Alternatives to Google Hangouts Chat

We're using GitHub for version control as it's an industry standard for version control and our team has plenty of experience using it. We also found many features such as issues and project help us organize. We also really liked the fact that it has the Actions CI platform built in because it allows us to keep more of our development in one place. We chose Slack as our main communication platform because it allows us to organize our communication streams into various channels for specific topics. Additionally, we really liked the integrations as they allow us to keep a lot of our in formation in one place rather than spread around many different apps.

Sentry has been essential to our development approach. Nobody likes errors or apps that crash. We use Sentry heavily during Node.js and React development. Our developers are able to see error reports, crashes, user's browsers, and more, all in one place. Sentry also seamlessly integrates with Asana, Slack, and GitHub.

I own an Escape Room. Since right now everyone is practicing social distancing, I would like to run my Escape Room games virtually. I would like to allow approx 4 users to log in to play. They can chitchat a few minutes before their game to get to know each other. Then once the game begins, I will introduce myself and give them the plot to their escape game. I will have a wide-angle camera mounted to the wall to show the room, and as the game master, carry a tablet or webcam around as players talk to me and direct me to show them certain items in the room, move in for closeups in certain areas, try lock combinations, etc. I will be their hands while they solve the puzzles. I am not sure if Google Hangouts Google Meet or Zoom is better for this. I did try it yesterday using google hangout meet and it was good, but I think there may have been a wifi issue where it was choppy. Just trying to figure out the best option. Thank you! Catherine

I'm looking for advice on what App to use in conversation and phone calls to someone who lives out of the country. Should I use Google Hangouts, Google Hangouts Chat, or does anyone have any other suggestions? I would greatly appreciate any help you could possibly provide. Thank you

Hi, I am building an enhanced web-conferencing app that will have a voice/video call, live chats, live notifications, live discussions, screen sharing, etc features. Ref: Zoom.

I need advise finalizing the tech stack for this app. I am considering below tech stack:

• Frontend: React
• Backend: Node.js
• Database: MongoDB
• IAAS: #AWS
• Containers & Orchestration: Docker / Kubernetes
• DevOps: GitLab, Terraform
• Brokers: Redis / RabbitMQ

I need advice at the platform level as to what could be considered to support concurrent video streaming seamlessly.

Also, please suggest what could be a better tech stack for my app?

#SAAS #VideoConferencing #WebAndVideoConferencing #zoom #stack

Using Screenhero via Slack was getting to be pretty horrible. Video and sound quality was often times pretty bad and worst of all the service just wasn't reliable. We all had high hopes when the acquisition went through but ultimately, the product just didn't live up to expectations. We ended up trying Zoom after I had heard about it from some friends at other companies. We noticed the video/sound quality was better, and more importantly it was super reliable. The Slack integration was awesome (just type /zoom and it starts a call)

You can schedule recurring calls which is helpful. There's a G Suite (Google Calendar) integration which lets you add a Zoom call (w/dial in info + link to web/mobile) with the click of a button.

Meeting recordings (video and audio) are really nice, you get recordings stored in the cloud on the higher tier plans. One of our engineers, Jerome, actually built a cool little Slack integration using the Slack API and Zoom API so that every time a recording is processed, a link gets posted to the "event-recordings" channel. The iOS app is great too!

#WebAndVideoConferencing #videochat

Hello everyone, I plan on building a platform that supports 100s of forums out of the box, it would give the user the ability to create forums, where other users can comment, post images, and videos (the size of videos would be limited). Each forum would have the ability to trend. I have been doing a lot of research and I have arrived at Golang and Erlang as the backend languages and PostgreSQL as the DB. Erlang would be used for the routing of chats and messages, while Go would be used to manage the forums. We would also be implementing a one on one chat system like WhatsApp chat, where users can add contacts.

Please I would like to know if the languages picked are appropriate for this project. Suggestions would be appreciated.

Looking for the pros and cons for a tool we can use best for cross-team collaboration (software development). Has anyone compared Google Hangouts Chat with Microsoft Teams? What were the advantages of either??

We use Microsoft Teams as our primary workplace collaboration tool. It enables our team to work remotely and still collaborate on projects - with integration to JIRA and Confluence, the tool enables us to create War Rooms when problems occur and also provides information-sharing capabilities. Replaced HipChat.

Oof. I have truly hated JavaScript for a long time. Like, for over twenty years now. Like, since the Clinton administration. It's always been a nightmare to deal with all of the aspects of that silly language.

But wowza, things have changed. Tooling is just way, way better. I'm primarily web-oriented, and using React and Apollo together the past few years really opened my eyes to building rich apps. And I deeply apologize for using the phrase rich apps; I don't think I've ever said such Enterprisey words before.

But yeah, things are different now. I still love Rails, and still use it for a lot of apps I build. But it's that silly rich apps phrase that's the problem. Users have way more comprehensive expectations than they did even five years ago, and the JS community does a good job at building tools and tech that tackle the problems of making heavy, complicated UI and frontend work.

Obviously there's a lot of things happening here, so just saying "JavaScript isn't terrible" might encompass a huge amount of libraries and frameworks. But if you're like me, yeah, give things another shot- I'm somehow not hating on JavaScript anymore and... gulp... I kinda love it.

How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

• GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
• Respectively Git as revision control system
• SourceTree as Git GUI
• Visual Studio Code as IDE
• CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
• Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
• SonarQube as quality gate
• Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
• VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
• Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
• Heroku for deploying in test environments
• nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
• SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
• Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
• PostgreSQL as preferred database system
• Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

• Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
• Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
• Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
• Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
• Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
• Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.

Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.