stores and grocery products manufacturers to place ads on its grocery delivery mobile app. It charges certain fees for it. Learn from Instacart's business model Instacart focuses more on its customers and shoppers. It does everything to provide value to its customers. The grocery delivery service provider ensures that the products delivered to customers are fresh and organic. Here’s how it does; Offers 1000+ fresh products with discounts vouchers Instacart partnered with reputed retailers and grocery stores, including ALDI, Safeway, Costco, CVS, etc. Customers can browse through popular stores and place orders Offer Instacart Express to its regular customers Delivers alcoholic beverages on the go Apart from these, Instacart also focuses on mobile applications, particularly the app for users. It ensured that users get all necessary features with excellent UI/UX. Final Thoughts If you are willing to begin your own business like Instacart, then ensure that you develop the right business plan by keeping mobile apps at the centerstage. You can also explore and learn from similar companies, apart from Instacart, and learn what their business plan works. At the same time, dig out how the utilization of technology will make differences.

10 Lessons Startups Can Learn from Instacart’s Growth

Wise, the leading embedded banking FinTech, that offers business banking via partnerships, announced today that it has closed a $12M Series A. This funding round was led by e.ventures, with participation from Grishin Robotics, and with continued investment from seed investors – Base10 Partners and Tech Stars. Six months after a $5.7M seed round, Wise raised the Series A funding to accelerate growth and partnerships across several verticals and to extend its breakthrough technology to support a fully-managed, first-of-its-kind embedded banking experience. Wise has raised $18M to date. "We built banking so our partners don't have to," said Arjun Thyagarajan, Co-Founder and CEO at Wise. "By embedding banking, Wise unlocks deep product offerings and better customer experiences for our partners. e.ventures built a thesis on exactly this, and we agree 100%." "Business banking has been broken for far too long. Poor user interfaces, payments delays, unnecessary fees, a lack of integrations, the list goes on and on," said Brendan Wales, Partner at e.ventures. "The team at Wise is bringing an Apple-like experience to the world of business banking with an embedded product that brings banking to where one’s business is managed." In addition to this round, Wise has also signed several new partnerships, where leading B2B companies are able to seamlessly offer banking, within their product experience, greatly expanding the value to their business customers. "In a world where more people are working remotely than ever before, it is important for RemoteTeam to provide its customers with a modern, instant payroll experience. Embedding banking solves a major pain point that makes RemoteTeam a standout offering in the payroll industry," says Sahin Boydas, CEO at RemoteTeam and a Wise partner. "Embedded experiences drive product engagement through the roof! It is a win-win-win proposition for everyone involved – Wise, its partner, and the small business that lives inside the partner ecosystem," said Raghav Lal, President at Wise. Prior to joining Wise, Lal launched several successful co-branded partnerships at AMEX and VISA. Before Wise, launching a banking offering could take months or in some cases, years. Now, SaaS B2B companies launch banking powered by Wise, with no-code and in just a few days – with the entire program managed and serviced by Wise. "We’re thrilled by Wise’s continued progress developing strategic partnerships with large SaaS partners," added Rexhi Dollaku, Principal at Base10 Partners. "This funding will accelerate Wise’s product and go-to-market efforts, so that they can continue to redefine the business banking experience for many more real economy businesses." Founded in December 2018, Wise is a Techstars NYC company headquartered in San Mateo, CA. Wise offers modern businesses a seamless way to bank, pay, and get paid. Wise embeds its all-in-one business banking product via partnerships. For more information, visit wise.us. About Wise Founded in 1999, e.ventures is the first tech-enabled global venture capital firm and invests in consumer and software companies at their inflection points from early to growth stage. The firm is headquartered in San Francisco and Berlin with global partners in Beijing, Tokyo, and São Paulo. e.ventures has combined its extensive, truly global network with local experience and insight to partner with over 250 startups globally. Notable US investments include Segment, Sonos, Appfolio, AngiesList, TheRealReal, GoPuff, Shipt, NGINX, and Acorns. About e.ventures Base10 is a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm investing in Automation for the Real Economy. Founded by Adeyemi Ajao and TJ Nahigian, the firm invests in technology companies that are bringing automation to sectors of the Real Economy, including industrial logistics, consumer logistics, restaurants, financial services, and sales & customer service. Portfolio companies include ThePillClub, Virtual Kitchen Company, Acquire, PopMenu, and others. Connect via base10.vc. About Base10 Media Contact Amber Moore GMK Communications amber@gmkcommunications.com 503.943.9381

[Announcement] Wise Raises $12M To Accelerate Embedded Banking Partnerships

As all of us are trying to fight against the fear of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a lot of talk in the about the imbalance of meeting the demands of consumers for groceries and other essentials. Many families in America, India, and Europe are trying digital e-commerce services for the first time. e-commerce industry A report by the mobile application tracking company states that the average daily downloads for popular digital e-commerce web apps such as Walmart, Instacart, and Shipt have surged since February. Apptopia COVID-19 Impact on Digital E-commerce The COVID-19 pandemic is rapidly accelerating the transition to digital e-commerce. As people around the world are being asked to practice social distancing, households started to rely upon online stores for home delivery during the pandemic and they are likely to continue to use those services once it's over. According to data from Rakuten Intelligence, the online orders volume from e-commerce merchants increases 210.1% between the period of March 12 to March 15. Even the e-commerce giant such as Amazon plans to hire more employees in their U.S based operations to deal with the demands of online consumers during the coronavirus pandemic. Changes in Revenue Across Industries Due to Covid-19 Source: Neilpatel.com As more cities are going under lockdowns, customers are limiting their shopping experience for all the necessary essentials. E-commerce brands across the industries are adapting to new changes to meet consumer’s needs. As more people are staying in their homes to slow the spread of the pandemic, there has been a drop-off in brick-and-mortar shopping. But, there would be an increase in online shopping as people are looking for online e-commerce stores to purchase the items they might have otherwise purchased in person. In reality, e-commerce sales in some industries are seeing a significant upsurge. This is especially true for online e-commerce stores selling household goods and groceries. I’ve gathered some facts and numbers around how consumer behaviors are changing during this lockdown period. Effect On Consumers Online Shopping Behavior The COVID-19 is a global pandemic and the situation is rapidly changing for consumers across the world. Shops, restaurants, bars, malls, and gyms in many major cities are shutting down. Meanwhile, many office workers are working remotely full time. People are isolating and this uncertainty is so huge that there are overnight changes to their shopping behaviors. From bulk-buying through online stores, people are now changing their buying habits and they’re now more careful about what they’re buying, when, and how. Just like consumer behaviors are being impacted, in the same way, the effect of the COVID-19 outbreak on eCommerce is impacting different geographies. According to , the UK, Japan, and Germany consumers were experiencing reduced confidence when shopping for groceries and food items, while in the USA, consumer confidence was near an all-time high. Morning Consult Image Source: Apptopia These are some useful apps that have played a major role in facilitating consumers’ needs. To avoid the spread of the virus, people are spending more time indoors and on their mobile devices for shopping for goods and all essential items. In China, the number of phone usage during the outbreak went up from . But it is a good way of tackling social distancing. 6.1 hours a day to 7.3 hours Panic Buying is Also Impacting E-commerce Companies Image Source: KJRH.com People started stocking up things like hand sanitizer, masks, toilet papers, and other household essentials. This is what we call panic buying. Due to the surge in consumer demands the online stores are also struggling to keep up with demand. As a result, the price of essential items increased and became rampant. People are responding in different ways. In this uncertain and risky situation of which they have no control, people tend to buy and try whatever they can do to gain some control. The global spread of COVID-19 has raised a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information that people are hearing from different sources and advice from multiple people. Panic buying is the result of the crowd mentality. Seeing what other people buying up validates the decision to stock up goods. It is like no one wants to be left behind in the race of buying up unnecessary items. Product Categories Are Changing As people are buying products through online e-commerce stores based on COVID-19 new and local circumstances, the product categories are also changing. In a survey conducted by they have identified major changes to consumer behavior tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are they: Nielsen Proactive buying of health and wellness products. Reactive health management products such as masks and hand sanitizers. Groceries and household essentials for pantry preparation. Products for the quarantine preparation. As we progress through lock down stages, these items and the product categories will continue to change. While data also shows that shopping behaviors are also changing based on gender. For example, that women are more concerned about the effects of COVID-19 than men’s. In the same report, men were found to be shopping online and avoiding in-store experiences more than women. While e-commerce sales do not appear to be increasing, there are some exceptions in the future. survey data shows Conclusion E-commerce industry experts around the world have been trying to meet changing consumer behavior, but they are still not able to predict the exact consequences. I hope these effects will be temporary. With some of the most recent findings and insights, I hope that we can help e-commerce marketers to navigate through these tough times and best prepare to manage the challenges. For any questions, please reach out at , a Global IT Solutions Company and . Syncrasy Tech PIM solution provider

Tracking the COVID-19 Impact On E-commerce Companies

A Relaxed Look at Getting Engineers up to Speed in a High Performance Organization I’m writing this having recently onboarded a dozen new engineers at (a 65% increase in the size of our team!). Folks varied in level from Intern to Senior Tech Lead, and they were ready to see what was all about. Drift Drift These are my learnings, and you can bet this is a work in progress. Here goes! Before I jump into methods, let’s talk outcomes. would be a group of overwhelmed programmers, fully dependent on others for instruction. They wouldn’t know their role in their team or their department, and they wouldn’t be able to connect their day-to-day work with the success of the company. Worse yet, they could start on the path of failure, driven by ego and defensive mindsets. The worst outcome would be a set of individuals with a sense of purpose, the tools they need to be autonomous, and with a learning mindset. They will have experienced success, and understand their role in the success of those around them. They have the will and skill to get shit done! The best outcome Do these look good? I think this paints a solid picture of what we want. Now let’s achieve results as quickly as possible, and optimize from there. Robust Purpose vs. Adaptive Execution You could take an approach and drop someone directly into the work. Perhaps pair them up with an accomplished engineer, and have them do real work. They’ll learn to adapt within your system, and they’ll learn how to execute. Chances are, . immersive your new hire won’t know where the company is going, how it’s going to to get there, and their role in this journey You could also take a approach where you get a robust training that covers every principle, product, and milestone of the company as it grows into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and everyone’s role in getting us there. In this case, they’ll have a purpose, but . highly-structured your new hire isn’t going to know how to do their job effectively We balance the two. Folks meet in the morning to learn about the company (where we came from, where we’re going, and our product offering). In the afternoons, we dive into engineering work. While we are driven by frugality and scrappiness here, we have unbelievably talented people. I have the opportunity to partner with (who developed talent at Hulu & Amazon) while she builds out robust company-wide programs. Her work has directly impacted my success onboarding engineers. Kari Howe Thank you, Kari! Engineering Autopilot I came across a quote that perfectly sums up the effect of good onboarding. “The goal is to feel so comfortable in the role that you go on autopilot”. The person quoted is a 2nd place finisher in the 2016 World Champion of Public Speaking. “There is no substitute for experience” he says, about building up the skills to accomplish a task. “The goal is to feel so comfortable in the role that you go on autopilot.“ — , on developing skills Aaron Beverly For that reason, our engineering onboarding is primarily composed of shipping engineering work. If you’re not creating muscle memory for the day-to-day work, you’re failing. 1. Success Paths / Failure Paths After introductions, I lead off with a discussion about what success and failure. Together, we develop a picture of the habits and priorities of what a successful engineer at Drift looks like. An example outcome of the “Success Paths / Failure Paths” exercise We develop this list in real time as a group. I’m able to pull from the unique experiences of each engineer in the room, while framing things in a Drifty way. If we don’t complete the picture, I’ll ask some leading questions. I’m also sure to explain WHY each of these is valuable and how they play into one’s success. To further cement these guardrails for success, we characterize the failure path. These are more-or-less opposites of the success path. 2. The no-op Deploy If onboarding is a rocket ship, the no-op deploy is the ignition. Up to this point, there’s been a lot of talk, lots of account setup & access, so this is important. This is our day 1 win. In this step, we get our local dev environments set up (with the help of automated scripting), and spin up a backend service. Each person makes a formatting change and we get to work sending it up the deploy pipeline. From branch to PR, builds, validation, and then we promote to production. Not only are we isolating their focus (first deploy, then learn our application code), but we’re creating small, almost inevitable, wins early in the process. 3. Customer-centric Engineering This is a short (15m) chat I give in front of a white board. I introduce them to the concept of a as a center point from which an activity or process is focused. I explain, the are many centers, and we offer examples of , , Eventually we get to . self-centered team-centered financially-centered. customer-centered At Drift, . For engineers, this mean we orient our product work around the success of our customers. we are customer-centered It’s my hope that new folks internalize this principle. I think taking a few minutes to review this ahead of real product work really helps. 4. Pairing We pair up new hires at this point. Ideally with a senior engineer and a junior engineer. Pairing discourages people from silo’ing off while in a new setting, and it tees up the expectation that they collaborate, and do visible work right out of the gate. 5. The First Ship™ This is a big deal. It’s our big focus for the next 2 days, and they need to complete it in order to “graduate” from onboarding. Here’s the deal: peer-reviewed & validated by PMs/Engineers; Potential work goes into a visible backlog that anyone can contribute to or comment on. It represents customer value — — an existing Drift eng. could complete it in a couple of hours. It’s right-sized — when pairs receive the work, they are given 10m to investigate and plan their solution. We review these aloud, and analyze the solutions as a group. I help them create a validation plan. Plan in pairs, share with the group — We do what it takes to get this done. If we stay after hours or come in extra early, we do that. If we need to bleed into Day 4 of onboarding we do that. It’s critical for high-performing organizations to model responsibility and complete ownership over your work. It’s done when it’s done 6. “Graduation” When that The First Ship™ lands in shipyard, it’s a celebration of a job well done. Like I said, the task should just be a few hours of work, but this assumes much about dev environment, code snags, and a ton of validation and testing. For a brand new hire, these things will take longer, and we account for that. From here, they join their teams. Ideally, it’s how we wrap up on Wednesday afternoon. We celebrate wins in the #shipyard. Comments visible from Sales & Product & CS 7. Post-graduate work (for me) While Kari surveys the individuals to collect feedback on their overall experience. I survey the teams them. The product managers, the tech leads, and anyone who is assigned as a guide or mentor receives these questions: receiving Stats go into a google sheet. I assigned myself a target of 9.5/10 I owe the team two documents after each onboarding: — A living table of survey results, participants, and composition of the new hires (i.e. — all senior? all interns? mix?) along with action items based on the survey’s qualitative data Onboarding Sentiment — My own notes broken into four columns: These are my personal observations and notes based on feedback I collect from others during the process. I include planned iterations on this document as well, based on these notes. Onboarding Learnings Good / Bad / Do More / Do Less. A sample onboarding outline (engineering only) This puts the learnings and strategies above into practice with a . It’s a rough outline, but it may help folks understand how we executed on this. 3-day outline of events (Google Sheets) Come Hang With me That’s all for now. I hope you learned something, please do , or check back in the article for a quote you like and tweet that (it would warm my cold heart). tweet at me Last (and of course) if a high-perf engineering team is your jam, ! hit us up References The Aaron Beverly quote was found via How to Tell a Story The “big and robust or small and adaptive?” narrative was inspired by The Critically Important Role of Product Teams in Strategy, Innovation & Org Structure

Culture! Ship it! Go!

⚡️View the hottest state management libs for React Why? This is to serve as a Rosetta Stone of state management systems. A basic packing list app was built in: setState React 16.x Context Redux — by Dan Abramov MobX — by Michel Weststrate unstated — by Jamie Kyle MobX-State-Tree — by Michel Weststrate again Apollo GraphQL with Amazon AppSync setState + react-automata — by Michele Bertoli Freactal — by Dale while at Formidable ReduxX — by Mikey Stecky-Efantis pure-store — by Arthur Gunn AND MANY MORE! Surely you’re familiar with one or more of the aforementioned systems, and now you can leverage that knowledge to better understand many others. It’s your chance to see what all the buzz is about, and honestly, how similar all these state systems really are. To portray these systems in a terse and understandable form, the chosen app is a simple packing list app with only the ability to and . add clear Simple as it gets app (Native and Web) To illustrate state jumping the wire, the ADD/CLEAR is one component, and the LIST is a secondary component in all examples. Even the two main components (adding/listing) have been abstracted to an imported library, leaving only fundamental code in order to emphasize state choice(s). The code is meant to be minimalistic. Welcome to the React State Museum! The code for each of these systems can be found in React and React Native. https://github.com/GantMan/ReactStateMuseum Use the above repo to personally dive into each of those systems and check them out! 🔥 Also: Watch the talk from Connect.Tech here: _"Use redux, don't use redux. Use mobx, but don't use mobx. Hell just use setState! Don't worry, the new Context will…_www.recallact.com React State Museum | recallact.com Personal Notes on Each Solution: If you want code, check the GitHub, if you want opinions, continue into this very long description below. Here I jump into the differences between each item in the museum, and that which makes it unique. If you’ve got some strong opinions, or experiences, please share them in the comments. I’m also interested in giving this report as a fun-filled conference talk. setState Here’s the most basic structure of state management, it depends only on the fundamental understanding of components and their encapsulation. In many ways, this is a great example for beginners in React. Explicitly raising state to a root component that all components are children of identifies the props vs. state relationship. As an application grows, explicit connections down into components would be more and more complex and fragile, which is why this is not commonly used. The Code: | React React Native React Context https://reactjs.org/docs/context.html There’s been a lot of buzz about the updates to Context. In fact, the final form of Context in 16.x feels a bit like a state management system itself. For simplicity, the context allows for and a . All children of a provider will have access to the values applied there. All non-children will see the context defaults. The following graph explains such lineage. provider consumer Only children inherit On a second, and very opinionated note, I’m not a fan of the consumption syntax structure. Clearly, it’s a function that is the child of Consumer, but it feels like it violates JSX while mega-overloading all use cases of braces. A pedantic issue, but the readability of code should always factor into API, and on this front, Context starts to feel a bit dirty. The Code: | React React Native Redux https://github.com/reactjs/react-redux I’ll dare say at the time of this writing Redux is the most popular state management tool, and therefore the most attacked. Writing a solution in Redux took many files, and almost double the lines of code. But to Redux’s defense, it’s simple and flexible. If you’re unfamiliar with Redux, it’s a functional approach to state management that provides time-travel and clean state management in a form like a reducer function. Dan Abramov’s video explaining redux has been watched times. many In short, it’s like having someone shout commands in your app (Actions) which are projected via Action Creators. Data managers in your app (Reducers) hear those shouts, and can optionally act on them. I love my pirate ship analogy, so shouting “MAN_OVERBOARD” can tell your crew counter to subtract the staff by one, the accountant to re-split the treasure, and the guy swabbing the deck can just ignore it because he doesn’t care. I like this analogy, because shouting is a powerful way to manage all corners of your app, and in larger applications, noisy. Combine this with no way to handle side-effects and the need to glue on an immutable structure to make it all work, Redux is the bill-by-hour developer’s friend. The Code: | React React Native MobX https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx-react MobX is one of the EASIEST state managers to get started with. Open the readme, and follow along and you’ll have things running in no time. It feels like mutable JS, and it really kind of is. The only part that might throw you for a loop is the decorators like on classes. Though odd, they kind of clean up the code a bit. @observer @observer is like an automatic `mapStateToProps` + `reselect` if you’re used redux things — Steve Kellock Be sure to checkout Nader’s blog post highlighting some more advanced topics on switching to MobX. _In late 2017 I worked on a React Native project with a team that had used MobX as their state management library. I had…_medium.com Ditching setState for MobX - Nader Dabit - Medium In summation, MobX was one of the smallest and simplest tools to add! The Code: | React React Native Unstated https://github.com/jamiebuilds/unstated Unstated was as easy as MobX. Much like MobX felt like mutable JavaScript, Unstated felt like adding more React code. I actually feel that Unstated feels more like React than Context did. It’s simple, you create a container, and inside that container, you manage state. Simple known functions like exist inside the state container. It’s not just an apt name; it’s an apt React based manager. setState I’m not sure how well it scales or handles middleware etc. but if you’re a beginner to state management MobX and Unstated are the simplest tools to get up and running! The Code: | React React Native MobX-State-Tree https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx-state-tree Yes, this is VERY different from vanilla MobX. It’s a common misconception. Even my co-workers try to shorten the title down to “MobX,” and I’m always pushing MST as an alternative instead. With that being said, it’s important to note MobX-State-Tree sports all the great features of Redux + reselect + Side-effect management and more all in one opinionated bundle with less code. In this small example, the only thing that’s obvious is the terse syntax. The lines of code are barely bigger than our original MobX example. Both share that succinct decorator syntax. Though it takes a bit of time to really get all the benefits out of MobX-State-Tree. The most important note is that if you came from ActiveRecord or some other kind of ORM, MobX-State-Tree feels like a clean data model with normalized relations. This is a great state management tool for an application that will scale. The Code: | React React Native Apollo GraphQL and Amazon AppSync https://github.com/apollographql/react-apollo https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/ If you haven’t jumped on the GraphQL train, you’re missing out. Apollo GraphQL + AppSync is a great way to manage your state, AND handle offline, AND handle fetching API, AND handle setting up a GraphQL server. It’s a serious solution. Many have projected GraphQL to effectively “solve” the state debate. In a lot of ways that’s easy, and in a lot of ways, that’s hard. Not everyone is ready to use a GraphQL server, but if you are, then AppSync is an easy way to handle all your data in your DynamoDB. It takes more time/energy to get this up and running, but with clear benefits. In my example, I don’t really use all the bells and whistles. You can see the delay as the data awaits from the server, and I’m not using subscriptions to get updates. This example could get better. But it’s as simple as wrapping the config with the components. Tadaaaaa! The rest is history. Please be careful what you put in the packing list in this example, as it’s shared. Special note: The Code: | React React Native setState + react-automata https://github.com/MicheleBertoli/react-automata This is a strange one in the group. In many ways, you’re wondering how setState is involved, and the answer is simple. The idea of breaking state down into a state-machine is very different from most state management systems. By creating an machine config, you handle how state gets passed, called, and identified. Therefore, you must identify ALL states your app can be in, and ALL ways it can move from one state to another. Much like dispatching an action in Redux, you have to to another state on a given event. xstate transition It’s not a full state management system; it’s merely a state-machine for your state management. Here’s the chart created by our statechart Exciting benefits come from using statecharts. Firstly, you can be protected from transitions you don’t want. For instance, you can’t transition to “loaded” state without first typing text. This stops empty adds to our packing list. Secondly, all transitions of state can be automatically generated and tested. With one simple command, multiple snapshots of state are generated. : On React Native I had to to satisfy some unused import in a dependency. This was a sneaky gotcha for native only CAVEAT yarn add path The Code: | React React Native Freactal https://github.com/FormidableLabs/freactal/ Of course, we’ll feature the awesome work of Formidable Labs. Freactal is a very advanced example and states it can replace , , , , , and more. [redux](https://redux.js.org/) [MobX](https://mobx.js.org/) [reselect](https://github.com/reactjs/reselect) [redux-loop](https://github.com/redux-loop/redux-loop) [redux-thunk](https://github.com/gaearon/redux-thunk) [redux-saga](https://github.com/redux-saga/redux-saga) Though this was probably the most difficult one for me to setup, I still see it has great value. More examples would have helped. Special thanks to who agreed to answer any questions I had while reading through the docs. Ken Wheeler The final code is succinct and straightforward. It feels a bit like the Context syntax in the end. I especially like the use of name-spacing separately from , and though there’s not much stopping you from taking this convention to other libs. effects state computer The Code: | React React Native ReduxX https://github.com/msteckyefantis/reduxx ReduxX, while probably having a bit of trouble in SEO, is still a pretty cool name. “Why is it you can add X to something to make it cool?” — Gant X ReduxX reads pretty well as in some ways it reminds me a bit of the charisma from Unstated, as we’re using verbiage to set and mutate state. One aspect that might seem alien, is the state is retrieved with as a function. This feels a bit like keychain access, and I wonder if there could be some certs/crypto mixed in easily? Food for thought. I see there’s which will swap keys out for GUIDs. Security-wise this library might have some interesting advantages. react-styled getState obscureStateKeys: true As for how to use it, Set and Get via keys. That’s it! If you’re not worried about middleware, and you’re familiar with keychain globals, you already know ReduxX. Special thanks to the author Mikey Stecky-Efantis for providing this example! pure-store https://github.com/gunn/pure-store 100% test coverage, MIT licensed, TypeScript backed mini-library for state management. This library feels the closest to “Just use globals”. As a matter of fact, if you identify that takes the signature of then you’re looking at a global state in a singleton. update setState Special thanks to Arthur Gunn for contributing this example! The Missing State Example? I’m sure there are other state managers out there which are being sorely under-represented here, and if you know them, please send a PR to the public repo. I’ll happily accept contributions so that we can all benefit. I’ll even update this blog post as new systems are added. So please, file tickets, and more importantly contribute! The museum thanks you 😆 Since this writing, many people have contributed!!! I’m especially thankful and happy that in some cases, people used this library to learn that their state system did not work with React Native, and the fixed it upstream!!! UPDATE: To get a full listing of state systems visit the repo . In Summation: You can get pretty far with setState and Context! Why bring in a dependency at all? If you’re not sure your app will need it, try to ship without an external lib. You might be able combine Context with something simple like react-automata to round out a clean and testable result! Do you want no dependencies? **Do you want simple?**unstated, reduxX, and pure-state are easy and simple. They have slight opinion differences, and small differentiating benefits for each. MobX is also easy, but shows up with some decorator syntax you have to accept. If you do, then the code stays readable and optimized, with a TON of docs/stackoverflow help. VERY **Do you want scalable?**If you’re sure your app is going to need all the bells and whistles, it’s time to break out the big guns. This is where Redux shines. You’re forever a mechanic when you implement Redux, so you know you can adapt. MobX-State-Tree shows up with all the powers of MobX + opinions, state, optimizations, and more. It’s not something you can comprehend in a single sitting, but each time you learn more about it, you’re empowering your application. There’s no doubt that GraphQL is catching fire in the technical space. Now if you’re using it with AppSync for networking, or if you’re simply using to manage your local data, you surrender some fine-grained control, but gain power in return. Be sure to keep an eye on these libraries as they evolve. It’s likely that many of the state-systems above will have to adapt to accommodate GraphQL in the near future. Do you want the future? apollo-link-state is Chief Technology Strategist at , published author, adjunct professor, worldwide public speaker, and mad scientist in training. Please clap/follow/tweet or just say hi to him . Gant Laborde Infinite Red at a conference Credits Header graphic thanks to: https://unsplash.com/photos/uqMBLm8bAdA Special thanks to who has since this blog post was originally released! Juan David Castro contributed extensively Have a minute? Check out a few more: _The Pitfalls of Remote Work + Proposed Solutions_shift.infinite.red 5 Things that Suck about Remote Work _Add Solidarity to your project for multi-machine peace of mind_shift.infinite.red Solidarity — The CLI for Developer Sanity

⚛ The React State Museum

Will the Real Web Developer Please Stand Up?

Over the past few weeks, Facebook officially transferred control of Parse to the open source community. If you’re using Parse today, then there should be little change to you. If you’re a developer tracking these repos, please update your branches to . Our home is now at , and all docs have relocated to https://github.com/parse-community http://parseplatform.org http://docs.parseplatform.org The Parse project has been fully community run for at least the past three months. Ever since Facebook announced the open source version of Parse server, we’ve added long awaited and powerful features such as: - , supported across all major client SDKs.- support, starting with in addition to MongoDB.- models and no longer restricted to Facebook and Twitter.- New Live Queries Multiple Database Postgres Flexible authentication Class Level Permissions . And so much more; Parse is stronger open than closed. We’ve seen a trove of companies offering hosting services around the open source project and we encourage the less tech savvy users to explore those if they aren’t comfortable with hosting their own solution. The adaptable model implemented in Parse Server makes it easy to extend it, allowing the most experienced developers to tailor its behaviour to their needs. With adapters for file storage, authentication, databases, caching, etc., Parse Server is designed to adapt your needs as you scale and grow. We’re commited to expand that support in the future and remove bottlenecks that prevent you and your team to grow and scale. We’re grateful to , , and the entire Facebook Parse team for this gift to the open source community. Kevin Lacker Fosco Marotto I would like to also personally thank all contributors, on every repositories and in particular (but no particular order), , , , , , and many more. They have pulled a tremendous amount of work and dedication to the success of the project. This transition would not have been possible without them. Arthur Cinader Tyler Brock Natan Rolnik Steven Shipton Roger Hu Michael Mimeault What’s next? Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll develop a proper roadmap with the help of the community to understand your most pressing issues and assess what features you want to see in the long run implemented in the parse platform. We’ll update all the repositories READMEs with the dedicated maintainers, or go-to persons to reach out if you have issues or questions. Parse is a complex ecosystem, with many open source components, and can be difficult to maintain. We always welcome new maintainers. If you feel you’re up to the task and the challenge, feel free to reach out to or open an issue on the repository to which you’d like to contribute. community@parseplatform.org We’re more commited to Parse than ever and now it’s yours. Florent Vilmart, principal maintainer. is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising & sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

Long Live Parse

I thought I didn’t need any help. I was wrong. “The maturation plot — the plot about growing up — is one of those strongly optimistic plots. There are lessons to learn, and those lessons may be difficult, but in the end the character becomes (or will become) a better person for it.” —Ronald Tobias This story begins in the fall of 2016, when I was on the phone with one of my investors and closest mentors. We were talking about ’s progress and funding situation, and he made a suggestion that, I must admit, I was not a big fan of at the time: Hardbound “Have you considered applying to Techstars?” I had not. In my view, accelerators were not a smart choice. They take a large equity stake in your company (6%) for a minimal (20k) and justify their steep price by giving you lots of “advice” and plugging you into their “network.” startup investment No thanks. It wasn’t that I was greedy to keep the largest ownership stake as I possibly could. This is my first company, and I wanted to partner with the best people possible. I knew we had a lot to learn and couldn’t do it by ourselves. If that relationship was going to be truly aligned, I them to have equity. wanted The problem, in my mind, was that we had all the advice we needed. Possibly even advice! We had a great crew of investors who had bet on us in our pre-seed round, and at this point we just needed to execute. I thought it would be a huge distraction to go through some kind of accelerator program. too much But there was something else, too. I’m a bit of a lone wolf. I’m not really a “group” person. Every time I used to see something like “Founder of _______, (YC S12)” on a founder’s Twitter bio, it made me think they had an emotional need to belong to some sort of group. To display that badge of honor as proof that their unknown startup is really actually quite special. So when I was on the phone that day with our mentor, and he suggested that we apply to Techstars, I didn’t give it serious consideration. “The protagonist of the maturation plot is usually asympathetic young person whose goals are either confused or not yetquite formed. He floats on the sea of life without a rudder.” Our app was doing pretty well, but growth wasn’t exactly explosive. Apple featured us as a “best new app” and Fast Company named us one of the top 10 apps of 2016, so we were getting a pretty solid stream of downloads, but it all felt completely beyond our control. It was like we were dependent on lighting strikes from heaven, when someone with a big audience decided they liked us. We were spending 90% of our time just executing, and not very much time on investigating the big questions. We didn’t believe that any kind of structured work process would make that much of a difference, so we just had ad-hoc conversations whenever one of us decided there was something to say. That was us ^ Our bank account was slowly dwindling, and I knew we’d need to do something about that soon. So I scheduled a wave of phone calls with potential seed round investors to take their temperature. Some people loved us, others thought our idea made no sense. I remember one meeting where a VC literally told me “this just isn’t an exciting opportunity.” Gotta give her points for honesty! I was encouraged at first by some of the conversations, but the deeper I dug, the more clear it became that we were not quite ready for a seed round. They were rooting for us, but not even close to pulling the trigger. Our plan just wasn’t crisp enough to invest in without off-the-charts growth. I didn’t know what to do. “He often vacillates, unsure of the proper path to take, the proper decision tomake. These inabilities are usually the result of a lack of experiencein life — naivete.” At some point in this process, I reluctantly concluded that it was going to be very hard for us to raise a seed round. Joe (my cofounder) and I were talking about it at work one day, and Techstars came up. They invest in companies at the earliest possible stage, so we figured we’d have a much better chance with that than raising a big seed round (something that many startups do they go through an accelerator program). after We went to the Techstars website and started poking around, to try to learn more. The application was due in two days. Shit. We spent that whole afternoon gathering the data they asked for, crafting answers to their questions, and recording a quick video. I still wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. “Which brings us to the test. The catalytic event. Suddenly something comes along and smacks [him] square in the face. The event must be powerful enough to get the attention of the protagonist and literally shake up [his] belief systems.” After a couple of weeks passed, we got some good news: our top 2 choices (Techstars NY and Techstars Boulder) wanted to interview us. both We had the calls, and discovered that we got along really well with the Techstars Boulder crew, but we had slightly less chemistry with Techstars New York. This was kind of a bummer to us, because our company was located in New York, and Joe and I were both reluctant to move to Boulder for 3 months and be apart from our girlfriends / lives. Another week passed, and we got an email: we didn’t get into Techstars New York. Shit. Side note: isn’t it funny how even when you’re not sure you want something, it hurts when you don’t get it? Then we got another email: Techstars Boulder wanted to have a second phone call. I still wasn’t sure I wanted to do it, and was honestly kind of leaning against it. So I saw this call as our opportunity to talk through all our concerns with them. Based on our first call I knew I liked them a lot, and I wanted to give them a chance to change our minds. We spilled our guts, basically. We said we weren’t sure about giving up 6%, we didn’t know how to value the “advice” and “network”, and we didn’t really want to leave New York. They gave us a list of alumni to talk to. I got on the phone with some founders from previous cohorts, and they told me all about how big an impact Techstars had made on not just their company, but their lives. I pressed for details. It seemed to add up. I was torn. Will this really make us grow faster?Don’t we already know what we’re doing?We just need to execute a little better!Nobody knows more about our challenges than us. Maybe that’s true, but why aren’t we growing faster?Why does it seem so hard for us to raise a seed round?Maybe we don’t know what we don’t know… A couple days later, we got an email. “You’re in.” “It may be, in fact, that your protagonist is actually trying to do the right thing, but doesn’t know what the right thing is. That means trial and error. Finding out what works and what doesn’t work. That is the process of growing up, the journey from innocence to experience.” That night I went home and talked to Sonia (my fiancee) about it. I thought maybe we should do it, but I wasn’t sure. The only thing I was certain about was that it would really suck to be apart for 3 months. She told me that if I thought it was the right thing for Hardbound, that we should do it. That meant a lot to me. The next day, Joe and I went on a walk. It was hard for me to admit to him that I wanted to do it. Partly this was because I didn’t want to admit I was wrong. But also because I knew it was a lot to ask of him, to move to Boulder for 3 months. I was nervous, but I said I thought it would be a good idea. I thought we could probably learn a lot from them. It might even be worth 6% of the company. Maybe. “Yeah, I think you’re right. We should do it.” I honestly wasn’t expecting that. But as we continued on our walk through Greenwich Village, and started to turn back towards the office, it became clear that we both knew it was time for us to level-up. It was decided. That was back in December. It’s now Saturday, February 4th, and I’m sitting in our Airbnb at the kitchen table, reflecting on the two weeks that have passed since Techstars started. If I’m being honest with myself, I have to admit that we’ve learned more in the past two weeks than we did in the previous six months. But the bulk of the learning hasn’t been specific to our product or market. Instead, we’ve been learning how to learn. After going through the “foundational” lectures and exercises, doing team thought experiments, and talking to literally of smart, experienced people about our business, I think I realized what was holding us back before. The big mistake we were making actually turned out to be pretty simple: hundreds We were sloppy. Not with our product, but with our learning. In my past I’ve operated mostly on intuition, and a lot of times I have been proven right. This has taught me the wrong lesson: just hack it together, ship it as quickly as possible, and everything will work out fine. You can always adjust from there if need be. Usually I just liked to charge forward. In the words of Stephen Covey, I was investing all my time in and none of my time into . I was constantly chopping wood but never stopping to sharpen my axe. Production Production Capacity I used to think that team meetings with whiteboards and post-it notes were “playing house” and scoffed at them. I used to think it wasn’t worth the time to have a weekly OKR meeting, or a daily standup. I’ve only seen extremely watered-down versions of these in my prior working experiences, so I just had no idea how powerful they can be if done well. Turns out, they can be pretty damn powerful! The bottom line is this: Techstars has taught us to be disciplined and focused. Not because they’ve said anything we haven’t heard before, but because they’ve us how to do it, and given us brutally honest feedback on our form. shown It’s like the difference between reading a book about tennis and joining a full-time program where you dedicate 100% of your time to improving your tennis game, with constant feedback from multiple master coaches with various specialties. I don’t care how smart you are, you’re going to do significantly better if you put yourself this kind of environment. Now that I think about it, I’m frankly a bit embarrassed we didn’t apply sooner! But that’s life, right? If you’re not embarrassed by how naïve you were six months ago, you’re not learning fast enough. 🙏🏼 An infinite amount of thanks to Natty and Julie at Techstars, who brought us into the family and took a chance on us and our crazy idea. We are so grateful for everything you do!

I used to be a skeptic, but the first two weeks of Techstars Boulder have blown my mind.

In my previous article, Managing Architectural Tech Debt, I talked about understanding and managing architectural technical debt. Architectural technical debt is the often ignored, but ironically, one of the most damaging, categories of technical debt. In this article, I want to dive deeper into one way to manage architectural technical debt (and technical debt as a whole)—architectural observability (AO). AO is a new category of observability that I believe is just as important, if not more so, as application performance management (APM). I believe we need to shift left observability—to the architectural stage—where we can not just see symptoms, but fix core problems. Let’s take a look. APM Is (Half) the Answer You already know that APM is important. Gartner defines it as “software that enables the observation and analysis of application health, performance and user experience.” And IDC reports that companies using APM solutions see a 2.5x improvement in mean time to resolution (MTTR) and a 50% reduction in the number of incidents. APM and observability: Helps to ensure better user experiences by monitoring, in real-time, performance and responsiveness.
Can help identify defects.
Can provide data to teams, such as usage patterns, bottlenecks, and overall health to keep systems healthy. Overall, APM has become a necessary tool for troubleshooting and fixing issues in enterprise environments. APM has become table stakes. And APM works! In my current role, we use APM to observe the usage of our APIs to understand the breakdown of URI (uniform resource identifier) requests across all of our consumers. When our APIs are not functioning as expected, we lean to APM in order to gain visibility into performance bottlenecks. In cases where an alert is triggered, the same interface can be utilized for initial troubleshooting efforts in order to help pin down the root cause. But even though APM works, there’s a problem. APM identifies the symptoms of the defects, but not the actual defects themselves. It’s up to the team to track down why the problems are occurring. And with the pressure we often feel in prod to “just fix the problem as fast as you can,” I often see that while symptoms may be addressed, teams don’t have the time (or organizational support) to find and fix the actual core problems. Imagine taking aspirin because you get a headache every night, but never taking the time to figure out why you keep having headaches. To find—and address—the why of our defects, we need architectural observability. Architectural Observability: Getting to the Real Answers We need to shift our processes left, stop focusing on symptoms, and instead focus on the root cause of these problems and actually reduce the number of incidents caught with APM. That’s where architectural observability comes in. Architectural observability is the ability to analyze an application’s architecture (both statically and dynamically), understand how it works, observe changes, and identify and fix architectural technical debt. Architectural observability is the next step in observability tools. Architectural observability gives you visibility into your application architecture, helping you solve problems (not just identify symptoms) earlier in the SDLC by identifying architectural issues. You probably already have the data you need to implement AO—it uses the same data sources as APM (for example, OpenTelemetry (OTel). But AO takes that data and applies a layer of intelligence that focuses on analyzing the architecture and the sources of architectural technical debt. For example, an AO tool might analyze: Architectural complexity - The interdependence and relationships of services within the architecture, the number of flows in a service, identifying multi-hop flows and circular flows. Dependency mappings - Relationships among services including circular dependencies. Architectural drift - What has changed since your last release, what new domains/services were added, what new dependencies and flows were introduced. Technical debt - Such as resource exclusivity, service dependencies, duplicate services that should be merged, and complexity. Technical debt is a huge problem in the industry. 70% of organizations say that technical debt is a major obstacle to innovation. Database-related issues - Examine if multiple services are accessing tables. Architectural observability is proactive and strategic. Where APM tools alert on the leaks in the roof when it is already raining, AO identifies architectural issues that can lead to those leaks, way before they actually occur. Using Tools to Gain Architectural Observability Used well, AO doesn’t just help you find issues earlier, but helps you: Truly discover and understand your architecture and its relationships and dependencies.
Prevent issues caused by architectural changes.
Make systems more resilient and scalable by continually monitoring, modernizing, and strengthening your architecture.
Minimize technical debt. I love that last one. As I pointed out in my last article, architectural debt is a foe of mine that I have been battling for over a decade. Architectural observability is a new field and is starting to gain traction as something teams must have. There aren’t many tools yet built around the concept, but let’s look at how your team might use one of the first AO tools—vFunction—to gain AO. Once you’ve connected to your applications (through the OTel connector or similar), the tool analyzes your system (in this case with vFunction, it’s using AI to understand and analyze your architecture). Then you get a report on the current state of your architecture. You’ll see details such as: A visualization of the architecture across your entire app portfolio
A map of services and entry points, cross services APIs, and external APIs
Exclusivity of database tables (Kafka, Redis, MongoDB) and other resources
Complexity scores
And more… And you can use architectural observability to monitor your architecture not just in the present state, but dynamically as it changes. Changes to your architecture (a.k.a., architectural drift)? You’ll know right away.
Add a dependency impacting resiliency? You’ll catch it before migrating.
Did you create a circular flow? Did you significantly increase the complexity of your system? Find out early. Incurring even more technical debt? You can’t hide from it now. With architectural observability, you now have hard proof of how architectural debt is affecting your systems and how, by using AO, you can identify and prioritize the actual problems in your systems early and often, rather than only addressing the symptoms in production. AO makes applications more resilient, more scalable, and helps your team move faster. And AO can help proactively. Is your team moving from a monolith to a microservice? AO can give you a plan to move your architecture forward. With AO, you could analyze your monolith, understand how its domains and functionality are structured and connected, and then get actionable steps on how to modularize and move the functionality to microservices. And once you have a distributed architecture (microservices or distributed monoliths), you’ll want to make sure your architecture doesn’t drift or get more complex to the point that things start to break, you lose control, and you have to slow down your engineering velocity. AO keeps your applications in check whether monolith or microservices. Architectural Observability Gives You Better Systems My readers may recall that I have been focused on the following mission statement, which I feel can apply to any IT professional: “Focus your time on delivering features/functionality that extends the value of your intellectual property. Leverage frameworks, products, and services for everything else.” - J. Vester Architectural observability adheres to my mission statement perfectly. By moving from plain vanilla observability to architectural observability, we can shift left for more reliable, more resilient, and better-performing systems. This shift affords us more time to spend on the business problems that our teams understand best. As John F. Kennedy once said: “The best time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” Architectural observability should be placed on the same level (or higher) as APM. With AO, teams can truly understand their architecture, have a broader and more insightful view of their applications than with APM alone, and fix problems earlier. Have a really great day! In my previous article, Managing Architectural Tech Debt , I talked about understanding and managing architectural technical debt. Architectural technical debt is the often ignored, but ironically, one of the most damaging , categories of technical debt. Managing Architectural Tech Debt architectural the most damaging In this article, I want to dive deeper into one way to manage architectural technical debt (and technical debt as a whole)— architectural observability (AO) . AO is a new category of observability that I believe is just as important, if not more so, as application performance management (APM). I believe we need to shift left observability—to the architectural stage—where we can not just see symptoms, but fix core problems. architectural observability (AO) Let’s take a look. APM Is (Half) the Answer You already know that APM is important. Gartner defines it as “software that enables the observation and analysis of application health, performance and user experience.” And IDC reports that companies using APM solutions see a 2.5x improvement in mean time to resolution (MTTR) and a 50% reduction in the number of incidents. IDC reports APM and observability: Helps to ensure better user experiences by monitoring, in real-time, performance and responsiveness. Can help identify defects. Can provide data to teams, such as usage patterns, bottlenecks, and overall health to keep systems healthy. Helps to ensure better user experiences by monitoring, in real-time, performance and responsiveness. Can help identify defects. Can provide data to teams, such as usage patterns, bottlenecks, and overall health to keep systems healthy. Overall, APM has become a necessary tool for troubleshooting and fixing issues in enterprise environments. APM has become table stakes. And APM works! In my current role, we use APM to observe the usage of our APIs to understand the breakdown of URI (uniform resource identifier) requests across all of our consumers. When our APIs are not functioning as expected, we lean to APM in order to gain visibility into performance bottlenecks. In cases where an alert is triggered, the same interface can be utilized for initial troubleshooting efforts in order to help pin down the root cause. But even though APM works, there’s a problem. APM identifies the symptoms of the defects, but not the actual defects themselves . It’s up to the team to track down why the problems are occurring. And with the pressure we often feel in prod to “just fix the problem as fast as you can,” I often see that while symptoms may be addressed, teams don’t have the time (or organizational support) to find and fix the actual core problems. but not the actual defects themselves why Imagine taking aspirin because you get a headache every night, but never taking the time to figure out why you keep having headaches. To find—and address—the why of our defects, we need architectural observability . why architectural observability Architectural Observability: Getting to the Real Answers We need to shift our processes left, stop focusing on symptoms, and instead focus on the root cause of these problems and actually reduce the number of incidents caught with APM. root cause of these problems That’s where architectural observability comes in. Architectural observability is the ability to analyze an application’s architecture (both statically and dynamically), understand how it works, observe changes, and identify and fix architectural technical debt. Architectural observability Architectural observability is the next step in observability tools. Architectural observability gives you visibility into your application architecture, helping you solve problems (not just identify symptoms) earlier in the SDLC by identifying architectural issues. You probably already have the data you need to implement AO—it uses the same data sources as APM (for example, OpenTelemetry (OTel). But AO takes that data and applies a layer of intelligence that focuses on analyzing the architecture and the sources of architectural technical debt. For example, an AO tool might analyze: Architectural complexity - The interdependence and relationships of services within the architecture, the number of flows in a service, identifying multi-hop flows and circular flows. Architectural complexity - The interdependence and relationships of services within the architecture, the number of flows in a service, identifying multi-hop flows and circular flows. Architectural complexity Dependency mappings - Relationships among services including circular dependencies. Dependency mappings - Relationships among services including circular dependencies. Dependency mappings Architectural drift - What has changed since your last release, what new domains/services were added, what new dependencies and flows were introduced. Architectural drift - What has changed since your last release, what new domains/services were added, what new dependencies and flows were introduced. Architectural drift Technical debt - Such as resource exclusivity, service dependencies, duplicate services that should be merged, and complexity. Technical debt is a huge problem in the industry. 70% of organizations say that technical debt is a major obstacle to innovation. Technical debt - Such as resource exclusivity, service dependencies, duplicate services that should be merged, and complexity. Technical debt is a huge problem in the industry. 70% of organizations say that technical debt is a major obstacle to innovation. Technical debt major obstacle to innovation. Database-related issues - Examine if multiple services are accessing tables. Database-related issues - Examine if multiple services are accessing tables. Database-related issues Architectural observability is proactive and strategic. Where APM tools alert on the leaks in the roof when it is already raining, AO identifies architectural issues that can lead to those leaks, way before they actually occur. Using Tools to Gain Architectural Observability Used well, AO doesn’t just help you find issues earlier, but helps you: Truly discover and understand your architecture and its relationships and dependencies. Prevent issues caused by architectural changes. Make systems more resilient and scalable by continually monitoring, modernizing, and strengthening your architecture. Minimize technical debt. Truly discover and understand your architecture and its relationships and dependencies. Prevent issues caused by architectural changes. Prevent Make systems more resilient and scalable by continually monitoring, modernizing, and strengthening your architecture. Minimize technical debt. I love that last one. As I pointed out in my last article , architectural debt is a foe of mine that I have been battling for over a decade. my last article Architectural observability is a new field and is starting to gain traction as something teams must have. There aren’t many tools yet built around the concept, but let’s look at how your team might use one of the first AO tools—vFunction—to gain AO. Once you’ve connected to your applications (through the OTel connector or similar), the tool analyzes your system (in this case with vFunction, it’s using AI to understand and analyze your architecture). Then you get a report on the current state of your architecture. You’ll see details such as: A visualization of the architecture across your entire app portfolio A map of services and entry points, cross services APIs, and external APIs Exclusivity of database tables (Kafka, Redis, MongoDB) and other resources Complexity scores And more… A visualization of the architecture across your entire app portfolio A map of services and entry points, cross services APIs, and external APIs Exclusivity of database tables (Kafka, Redis, MongoDB) and other resources Complexity scores And more… And you can use architectural observability to monitor your architecture not just in the present state, but dynamically as it changes. Changes to your architecture (a.k.a., architectural drift)? You’ll know right away. Add a dependency impacting resiliency? You’ll catch it before migrating. Did you create a circular flow? Did you significantly increase the complexity of your system? Find out early. Changes to your architecture (a.k.a., architectural drift)? You’ll know right away. Add a dependency impacting resiliency? You’ll catch it before migrating. Did you create a circular flow? Did you significantly increase the complexity of your system? Find out early. Incurring even more technical debt? You can’t hide from it now. more With architectural observability, you now have hard proof of how architectural debt is affecting your systems and how, by using AO, you can identify and prioritize the actual problems in your systems early and often, rather than only addressing the symptoms in production. AO makes applications more resilient, more scalable, and helps your team move faster. And AO can help proactively. Is your team moving from a monolith to a microservice? AO can give you a plan to move your architecture forward. With AO, you could analyze your monolith, understand how its domains and functionality are structured and connected, and then get actionable steps on how to modularize and move the functionality to microservices. And once you have a distributed architecture (microservices or distributed monoliths), you’ll want to make sure your architecture doesn’t drift or get more complex to the point that things start to break, you lose control, and you have to slow down your engineering velocity. AO keeps your applications in check whether monolith or microservices. Architectural Observability Gives You Better Systems My readers may recall that I have been focused on the following mission statement, which I feel can apply to any IT professional: “Focus your time on delivering features/functionality that extends the value of your intellectual property. Leverage frameworks, products, and services for everything else.” - J. Vester “Focus your time on delivering features/functionality that extends the value of your intellectual property. Leverage frameworks, products, and services for everything else.” - J. Vester Architectural observability adheres to my mission statement perfectly. By moving from plain vanilla observability to architectural observability , we can shift left for more reliable, more resilient, and better-performing systems. This shift affords us more time to spend on the business problems that our teams understand best. architectural observability As John F. Kennedy once said: “The best time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” Architectural observability should be placed on the same level (or higher) as APM. With AO, teams can truly understand their architecture, have a broader and more insightful view of their applications than with APM alone, and fix problems earlier. Have a really great day!

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