domwatson.getMeta()

• CTO at Pixl8
• Developing 20+ years
• Lead dev of Preside
• Musical Theatre actor in a previous life
• https://lichess.org/@/DomWatson, https://www.chess.com/member/domwatson

pixl8.getMeta()

• UK Digital agency serving the membership sector (mostly)
• Develop a platform for membership organisations to manage their website, CRM, email and more
• A growing company, currently  ~80 employees

preside.getMeta()

• A development platform for writing data driven applications. Including headless APIs, pure admin systems and full blown CMSs
• Open source
• Awesome sauce
• Time for a 20,000 ft overview getting started video

SaaS Cloud Whizzbang++ vs Just build it your **** (good) self

Tip: don't build EVERYTHING

• Some off-the-shelf services are just too good and no need to rewrite them  - Developer experience with integration is a good indicator!
• Some problems are not worth the maintenance
• Some problems are too hard
• LOTS of problems are worth tackling yourself though :)

Things we don't build

• JIRA. Yet (working on it, bit by bit)
• Gitlab (will never do)
• Identity management (basics could easily be done, but so many integrations and good options out there) - we use JumpCloud
• Networking management (we use Cloudflare)

Things we do/have

• Pixl8 Intranet (with ALLLL the tools and hub for our integrations)
  • Amazon SES infra provisioning
  • Application management and CI (triggering to Gitlab)
  • Vulnerability report gathering
  • HR systems
  • Some project management exensions of JIRA
  • WIKI
  • ... and much more
• Mailkeeper
• Translation manager for software i18n
• Encryption key server
• Dev tools
• .. and more

Pixl8 Approach

Some dev tooling

• Low bar to entry
• A nice welcome break for developers when working on tooling
• So long as there's documentation and it works, we get to stress a little bit less about the perfection of the implementation

Example: Git tooling around releasing and patching

Our intranet "MIS"

• A central hub
• Pixl8's main CRM system
• WIKI
• HR management
• Major source of building our tools

Building a micro service

• Sometime we don't use Preside :o :O :O
• Upcoming version of Preside makes it more viable to create smaller focused micro service/apps
• e.g. just make an API with no admin but using the Preside data model framework

Auto i18n tranlation

• Challenge with constant flow of new i18n in our code base that requires translation in multiple languages
• Mix existing translation services with our own custom application to make this flow easier
• Plugin to Gitlab pipelines to make it zero friction

What's new and upcoming

• 10.25 and 10.26 released since last year
• Working on 10.27

Upcoming

• Dependent features && Preside "zero"
• Local app extensions - like modules_app for Coldbox, can have extensions_app/ folder
• Data API extension brought into core
• Alt admin theme brought into core
• Private workflow extension published and brought into core
• More overall admin UI/UX improvements