Filestack Presents: Nerd Up: Scale Up - A Full-Day Online Conference

Scaling is an important but often overlooked consideration in software and web development. Let’s say that you have plans to make a great product. And let’s also say that after a few months of development, you were able to deploy it successfully. Now, you suddenly have hundreds of thousands of active users.

What will you do if the number keeps growing? And how will you handle this huge but sudden change? Do you have enough resources to do so? Will you have to make changes in terms of your tech stack? Scalability is all about having an answer to all these questions.

It’s not always easy to scale your product or service properly, and scaling involves a lot of complicated steps. It’s not like there’s a comprehensive and fun way to learn about all this, is there? Thankfully, now there is.

On February 22, 2023, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Central Time, Filestack will be hosting a full-day online conference. The event, titled “Nerd Up: Scale Up," brings together six field experts from across the globe.

They will provide you with effective and modern strategies for software and website scaling. The event’s registration is now open to those who are willing to learn about proper software and website scaling. This article will discuss the basics of the topics that the conference will cover.

What is the Nerd Up: Scale Up conference about?

The event will guide you through the different ways you can prepare for any changes in your application or website. Here are the topics, along with their corresponding presenters, that you will encounter at the conference:

• OpenAI: Creating Chatbot Applications, Adrian Twarog
• A Qwik Integration to File Management, Giorgo Boa
• Designing for Scale: Optimizing Microservices, Chris Bongers
• IL Classroom and Filestack: Powering LMS, Ian Lotinsky
• A Design System Story, Gil Fink
• Using AI to Improve Existing Systems, Patty O’Callaghan

Unfamiliar with some of these topics? Don’t worry. We’ll be discussing basic information about them below. And if you are already familiar with them, then you will be learning a lot more when it comes to using them for scaling applications and websites. Let’s start with the conference’s core topic: scalability.

What is software or website scalability?

There comes a point in every developer’s life when they need to deeply consider software or website scalability. It’s an essential part of adapting to the constantly changing software industry environment.

For example, when your website or application starts to grow, you have to prepare accordingly. Similarly, when an unprecedented event (like a pandemic) threatens to topple the stability of an application or website, you have to know how to handle it. Software or website scalability deals with keeping up with any changes in the business environment.

Without proper scaling, your software or website might fail to adapt to any major changes. For instance, let’s say that you have software that supports strictly up to 100,000 users due to some constraints. When that software starts growing in popularity or demand, it will be more difficult for you to adapt.

The changes you will have to make can include purchasing more servers, changing your software’s structure, and other exhausting tasks. On the other hand, if you make your software scalable from the start, it’s easier to make these changes.

There are several factors and ways to make your products scalable. At the Nerd Up: Scale Up conference, our speakers will discuss some important ones to help guide you. So, are you good with scalability? Let’s move on to artificial intelligence, another major topic of the conference.

What do you need to know about AI?

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a field of computer science that deals with creating computer systems that can mimic human intelligence to a degree. Formally defining AI is difficult. In fact, in the book “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach," authors Russell and Norvig gathered eight definitions for AI from different studies.

But one thing is for sure: AI is one of the most popular and sought-after fields today. This is true not only for scientists and mathematicians but also for businesspeople and modern developers.

One increasingly popular topic about AI is OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company. OpenAI provides various APIs that developers can use to create beneficial AI-powered applications.

For example, ChatGPT is a model for human-like conversations. It can answer questions, remember conversations, and even admit mistakes, making it perfect for chatbots. OpenAI allows developers to integrate chatbots into their applications quickly. As a result, developers can scale their applications rapidly and meet their users’ needs.

Developers can also use AI to improve the quality of existing systems. AI does this by increasing productivity, reducing costs, and improving the user experience.

Why we need AI

• AI for commercial software and websites is one of the best and most popular innovations that we have today
• It can make our lives easier (with the right guidance and usage)
• AI is getting more advanced and accurate every day
• It can help improve existing or old solutions
• AI functionality is becoming more accessible for developers

What is the Qwik framework?

Qwik is another topic that the conference will cover, but what is it, exactly? Qwik is a web framework that promotes performance and scalability. Its goal is to minimize the application’s JavaScript executions and downloads. Some of its features include:

• No hydration (instant interaction with the application even on slow mobile devices)
• Resumability (No JS downloads/execution before handling user interaction or rendering)
• Easy lazy loading (load digital assets as needed)
• Minimal rendering for downloaded and executed code
• Scalability (The amount of downloaded code is based on user interaction complexity instead of component size)
• One mental model to follow for both front-end and back-end code

Qwik believes that developers shouldn’t worry too much about application size. This is because the industry’s best practices often translate into larger bundles. Furthermore, the Qwik philosophy states that tooling can break down applications into different chunks. Developers can then lazy-load these chunks. This means that the runtime will only download these assets as needed. This view on sizing makes Qwik a helpful tool for scaling websites and applications.

Qwik is perfect for many different applications, especially those with file management features. The framework allows developers to rapidly build applications. And when paired with a capable file management service, Qwik also makes handling digital assets much easier.

Why we need frameworks like Qwik

• We can surpass limits set by large application bundle sizes with these frameworks
• Qwik makes it easy to speed up applications and websites
• You can follow all the best practices and still have good performance
• Qwik strikes the balance between an application with less interactivity but high performance and an application with more interactivity but poor performance

What is microservice architecture?

A microservice architecture is a type of application architecture that developers can follow when building larger applications. The “microservice” part means that the applications that use this application architecture consist of a set of services. These don’t just refer to any services, however. Each service must possess the following qualities:

• Small, loosely coupled, and independently deployable (i.e., a team can update and deploy their microservice separately from the main application)
• An independent codebase that is owned by a small team
• The ability to handle its own data or external state persistence
• The ability to communicate with other microservices using APIs (details of the other services must be abstracted from one another)
• The ability to emerge from different tech stacks compared to the other microservices of the application (i.e., every service doesn’t have to have the same frameworks or libraries)

By following this application architecture, developers can rapidly develop and frequently update large applications. Microservices also allow businesses to change their tech stack at will, letting them adapt to newer technologies and trends. And because of these characteristics, microservice architecture greatly contributes to an application's scalability.

However, there are proper strategies for designing microservices for scalability. You still have to optimize these microservices. This process can include steps like using service meshes and pipelines for testing and deployment. Fortunately, optimizing these microservices is one of the major topics of the upcoming conference.

Why we need a microservice architecture

• Easier management of services (bug fixes, new releases) because of independence
• More scalability and productivity from smaller teams working on one service (less and faster communication compared to larger teams working on one or multiple services)
• It’s easier to add or remove features when they’re separate from one another
• Developers have more control over scaling their application (scale one or some services instead of the entire application every time)

Time to nerd up and scale up

And that’s it for these interesting topics, at least for now. At the conference on February 22, 2023, you’ll get much more detailed insights about the topics that we’ve discussed above. To register for the upcoming online conference, click here.