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8
Dec, 2022

Top 10 Security Tools for Your AWS Environment

Amazon Web Services (AWS) enables organizations to build and scale applications quickly and securely. However, continuously adding new tools and services introduces new security challenges. According to reports, 70 percent of enterprise IT leaders are concerned about how secure they are in the cloud and 61 percent of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) believe their cloud data is at risk.

AWS provides many different security tools to help customers keep their AWS accounts and applications secure. In fact, there was significant focus on AWS security best practices at re:Invent 2020. See the Best practices with Amazon S3 recap and Jeremy Cowan’s Securing your Amazon EKS applications: Best practices session for some of the details.

In this article, we’ll review the top ten AWS security tools you should consider using to improve your security posture in 2021 and beyond. Before we do that, we will briefly explain AWS account security versus application and service security.  Organizations must focus on keeping both secure to protect against different types of attacks.

Account Security Versus Application And Service Security

AWS provides security tools designed to improve both account security and application and service security.

An AWS account is an attack vector, as resources and data are accessible through the public application programming interface (API). Implementing a secure identity and access management strategy helps prevent leaking data — such as in S3 buckets — to the public. AWS’s many tools provide insights into your configured permissions and access patterns, and record all actions for compliance and audit purposes.

Applications and services hosted in AWS are susceptible to different kinds of threats from the outside. Cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and brute-force attacks target public endpoints. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks may attempt to bring down your services, potentially compromising your architecture security. Without proper management, sensitive information — such as database credentials — may leak.

Therefore, it’s critical that organizations migrating to the cloud focus on minimizing risk and improving their overall security posture by addressing both account security as well as application and service security. The following AWS services lock down your cloud security, helping keep your customer data and systems safe from attack.

Top 6 AWS Account Security Tools

1. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service for securely controlling access to AWS resources. It enables you to create and control services for user authentication or limit access to a certain set of people who use your AWS resources.

The IAM workflow includes the following six elements:

  1. A principal is an entity that can perform actions on an AWS resource. A user, a role or an application can be a principal.
  2. Authentication is the process of confirming the identity of the principal trying to access an AWS product. The principal must provide its credentials or required keys for authentication.
  3. Request: A principal sends a request to AWS specifying the action and which resource should perform it.
  4. Authorization: By default, all resources are denied. IAM authorizes a request only if all parts of the request are allowed by a matching policy. After authenticating and authorizing the request, AWS approves the action.
  5. Actions are used to view, create, edit or delete a resource.
  6. Resources: A set of actions can be performed on a resource related to your AWS account.

Let us explore the components of IAM in the next section of the AWS IAM tutorial.

To review, here are some of the main features of IAM:

  • Shared access to the AWS account. The main feature of IAM is that it allows you to create separate usernames and passwords for individual users or resources and delegate access.
  • Granular permissions. Restrictions can be applied to requests. For example, you can allow the user to download information, but deny the user the ability to update information through the policies.
  • Multifactor authentication (MFA). IAM supports MFA, in which users provide their username and password plus a one-time password from their phone—a randomly generated number used as an additional authentication factor.
  • Identity Federation. If the user is already authenticated, such as through a Facebook or Google account, IAM can be made to trust that authentication method and then allow access based on it. This can also be used to allow users to maintain just one password for both on-premises and cloud environment work.
  • Free to use. There is no additional charge for IAM security. There is no additional charge for creating additional users, groups or policies.
  • PCI DSS compliance. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is an information security standard for organizations that handle branded credit cards from the major card schemes. IAM complies with this standard.
  • Password policy. The IAM password policy allows you to reset a password or rotate passwords remotely. You can also set rules, such as how a user should pick a password or how many attempts a user may make to provide a password before being denied access.

In the last section of the AWS IAM tutorial, let us go through a demo on how to create an S3 bucket using the multifactor authentication (MFA) feature.

2. Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors your AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation. These include use of compromised credentials, simplified forensics and continuous monitoring of all security events seen in an AWS customers environment. With the announcement of new Malware Production, GuardDuty will scan EBS-backed EC2 instances with malicious behavior based on GuardDuty’s existing findings and report malware detected on EC2 and containers running on EC2 and instantly send data to Trellix Helix.

3. Amazon Macie

Amazon Macie is a security service that uses machine learning to automatically discover, classify and protect sensitive data in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. It currently only supports Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), but more AWS data stores are planned.

Macie can recognize any PII or Protected Health Information (PHI) that exists in your S3 buckets. Macie also monitors the S3 buckets themselves for security and access control. This all can help you meet regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) or just continually achieve the security you require in the AWS Cloud environment.

Within a few minutes after enabling Macie for your AWS account, Macie will generate your S3 bucket list in the region where you enabled it. Macie will also begin to monitor the security and access control of the buckets. When it detects the risk of unauthorized access or any accidental data leakage, it generates detailed findings.

The dashboard provides you with a summary that shows you how the data is accessed or moved. This dashboard gives you a view of the total number of buckets, the total number of objects, and the total number of S3 storage consumed.

It also breaks down S3 buckets by whether they are shared publicly, encrypted or not, and buckets shared inside and outside your AWS account or AWS Organization.

Create and run sensitive data discovery jobs to automatically discover, record, and report sensitive data in Amazon S3 buckets.

You can configure the job to run only once for on-demand analysis, or periodically for periodic analysis and monitoring.

A finding is a detailed report of potential policy violations for sensitive data in S3 buckets or S3 objects. Macie provides two types of findings: policy findings and sensitive data findings.

Macie can also send all findings to Amazon CloudWatch Events so you can build custom remediation and alert management.

4. AWS Config

AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance.

With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time.

These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.

Allow you to assess, audit and evaluate configurations of your AWS resources.

Very useful for Configuration Management as part of an ITIL program.

Creates a baseline of various configuration settings and files and can then track variations against that baseline.

5. AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail is an application program interface (API) call-recording and log-monitoring Web service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS CloudTrail allows AWS customers to record API calls, sending log files to Amazon S3 buckets for storage. The service provides API activity data including the identity of an API caller, the time of an API call, the source of the IP address of an API caller, the request parameters and the response elements returned by the AWS service.

CloudTrail can be configured to publish a notification for each log file delivered, allowing users to take action upon log file delivery — a process that according to AWS should only take about 15 minutes. It can also be configured to aggregate log files across multiple accounts so that log files are delivered to a single S3 bucket.

The service can facilitate regulatory compliance reporting for organizations that use AWS and need to track the API calls for one or more AWS account. CloudTrail can also be configured to support security information (SIEM) and event management platforms and and resource management.

6. Security Hub

AWS Security Hub combines information from all the above services in a central, unified view. It collects data from all security services from multiple AWS accounts and regions, making it easier to get a complete view of your AWS security posture. In addition, Security Hub supports collecting data from third-party security products. Security Hub is essential to providing your security team with all the information they may need.

A key feature of Security Hub is its support for industry recognized security standards including the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Combine Security Hub with AWS Organizations for the simplest way to get a comprehensive security overview of all your AWS accounts.

Now that we have addressed the top account security tools, let’s focus on the top four AWS application sSecurity tTools you should consider.

Top 4 AWS Application Security Tools

1. Amazon Inspector

Amazon Inspector is an AWS software tool that automatically assesses a customer’s AWS cloud deployment for security vulnerabilities and deficiencies. Amazon Inspector evaluates cloud applications for weak points or deviations from best practices before and after they are deployed, validating that proper security measures are in place. The service then provides and prioritizes a list of security findings, including detailed descriptions of issues and recommendations to fix problems.

Amazon Inspector is available through the AWS Management Console and is installed as an agent on the operating system of Elastic Compute Cloud instances. Amazon Inspector requires an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role, which grants the service permission to itemize instances as well as tags to assess before evaluating the security of a cloud deployment. The service can create an AWS IAM role, if needed.

An IT administrator defines an assessment template, which includes the rules packages to follow, the duration of the assessment run, the topics that result in notifications from Amazon Simple Notification Service and other attributes. The analysis of the target environment is called the assessment run, which analyzes behavioral data within a target, including network traffic on running processes and communication between cloud services.

Amazon Inspector pulls best practices from a knowledge base consisting of hundreds of rules (individual security practices or tests) that are updated by AWS security researchers. Amazon Inspector provides public-facing APIs that allow a user to incorporate the service on non-cloud technologies, such as email or security dashboards.

Amazon Inspector is billed based on the number of assessment runs and systems assessed, combining those elements into a metric called agent-assessments. Amazon provides a free trial before billing a customer per agent-assessment.

2. AWS Shield

AWS Shield protects AWS components against DDoS attacks. These attacks produce huge numbers of artificially generated requests to disrupt public applications. Shield is available in two presentations: Standard and Advanced.

AWS Shield Standard is enabled by default in CloudFront and Route 53 at no extra cost. AWS Shield Advanced is available for those two services plus several others: Elastic Load Balancing, EC2, Elastic IPs and Global Accelerator.

AWS Shield Standard offers protection against certain attacks but lacks flexibility for custom configurations. Shield Advanced integrates with the AWS WAF service to configure specific protection rules. Additionally, Shield Advanced provides access to the AWS Shield response team, a 24/7 support group available for emergencies. It also protects against extra AWS charges that could incur as a result of increased usage due to a DDoS attack; affected customers can request credits.

AWS Shield Advanced costs $3,000 per month. There is an additional data transfer fee, which varies depending on the protected resource type and the amount of data transferred (e.g., <100 TB, 400 TB, 500 TB). The Shield Advanced data transfer fee could be between $25 to $50 for 1 TB of data transferred within the initial 100 TB bracket, depending on the protected resource type. This is in addition to the data transfer fees applicable to each protected resource. The monthly fee is applicable per AWS Organization. Therefore, deployments across multiple AWS accounts within one Organization would pay only a single fee.

6
Dec, 2022

AWS vs GCP – Which Cloud Services to Choose in 2023?

  • Google Cloud is a suite of Google’s public cloud computing resources & services whereas AWS is a secure cloud service developed and managed by Amazon.
  • Google Cloud offers Google Cloud Storage, while AWS offers Amazon Simple Storage Services.
  • In Google cloud services, data transmission is a fully encrypted format on the other hand, in AWS, data transmission is in the general format.
  • Google Cloud volume size is 1 GB to 64 TB while AWS volume size is 500 GB to 16 TB.
  • Google Cloud provides backup services, but AWS offers cloud-based disaster recovery services.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a platform that offers flexible, reliable, scalable, easy-to-use, and cost-effective cloud computing solutions.

AWS cloud computing platform offers a massive collection of cloud services that build up a fully-fledged platform. It is known as a powerhouse of storage, databases, analytics, networking, and deployment/delivery options offered to developers.

Here are the important pros/benefits of selecting AWS web services:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers easy deployment process for an app
  • You should opt for AWS when you have DevOps teams who can configure and manage the infrastructure
  • You have very little time to spend on the deployment of a new version of your web or mobile app.
  • AWS web service is an ideal option when your project needs high computing power
  • Helps you to improve the productivity of the application development team
  • A range of automated functionalities including the configuration, scaling, setup, and others
  • It is a cost-effective service that allows you to pay only for what you use, without any up-front or long-term commitments.
  • AWS allows organizations to use the already familiar programming models, operating systems, databases, and architectures.
  • You are allowed cloud access quickly with limitless capacity.

Important features of Amazon Web Services (AWS) are:

  • Total Cost of Ownership is very low compared to any private/dedicated servers.
  • Offers Centralized Billing and management
  • Offers Hybrid Capabilities
  • Allows you to deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks

What is Google Cloud?

Google launched the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2011. This cloud computing platform helps a business to grow and thrive. It also helps you to take advantage of Google’s infrastructure and providing them with services that is intelligent, secure, and highly flexible.

Here are the pros/benefits of selecting Google cloud services:

  • Offers higher productivity gained through Quick Access to innovation
  • Employees can work from Anywhere
  • Future-Proof infrastructure
  • It provides a serverless environment which allows you to connect cloud services with a large focus mainly on the microservices architecture.
  • Offers Powerful Data Analytics
  • Cost-efficiency due to long-term discounts
  • Big Data and Machine Learning products
  • Offers Instance and payment configuration

Important features of Google Cloud are:

  • Constantly including more Language & OS.
  • A better UI helps you to improves user experience.
  • Offers an on-demand self-service
  • Broad network access
  • Resource pooling and Rapid elasticity

AWS vs. GCP - Products and Services

AWS and GCP have over 100 products and services in their catalogs that efficiently help customers work with cloud technologies. We will look at the differences between the popular services that AWS and GCP offer to their clients. 

Compute Engine is a compute and host service that provides scalable virtual machines to clients for running their workload tasks and applications. 

GCP provides four types of compute engine instances that offer specific features:

  • General Purpose – It is used for general workloads with reasonable price and performance ratios. 

  • Compute Optimised – It is optimized for compute-intensive workloads and offers higher performance than general-purpose instances. 

  • Memory Optimised – It is designed for memory-intensive tasks, providing up to 12TB of memory per core.

  • Accelerator Optimised – It is designed for parallel processing and GPU-intensive processes. 

AWS: Typically, AWS provides different EC2 instances similar to the list above. 

  • General Purpose instances provide diverse functionalities like compute, storage, and networking in equal proportions. General Purpose instances are suitable for web servers.

  • Compute Optimised instances are ideal for high-performance tasks that require high-speed processors and are compute-intensive—for example – game servers, media encoding devices, etc. 

  • Memory Optimised instances are optimal for situations where a large amount of data is processed in memory. These EC2 instances come to EBS optimized by default and are powered by the AWS Nitro System.

  • Storage Optimised instances offer high sequential and random read/write operations capability. These are used primarily for workloads that perform read/write on huge data stored in local storage. 

  • GPU/Accelerated instances are used for graphics processing and floating-point calculation that require colossal processing power. Accelerated Instances use extra processors and dedicated GPUs that boost hardware performance. 

Kubernetes is open-source container management and orchestration system that helps in application deployment and scaling. Containers are resources that run code along with its constituent dependencies, and Kubernetes provides container management and portability with optimal resource utilization for application development. It is easier to run Kubernetes on GCP because Google has been involved in the development of Kubernetes from its inception. Elastic Kubernetes Service in AWS provides no resource monitoring tool compared to Stackdriver by GCP. 

Serverless computing is a prevalent Function-as-a-Service example that does not require the deployment of virtual machine instances. AWS Lambda is the serverless offering from AWS, and Cloud Functions is its GCP counterpart. Google Cloud Functions support only Node.js, while AWS Lambda functions support many languages, including Java, C, python, etc. It is also easier to run cloud functions when compared to AWS Lambda since it needs a few steps. On the other hand, AWS Lambda is faster than Google Cloud Functions by 0.102 million executions per second. 

Amazon and Google both have their solution for cloud storage. Let’s look at the features one by one:

AWS S3 

  • Each object is stored in a bucket, and one needs the developer given keys to retrieve these buckets. 

  • An S3 bucket can be stored from a list of regions depending on the proximity, availability, latency, and cost-related issues.  AWS has a vast web of connected data centers worldwide in all areas. It is bound to provide higher performance and speed when storing and retrieving data across large distances. 

GCP Storage 

  • Google Cloud storage provides high availability.  

  • It offers data consistency across regions and different locations. 

  • It also gives google developer console projects.

AWS glue is a fully managed, serverless extract, transform and load (ETL) service to discover, prepare and integrate data from multiple sources for machine learning, analytics, and application development. It is a serverless data integration service that makes data preparation easier, cheaper and faster. 

On the other hand, GCP Dataflow is a fully managed data processing service for batch and streaming big data processing. Dataflow allows a streaming data pipeline to be developed fast and with lower data latency. 

AWS vs. Google Cloud - Pricing

AWS: AWS offers three unique pricing features or models

  • Pay as you go: The model makes resource usage adaptable and flexible by pricing only the company’s current resources.

  • Save when you commit: The feature means that if you use AWS services for a certain period, like one year, you will be eligible to have saving offers. 

  • Pay Less by using more: AWS promotes more usage of its services by tiering the price. That means the more one uses a service, the cheaper it gets, and vice versa. 

GCP: GCP also offers features on pricing with some similarities to AWS

  • Only pay for what you use: Similar to AWS’s Pay-as-you-go model, you are only paying for resources you end up using. Thus, making it on-demand pricing.

  • Save on workloads by prepaying: The model saves customers money if they commit to using a service and pay early for the resources at discount prices. 

  • Stay in control of your spending: GCP offers many cost management tools that are freely available and provide valuable analytics like price and usage forecasts, intelligent recommendation on cost-cutting, etc. Using these, customers can inspect their spending and optimize it accordingly. 

  • Price Calculator or Estimator: GCP provides a price calculator tool using which customers can estimate the overall price for the product and services before subscribing to them and preemptively make amends in their budgets. 

GCP provides 300$ in credits to new customers to use their services and products up to the free monthly usage limit. GCP is relatively cheaper in pricing than its Amazon counterpart, AWS. It also charges for computing minute-wise and is more strict to the pay-what-you-use model. 

AWS vs. Google Cloud - Machine Learning

AWS and GCP offer cutting-edge machine learning tools from their portfolio that help develop, train, and test a machine learning model. AWS has three powerful tools: Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Lex, and Amazon Rekognition. In contrast, Google gives the clients two major options – Google Cloud AutoML for beginners and Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine for heavy-duty tasks and granular control. GCP also offers Vertex AI and Tensorflow for advanced machine learning capabilities.

AWS Machine Learning Services 

  • Amazon SageMaker is a full-fledged machine learning platform that runs on EC2 instances and can develop traditional machine learning implementations. 

  • Amazon Lex brings Natural Language Processing toolkit and speech recognition possibilities, focusing on integrating Chatbot applications. 

  • Amazon Rekognition is a computer vision suite that renders the development and testing of face/object recognition models. It can easily perform complex CV tasks like object classification, scene surveillance, and facial analysis. 

GCP Machine Learning Products 

  • Google Machine Learning Engine: It is the machine learning offering at scale from Google. Google ML engine can perform complicated Machine Learning tasks using GPU and Tensor Processing Unit while running externally trained models. With great efficacy, Google Machine Learning Engine automates resource provisioning, monitoring, model deploying, and hyperparameter tuning.  

  • Google Cloud AutoML is a machine learning toolkit explicitly built for beginners in the field. It offers functionalities like data model upload, training, and testing through its web interface. AutoML integrates well with other Google cloud services like cloud storage. It can perform all the complex machine learning problems like Face Recognition, etc.

  • Tensorflow: Tensorflow is an already renowned name in the machine learning community. Tensorflow is an open-source library for numerical computation and analysis. It is used widely in deep learning models and packs many useful Machine Learning functions.

  • Vertex AI is an MLOps platform that promotes experimentation through pre-trained APIs for natural language processing, image analysis, and computer vision.

AWS vs. GCP - Regions and Availability

Google Cloud network locations are available across 106 zones and 35 regions worldwide and over 200 countries and territories. In contrast, AWS is present in more than 245 countries and territories, with 29 launched regions and 93 availability zones. GCP is expanding its reach in different countries like Doha, Paris, Milan, Toronto, etc. At the same time, AWS is bringing its services to places such as Israel, UAE, Hyderabad, Switzerland, Jakarta, etc. 

Criteria
AWS
GCP
Overview
Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud provider worldwide, developed and maintained by Amazon, which provides cloud storage and computing services. Launched in 2006.
GCP is the cloud platform developed by Google that provides many cloud computing services that run and use the already established infrastructure used by other cloud services. Launched in 2008.
Availability
AWS has across 93 availability zones and 29 geographic regions worldwide.
GCP is present in more than 200+ countries and 106 zones across the globe.
Pricing and Billing
Minimum instance: 2vCPUs + 8GB RAM ~69USD/month Maximum instance: 3.84TB RAM + 128vCPUs ~$3.97/hour
Minimum instance: 2vCPUs + 8GB RAM ~52USD/month Maximum instance: 3.75TB RAM + 160vCPUs ~$5.32/hour
Market Share
AWS is leading with 34% of public cloud market share.
Google Cloud Platform commands 11% of the world cloud market.
Job Market and Salaries
LinkedIn search for AWS Cloud Engineers shows 45k+ job results. The average salary of an AWS Cloud Engineer in the USA is $136,453 per year.
LinkedIn search for GCP Engineers shows 24k+ results. The average salary of GCP Engineer in the USA is $141,375 per year.
Compute Services
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Compute Engine

AWS vs. GCP - Which is Better?

Comparing these two cloud giants at the forefront of the industry is complex. AWS and GCP are the most significant cloud providers and competitors like Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, IBM cloud, etc. To draw a differentiation between these technologies is like comparing iOS and Android or Mercedes and BMW. Both are good and have their own thriving cloud communities. 

We, as users, have to decide and pick a cloud platform that is compatible with our business foundation and allows us better control over our needs and demands. For example, Google offers myriad machine learning frameworks and utilities that integrate well with Google Cloud. If our goal is analytics, GCP could be a good choice. It is subjective in the end and contingent on the user/company. 

Everything is moving slowly to the cloud, and fewer on-premise applications and products remain. As cloud professionals, it is essential to have the expertise and know-how of various cloud providers in the industry. You can make critical decisions even if you have to switch between vendors. Learning the ins and outs of different cloud service providers, whether AWS or GCP, takes time and effort. Persistence is the key, ultimately. 

30
Nov, 2022

The Journey from POC to MVP to PMF: 5 things that every startup founder needs to know

The concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) is now pervasive. But it is not the only way to think about market development for new products. What’s the right way to be entrepreneurial, especially if you work in a highly regulated industry like finance?

MVP reflects a widely acceptable view that innovation is often experimental, and perhaps nowhere more experimental than in the startup community where entrepreneurs are, in effect, building a hypothesis about a product and its suitability for the market.

Product-Market Fit is an on older idea. It has much more fluidity about it – rather than proposing a series of iteration cycles it better reflects the reality of much entrepreneurship.  Whatever the merits of  product, and however aligned with customers, there is nonetheless an x factor that allows some products fly while others stay grounded.

The challenge to startup growth can be the presence of oligopolies or market entry barriers that come from deeply entrenched incumbents.  This is very much the case in financial services. To date very few startups have managed to breakthrough as alternative providers. The banking community, by and large, already has a tier of suppliers in its core system portfolio. Why would they need another? The answer is process model innovation. Banks, and financial service companies, need processes that radically reduce costs and, potentially, provide new services.

But in a game where oligopolies still rule what do terms like MVP and Product Market Fit mean for startups?

1. Market Validation

Andreessen is not the only one who has emphasized the importance of so-called product-market fit in determining a startup’s success or failure. Research from CBinsights supports this notion, finding that 42% of startup failures were due to a lack of market need. The lesson we can distill from this is, “don’t offer something people don’t want.”

Essentially, those failed startups did not achieve market validation.

Market validation is the way to confirm that your idea is a solution to a problem people actually have.

Some business advisors define market validation as a survey distributed to specific user segments, testing their attachment to your solution. However, we take the view that market validation is not a single action or event, but the thread that ties your whole business model together from proof of concept (POC) to product-market fit (PMF).

You don’t need a minimum viable product (MVP), or even a prototype, to start market validation. You just need an idea, open ears, and honest tongues. As soon as you have an idea you want to execute, you should talk about it!

First, you can ask friends, family, and other founders and entrepreneurs you know. Then, to the greatest extent possible, reach outside of your network to hear from people that are more likely to give it to you straight. If you get to this point, and everyone has told you it’s a stupid idea, you should probably consider the possibility that it is, indeed, a stupid idea.

If your idea is validated through your internal and external network, you should design and write a plan to continue market validation through your product development cycle. An initial step is to define your market. Who will be using your product? Whose pain point are you helping to alleviate?

Here are some basic questions to help you construct customer profiles and define your market:

  • What types of companies do potential customers work for?
  • How big is the company?
  • What is their job title?
  • How will this product improve their lives/jobs?
  • How can you find them?

If you can answer these questions, you are on your way to defining your market. This will be helpful when you are ready to launch a beta and reach out to your potential users. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves! Before any testing: alpha, beta, or otherwise, you will need to prove your concept.

2. POC: Proof Of Concept

A proof of concept (POC) is an exercise in which work is focused on determining whether an idea can be turned into a reality. A proof of concept is meant to determine the feasibility of the idea or to verify that the idea will function as envisioned.

It is sometimes also known as proof of principle.

A proof of concept is not intended to explore market demand for the idea, nor is it intended to determine the best production process.

Rather, its focus is to test whether the idea is viable — giving those involved in the proof-of-concept exercise the opportunity to explore the idea’s potential to be developed or built.

In software development, for example, a proof of concept would show whether an idea is feasible from a technology standpoint. For startups, a proof of concept would demonstrate financial viability.

Developing a proof of concept generally requires some investment of time or other resources, such as supporting technologies or necessary physical components to complete. Going through this process, however, enables companies to determine an idea’s viability before putting production-level resources behind an untested idea.

Developing a proof of concept can help a product owner to identify potential technical and logistical issues that might interfere with success. It also provides the opportunity for an organization to solicit internal feedback about a promising product or service, while reducing unnecessary risk and exposure and providing the opportunity for stakeholders to assess design choices early in the development cycle.

The individual or team going through this process can then use a successful proof of concept to convince stakeholders, managers or investors that the idea is worth pursuing further.

3. Prototype — Demonstrate the “How” of your Software Project

Prototyping is the fourth phase of both design thinking and design sprints. It’s an essential part of user experience (UX) design that usually comes after ideation, where you/your team have created and selected ideas that can solve users’ needs. In prototyping, you craft a simple experimental model of your proposed product so you can check how well it matches what users want through the feedback they give. You should consider prototyping from early on—using paper prototyping, if appropriate—so the feedback you gather from users can help guide development.

The advantages of prototyping are that you:

  1. Have a solid foundation from which to ideate towards improvements—giving all stakeholders a clear picture of the potential benefits, risks and costs associated with where a prototype might lead.
  2. Can adapt changes early—thereby avoiding commitment to a single, falsely-ideal version, getting stuck on local maxima of UX and later incurring heavy costs due to oversights.
  3. Show the prototype to your users so they can give you their feedback to help pinpoint which elements/variants work best and whether an overhaul is required.
  4. Have a tool to experiment with associated parts of the users’ needs and problems—therefore, you can get insights into less-obvious areas of the users’ world (e.g., you notice them using it for additional purposes or spot unforeseen accessibility issues such as challenges to mobile use).
  5. Provide a sense of ownership to all concerned stakeholders—therefore fostering emotional investment in the product’s ultimate success.
  6. Improve time-to-market by minimizing the number of errors to correct before product release.

4. MVP: Minimum Viable Product

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a concept from Lean Startup that stresses the impact of learning in new product development. Eric Ries, defined an MVP as that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. This validated learning comes in the form of whether your customers will actually purchase your product.

A key premise behind the idea of MVP is that you produce an actual product (which may be no more than a landing page, or a service with an appearance of automation, but which is fully manual behind the scenes) that you can offer to customers and observe their actual behavior with the product or service. Seeing what people actually do with respect to a product is much more reliable than asking people what they would do.

The primary benefit of an MVP is you can gain understanding about your customers’ interest in your product without fully developing the product. The sooner you can find out whether your product will appeal to customers, the less effort and expense you spend on a product that will not succeed in the market.

Teams use the term MVP, but don’t fully understand its intended use or meaning. Often this lack of understanding manifests in believing that an MVP is the smallest amount of functionality they can deliver, without the additional criteria of being sufficient to learn about the business viability of the product.

Teams may also confuse an MVP–which has a focus on learning–for a Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF) or Minimum Marketable Product (MMP)–which has a focus on earning. There’s not too much harm in this unless the team becomes too focused on delivering something without considering whether it is the right something that satisfies customer’s needs.

Teams stress the minimum part of MVP to the exclusion of the viable part. The product delivered is not sufficient quality to provide an accurate assessment of whether customers will use the product.

Teams deliver what they consider an MVP, and then do not do any further changes to that product, regardless of feedback they receive about it.

Proper use of an MVP means that a team may dramatically change a product that they deliver to their customers or abandon the product together based on feedback they receive from their customers. The minimum aspect of MVP encourages teams to do the least amount of work possible to useful feedback (Eric Ries refers to this as validated learning) which helps them avoid working on a product that no one wants.

5. PMF: Recognizing Product-Market Fit

Product-market fit describes a scenario in which a company’s target customers are buying, using, and telling others about the company’s product in numbers large enough to sustain that product’s growth and profitability.

According to entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreesen, who is often credited with developing the concept, product-market fit means finding a good market with a product capable of satisfying that market.

Alex Schultz, Facebook’s VP of Growth, says the biggest problem he sees facing the companies he advises is that they don’t have product-market fit when they think they do.

So, why is achieving it so important? Why do many venture capitalists demand evidence of product-market fit before investing in a company? Why does Andreesen, in fact, believe in the division of every startup’s life into two key stages: before product-market fit (BPMF) and after product-market fit (APMF)?

The answer is simple: Before you develop a product that you confirm enough people are willing to pay for, your team cannot afford to focus on other important strategic objectives such as growth or upselling existing users. Those initiatives could even be counterproductive, in fact, if you haven’t first determined that your product has enough of a market to sustain itself and generate a profit.

We generally associate the concept with marketing and product management. In reality, achieving it is a shared responsibility across the company. Sales, business development, support, finance, and all other departments help the company reach this important milestone.

No single set of metrics can tell any business when it achieves product-market fit. But Andrew Chen, a venture capitalist, offers some signals that a company is heading in the right direction with its offering:

  • When surveying potential customers or allowing them to test your product, does some segment indicate they will switch to your product?
  • Are some users who have rejected similar products on the market willing to try yours?
  • When user testing, do people group your product accurately with the right competitive offerings?
  • Do users demonstrate an understanding of your product’s differentiators or unique value proposition?
  • How do your underlying metrics (such as retention rates of users) measure up against those of your competitors?

Chen’s signals represent a mix of both qualitative and quantitative metrics. This is by design. Whatever methods your team uses to gauge success, you will want to include a mix of both as well. For example:

Quantitative:

  • NPS score
  • Churn rate
  • Growth rate
  • Market share

Qualitative:

  • Word of mouth. (As Andreesen says, if your customers talk about your products with others, they effectively become your product’s sales reps.)
  • Calls from the media or industry analysts come in much more frequently, and coverage of your product and company increases.

Just as the best way to measure product-market fit will differ for each company, there is no single path to achieving it. In his book, The Lean Product Playbook, Dan Olsen offers one high-level method that can help get your team started:

1. Determine your target customer

2. Identify underserved needs of that customer

3. Define your value proposition

4. Specify your minimum viable product (MVP) feature set

5. Develop your MVP

6. Test your MVP with customers

Then, based on those user tests and surveys, use metrics like the ones suggested above, from Andrew Chen, to determine if you’re headed in the right direction.

28
Nov, 2022

6 reasons why you should develop products like a startup

Every business founder, CTO, CEO, or product owner has to find the right product development strategy to suit their company’s business goals.

There are lots of different product development strategies out there and no real one size fits all rule when it comes to product management and development. 

One definite thing is that the complete product development strategy is crucial for any business if it wants to get out ahead of the competition by building a better product. 

Startups move faster, collaborate better and aren’t trapped by corporate bureaucracy or hidebound ways of thinking. But if you want your company or business units to act more like startups in their software development process, it helps to understand how startups really work and at what stages of their development. As you adopt the things that work for startups, you’ll need to be cognizant that your business units will need to grow and mature just like successful startups do.

Here are six ideas to innovate like a startup while avoiding common startup pitfalls:

1. Form smaller teams with leaders that carry a deep product understanding and are steeped in innovation ideas.

Amazon famously popularized the “two-pizza rule” in its early days. If you couldn’t feed the people in your meeting with two pizzas, you had too many people in the project for it to be productive.

The same holds true when forming product and development teams. Six to eight people on a team is plenty; five is even better for faster decision-making and higher productivity. Just make sure you have the right leaders in place for these teams. Team leaders at this stage or size have to be hands-on player-coaches who are innovative thinkers, passionate about understanding the solution and eager to interact with end users to collect feedback. 

2. Listen to your customers (clients)

You can’t have a successful software development initiative without understanding customers’ pain points and how other tools in the market are failing to meet those needs.

Don’t be afraid to allow your customers to participate in the innovation process as opposed to developing solutions in search of problems. This will also help you to take your products to where the market opportunity is and avoid the single-product mindset, instead developing complementary product lines on the same codebase.

3. Measure success based on innovation, not on people or budgets.

Since you’ll be keeping your teams small and lean like any startup worth its salt, staff and budget numbers shouldn’t be the defining barrier. Innovation is the only metric that counts. Are you expanding your product’s capabilities? Are you introducing new technology into the market before the competition? Are you reusing software assets to develop new product lines and move beyond the single-product mindset?

Creating the right culture and right talent to lead at this stage is critical for companies to continue to innovate, drive results and more importantly, establish a strong “product culture.” Following this course provides a foundation for a single-product company to be able to expand to a multi-product company and continue to maintain its startup culture as well as a fast pace of innovation.

4. Put a process in place that allows for continuous innovation and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Modern agile software development requires constant updates as new features are added, tested and put into production. This process requires building a CI/CD pipeline. You establish the source code for a development project, build the software using your tool of choice, test the software to make sure it’s behaving properly and free of coding errors and, finally, deploy the software once it’s passed quality control. As you make daily changes and updates, you go through this routine continuously.

You can automate this process, using commercial or open source tools, and avoid errors that turn into bugs. Customers appreciate your innovation and ideas and expect you to be able to solve problems for them that other firms haven’t figured out yet — but they still need your product to work.

5. Use solution-minded development techniques along with agile.

Agile development methods are great for supporting collaboration among remote teams, responding to changes faster, creating a feedback loop for continuous improvement and generally speeding up the product development lifecycle. This allows for a ton of features to be developed in short order. 

As the company gets a chance to establish the early customer base for its product, processes tighten and become more disciplined. The startup now must manage the innovation cycle in SaaS in context with maintaining product quality and delivering the product to the customer efficiently.

When the innovation cycles are short and new features are added rapidly, it is critically important to tie the innovation cycle to a solution. This is where the traditional software development approach still has its place, especially in terms of setting out the solution context and persona of the end user. You can still use agile sprints, but with controls in place for solution validation so that the final software you develop looks more like what you set out to do and what your customers want.

6. Foster a spirit of collaboration between product management and product marketing.

Once you’ve developed a new product, you need to make sure that it resonates with buyers and shows them how it can solve their pain points. This is where product marketing comes in.

Getting your product management and product marketing teams on the same page will lead to better alignment of vision, strategy and tactics and make you more responsive to your customers’ needs. Product marketing principles will provide a strong wrapper around the product development and make the end users appreciate the rapid development cycle to meet their feature demands.

Adopting some of the best traits of startups can help any development organization to raise their innovation game, become more responsive to customers and bring products to market faster. But startups have enough of a track record now to know what works and what doesn’t. The above steps should give you a baseline to form innovation centers inside your organization, improve your customer relations and gain new relevancy in the market.

25
Nov, 2022

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)? How Does Infrastructure as Code on AWS work? 

Overview

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes.

With IaC, configuration files are created that contain your infrastructure specifications, which makes it easier to edit and distribute configurations. It also ensures that you provision the same environment every time. By codifying and documenting your configuration specifications, IaC aids configuration management and helps you to avoid undocumented, ad-hoc configuration changes.

Version control is an important part of IaC, and your configuration files should be under source control just like any other software source code file. Deploying your infrastructure as code also means that you can divide your infrastructure into modular components that can then be combined in different ways through automation.

Automating infrastructure provisioning with IaC means that developers don’t need to manually provision and manage servers, operating systems, storage, and other infrastructure components each time they develop or deploy an application. Codifying your infrastructure gives you a template to follow for provisioning, and although this can still be accomplished manually, an automation tool. 

Declarative vs. imperative approaches to IaC

There are 2 ways to approach IaC: declarative or imperative. 

A declarative approach defines the desired state of the system, including what resources you need and any properties they should have, and an IaC tool will configure it for you. 

A declarative approach also keeps a list of the current state of your system objects, which makes taking down the infrastructure simpler to manage.

An imperative approach instead defines the specific commands needed to achieve the desired configuration, and those commands then need to be executed in the correct order. 

Many IaC tools use a declarative approach and will automatically provision the desired infrastructure. If you make changes to the desired state, a declarative IaC tool will apply those changes for you. An imperative tool will require you to figure out how those changes should be applied.

IaC tools are often able to operate in both approaches, but tend to prefer one approach over the other.

Benefits of IaC

Provisioning infrastructure has historically been a time consuming and costly manual process. Now infrastructure management has moved away from physical hardware in data centers, though this still may be a component for your organization, to virtualization, containers, and cloud computing. 

With cloud computing, the number of infrastructure components has grown, more applications are being released to production on a daily basis, and infrastructure needs to be able to be spun up, scaled, and taken down frequently. Without an IaC practice in place, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage the scale of today’s infrastructure.

IaC can help your organization manage IT infrastructure needs while also improving consistency and reducing errors and manual configuration.

Benefits:

  • Cost reduction
  • Increase in speed of deployments
  • Reduce errors 
  • Improve infrastructure consistency
  • Eliminate configuration drift

How IaC Works on AWS

Amazon’s market-leading, comprehensive cloud-computing platform, AWS (Amazon Web Services), combines Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and packaged Software as a Service (SaaS). It provides flexible, reliable, scalable, and easy-to-use computing power, database storage, analytics, networking, development tools, enterprise applications, and content delivery services. Launched in 2006 and built on Amazon’s internal infrastructure, AWS was also one of the first companies to introduce these services on a pay-as-you-go model. It dominates cloud computing for several compelling reasons. 

CloudFormation on AWS
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/

AWS covers 245 territories and countries and provides a vast array of

  • Automated services
  • Comprehensive functionality
  • State-of-the-art security
  • Cost-efficiency
  • Scalability
  • Performance
  • Quick and straightforward deployment
  • Systems integration
  • Support and proven operational expertise. 

Meet CloudFormation

So CloudFormation is the AWS IaC tool that serves as an automation platform that allows you to implement services or applications without having to set up and configure each one manually, saving you considerable time and avoiding the potential for mistakes and inconsistencies. Given its ease of use and wide-ranging capabilities, CloudFormation has helped make AWS so popular with companies of all sizes and types. Domain registrar and web-hosting company GoDaddy serves as a perfect example. 

Automating infrastructure management to focus on innovation

With more than 78 million domain names under management, more than 19 million daily entrepreneur/users, and handling more than 300,000 DNS queries per second, GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar/web hosting company in the world. And in 2018, they decided to transform their digital architecture from the on-premises, in-house, data-center model and move everything to the cloud. In doing so, they had three core objectives:

  • Accomplish the migration as quickly as possible.
  • Increase how application stacks are performed and operated.
  • Extend reliability and availability.

They did precisely that when they partnered with AWS and used CloudFormation, AWS Service Catalog and AWS Systems Manager.  

As a result, they could onboard and provision more than 200 accounts (more than 500 landing zones) within approximately one year, automatically provisioning each new onboard in under 2 hours. In addition, by automating the process through IaC, they saved approximately 25,000 hours and about $5,000 per account. They’ve saved more than 100 daily compute rotations just from automating the process and eliminating patching in terms of patching and updating.  This also freed up GoDaddy staff to spend more time working with and innovating for customers. But GoDaddy is by no means the only organization that benefits from IaC and AWS. 

Scaling as needed to support critical applications

In 2018, the Expedia Group planned to migrate 80 percent of its mission-critical apps from on-premises to the cloud. One of the world’s largest full-service online travel agencies, Expedia provides leisure and business travel services to customers around the globe. Committed to innovation and technology, Expedia began using AWS in 2010 when it launched its Expedia Suggest Service (ESS), a typeahead suggestion service that prompts customers to enter correction travel information. But ESS was not created solely for convenience. Expedia metrics showed that error pages were the greatest reason for customer site abandonment. But Expedia faced another challenge: time. 

On-premise vs cloud hosted
Source: https://www.ebcgroup.co.uk/news-insights/on-premises-vs-cloud

On-premises data-center solutions could not compete with decentralized, automated cloud services in terms of eliminating user lag and delays. So, Expedia took to the cloud. In the case study Expedia Group Increases Agility and Resiliency by Going All In on AWS, Expedia Principal Architect Magesh Chandramouli explains, “If an application processes 3,000 requests per second, we would have to configure our physical servers to run at about 30 percent capacity to avoid boxes running hot. On AWS, we can push CPU consumption close to 70 percent because we can always scale-out. Fundamentally, running in AWS enables a 230 percent CPU consumption efficiency in the data processing. We run our critical applications on AWS because we can scale and use the infrastructure efficiently.” 

This kind of success prompted the migration of other Expedia services to AWS. For example, to enable continuous deployment and speed, they used a blue-green deployment approach to create parallel production environments on AWS. They also used the deployment to troubleshoot effectively, scale, and develop applications faster. Expedia Principal Software Engineer Jun-Dai Bates-Kobashigawa also highlights the multifold value of IaC for provisioning, “If there are 100 boxes running, you might have to take 20 boxes out to apply new code. Using AWS, we don’t have to take capacity out; we just add new capacity and send traffic to it.” 

16
Nov, 2022

Flutter vs React Native: When to Choose Flutter Over React

Flutter vs. React Native: In a nutshell

Criteria
Flutter
React Native
What is it?
A portable UI toolkit for building natively-compiled apps across mobile, web, and desktop* from a single codebase
A framework for building native applications using React
Official release
December 2018, Google I/O
March 2015, F8 Conference
Created by
Google
Facebook
Free and open source
Yes
Yes
Programming language
Dart
JavaScript
Popularity
120,000 Stars on Github (May 2021)
95,300 stars on Github (May 2021)
UI
Flutter apps look as good on the up-to-date operating systems as they do on older versions. Since they only have one codebase, the apps look and behave similarly across iOS and Android – but thanks to Material Design and Cupertino widgets, they can also imitate the platform design itself. How’s that possible? Flutter contains two sets of widgets which conform to specific design languages: Material Design widgets implement Google’s design language of the same name; Cupertino widgets imitate Apple’s iOS design. This means that your Flutter app will look and behave naturally on each platform, imitating their native components.
Application components look just like native ones (e.g. a button on an iOS device looks just like a native iOS button, and the same on Android). The fact React Native uses native components under the hood should give you confidence that, after any OS UI update, your app’s components will be instantly upgraded as well. That said, this can break the app’s UI but it happens very rarely. If you want your app to look near-identical across platforms – as well as on older versions of an operating system (as Flutter achieves) – then consider using third-party libraries (like this one). They will enable you to use Material Design components, in place of native ones.
Sharing code
With Flutter 2 (announced in March 2021), we can use the same codebase to ship native apps to five operating systems: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux; as well as web experiences targeting browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Edge. Flutter can even be embedded in cars, TVs, and smart home appliances. (source). Perhaps the single largest announcement in Flutter 2 is production-quality support for the web. It can be used for: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) that combine the web’s reach with the capabilities of a desktop app, Single Page Apps (SPAs) that load once and transmit data to and from internet services. Existing mobile apps – allowing Flutter apps to be run on a desktop.
iOS and Android – but there are select libraries that allow you to use the same code to build iOS, Android, web, and Windows10 apps. You can also extract shared code in mobile, desktop, and web apps, to a separate repository; treat it as a separate project; then inject it in the same way as another dependency. This allows a developer to focus on writing code for a specific platform without having to consider compatibility with another one. Top apps made with this technology Xianyu app by Alibaba, Hamilton app for Hamilton Musical, Google Ads app, Philips Hue, My BMW Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Ads, Skype, Tesla Time-to-market Typically much faster than native development. Possibly as fast as development with Flutter. However… React Native uses bridge and native elements, so it may require separate optimization for each platform – a problem that widget-based Flutter doesn’t run into. It may make the app development with React Native longer. Competitive advantage Great look and feel thanks to rich widgets; Rapidly growing community, and popularity; Excellent documentation with strong support from the Flutter team (which makes it easy to start developing with Flutter); Improving Flutter for Web, offering the potential for one codebase across mobile and web platforms Difficult to beat time-to-market length Stability (5+ years on the market); Many successful, prominent market players using React Native; Mature, vast community; Easy-to-learn technology; Plenty of tutorials and libraries, which allow quick and easy development; Code can be easily reused for both web app and desktop app development. When it is not the best fit If… • Your app needs to support 3D Touch (for now, Flutter doesn’t support 3D – but it features on the Flutter team’s long-term roadmap) • The design of your app is platform-specific • Your app requires multiple interactions with an OS; or requires rare, little-known native libraries • You need a minimalistic UI, but rely on significant use of the phone hardware (e.g. an application that plays music, or only takes pictures) • You want to create an instant app (small-sized app) If your app sounds like any of the above, it’s probably better you choose native app development. Read more about these cases here >> If… • Your app needs to handle less common, or ultra-specific tasks (like calculations) in the background • You require custom communication via Bluetooth (which can be tricky to implement using React Native) • You want to create an app for Android only In truth, if you want to build an iOS app and you know JavaScript, consider React Native – but if you want an Android-only app, it’s likely better to build natively with another team. Why? Right now, iOS has better support than Android. If your app sounds like any of the above, it’s probably better you consider choosing native app development.
Competitive advantage
Great look and feel thanks to rich widgets; Rapidly growing community, and popularity; Excellent documentation with strong support from the Flutter team (which makes it easy to start developing with Flutter); Improving Flutter for Web, offering the potential for one codebase across mobile and web platforms Difficult to beat time-to-market length
Stability (5+ years on the market); Many successful, prominent market players using React Native; Mature, vast community; Easy-to-learn technology; Plenty of tutorials and libraries, which allow quick and easy development; Code can be easily reused for both web app and desktop app development.

Pros and cons of Flutter

Pros of Flutter

We’ll start with the pros that make Flutter the best choice for the developers. Here’s the list of advantages of Flutter over React Native:

  • It looks great!
  • It’s rich in widgets;
  • The community is rapidly growing
  • Well-structured documentation
  • Permanent improvements for web development
  • It requires less testing
  • The apps are fast
  • It helps to create the same UI for older devices
  • Flutter 2 helps to build apps for the web!

Cons of Flutter

Even though the list of Flutter advantages is impressive, some disadvantages are still important to consider.

  • It is not native
  • The apps are bigger than native ones
  • It still has a limited set of tools and libraries comparing to native apps

These disadvantages are minor, and they do not interfere with app development. However, in some cases, the cons of Flutter may be decisive when choosing a cross-platform development framework.

Flutter Apps Examples

Applications are written in Flutter:

  • Google Ads.
  • Alibaba.
  • Square.
  • eBay.
  • Hamilton Musical.
  • Reflection.

Which one to pick for your next project?

As we can see now, Flutter and React Native have many things in common. First and foremost, they are both open-source frameworks that anyone can use. They both are developed by leading companies: Google created Flutter vs React Native was created by Facebook. To compare basic info about Flutter and React Native, you can check this info by NIX.

Flutter is easier to use as it is more resistant to system updates. It means that when iOS or Android update the OS, the app will remain the same. On the contrary, React Native depends on native elements, so when the update is released, some problems may appear in the launch app. Currently, Flutter supports Android 4.1+ or iOS 8+, while React Native supports Android 4.1+ and iOS 10+. 

The biggest difference between React Native and Flutter is that Flutter has plugins developed by the Google team, like geolocation and mapping. Unfortunately, React Native app works better with apps with a one-time location and does not require tracking. 

All in all, Flutter and React Native are great choices to save time and money on mobile app development. What framework to choose will depend on the preferences of the developer and the company.

15
Sep, 2022

How long does it take to build a custom mobile app?

Whenever you are planning to build an app, the first and foremost question that would come to your mind is the time it takes to build an app. You want to know as it helps you determine the product timeline and set up a plan for your product launch. The duration may vary based upon the scope of the project and the process you follow.

A smaller app will take shorter time compared to a bigger app.  I will take an example of three apps with varying size and then will show you typically how long it takes to complete those apps. This will give you an idea of how long your app might take.

I am taking the example of Instagram App, I have listed all the features in existing App and grouped features to make a small sized, mid sized and large sized Instagram app.

This table will help you determine in which category your app falls.

Features Small Version Mid Size Version Large Version
Login/Signup with Email, Facebook, Forgot Pswd, Change Password
Yes
Yes
Yes
Newsfeed with activities
Yes
Yes
Yes
Access Phone Camera, Take Photo, Add/Upload Photo from Gallery, post in the app.
Yes
Yes
Yes
Follow/Following Other Users
Yes
Yes
Yes
Share Photo Facebook
Yes
Yes
Yes
Search Users, View User Profiles, Edit Profile
Yes
Yes
Yes
Connect to Facebook Friends, Invite Facebook Friends
Yes
Yes
Yes
Like & Comment
Yes
Yes
Yes
Login/Signup with Phone No, Phonebook Access, Invite phone contacts to the app.
No
Yes
Yes
Share to Followers or Direct (While sharing photo/video, user can select whether they want to share with their followers or Direct with their friends)
No
Yes
Yes
Add Story in the app (It is listed on Top of the Homepage. It is basically photo/video added with story/description. When you click on any user profile photo, it will open photo/video and story added by the user. App will run user Story in a slider.)
No
Yes
Yes
Add Emoticons with Photo and Video
No
Yes
Yes
Capture Video, Add/Upload video in the post. Video Playing.
No
Yes
Yes
Push Notifications
No
Yes
Yes
Add Locations, Tag People in Photo/Video
No
Yes
Yes
Share on Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr
No
Yes
Yes
Messaging/Chatting
No
No
Yes
Apply Filters & Photo Editing
No
No
Yes
See Following Activity
No
No
Yes
Advanced Upload Settings
No
No
Yes
Suggestions by App for users and content
No
No
Yes
Multilingual App
No
No
Yes

How Long it takes to do scoping and the requirements

You want to capture the feature list, create detailed requirements and scope of the app. If you are good at it, you can do it in 1-2 weeks for a smaller app, 2-3 weeks for a mid-sized app and 3-4 weeks for a bigger app. You will have to look at other apps in the market and decide what features are important for your mobile app

Small App Mid Size App Big Size App
1-2 weeks
2-3 weeks
3-4 weeks

How long it takes to do UI/UX Design is needed?

The process requires creating the wireframes for the mobile application based on the requirements and review/adjust them. Once wireframes are done, the graphical UI design needs to be completed which includes font, color, theme, and images for the App.

Small App Mid Size App Big Size App
2-3 weeks
5-6 weeks
9-10 weeks

How long it takes to do development and testing?

Most of startups and individuals want to build apps with lots of features imaginable.  Based on the feature list and type of company, will determine the time it takes to develop the app. You will need to build the mobile app and also the backend for the mobile app. All development: iOS App, Android App, and the backend should happen in parallel. For the smaller version, it can be achieved in 2 months, a mid-sized app can take around 3-3.5 months while a big sized app might take around 5-6 months. This will involve technical architecture, UI coding, backend setup, functional implementation, integration, and testing.

Small App Mid Size App Big Size App
6-7 weeks
14-15 Weeks
20-22 Weeks

How much time to do beta testing and deployment?

Once your app is fully developed, you want to do beta testing to find out additional possible bugs. You can spend 1-3 weeks on beta testing depending on the size of your app.

Small App Mid Size App Big Size App
1 week
2 weeks
3 weeks

As you can see that time for each step will depend upon the size of the app. At a high level, you want to keep around 10-12 weeks for a small app, 23-25 weeks for a mid-sized app and 35-38 weeks for a large sized app.

You’re having an idea about a new app, just tell us and we can create amazing things together.

29
Aug, 2022

11 Web Development Trends to Expect in 2022

Over the decades, website development has evolved and continues to shift rapidly. As a website owner, you need to be aware of changing website development trends.

Failing to keep up with new trends can result in serious consequences for your website performance and user experience. You may fall behind your competitors and lose traffic to websites offering better experiences.

Developing and maintaining your website according to ongoing trends is the best way to remain competitive in your business niche. Let’s take a closer look at the top trends in website development you can expect in 2022.

1. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are apps built with web technologies that we probably all know and love, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But they have the feel and functionality of an actual native app. Wait a minute! Native Apps, what do we mean by this?

A Native App is a software application built in a specific programming language for a specific device platform, either IOS or Android.

PWAs are built with the capabilities like push notifications and the ability to work offline. They are also built on and enhanced with modern APIs which makes it easy to deliver improved capabilities along with reliability and the ability to install them on any device.

PWAs takes advantage of the huge web ecosystem this is inclusive of the plugins, and community and the relative ease of deploying and keeping a website contrary to a native application which is pretty difficult to develop. This means you can build a PWA quickly and easily.

With its popularity many companies have shifted into the product, I tend to believe that this is because of its ability to run on an android and iOS without much difference. Some good examples of top companies who have their products as PWAs include: Twitter, Pintrest, Uber, Tiktok, Spotify, Jumia (a leading e-commerce site in Africa) etc…

A common feature about this products is that they are all installable on your home screen, able to work offline from where you last left and offer a comparable experience and features to their native apps.

Just like when building a native mobile app there are some expectations that should be met to make a good product for consumer use, the same thing applies to PWAs. Let’s discuss what makes a good PWA.

2. AI Chatbots

In 2022, AI chatbots are expected to become even more sophisticated in meeting the needs of and matching the behavior of users by leveraging machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval techniques.

Besides assisting companies in performing faster operations using voice or text chats, AI-enabled chatbots also help improve the customer experience. They can collect data, answer frequently asked questions, and solve other issues, thereby providing customers with seamless digital experiences with a company.

Many prominent B2C companies already serve their customers with AI chatbots. According to Forbes, marketers’ use of AI increased by 190% between 2018 and 2020, many functioning within Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Skype, instead of standard chatbots. We can expect more companies to embrace AI chatbots in 2022.

3. Accelerated Mobile Pages

The mobile-first mindset is here to stay – the statement holds true from both the business and consumer side.

To say users, consult their mobiles before making a purchase would be a gross understatement. Mobile internet usage has surpassed desktop mobile usage all over the globe. Even countries such as India, Mexico, and Indonesia have more than 4 times higher smartphone vs. desktop usage:

Screenshot shows total mobile users surpassed desktop users

There are 30 billion mobile moments (the moment a customer consults their phone and expects an immediate answer) every day in the US alone. This means every day your brand has 30 billion mobile opportunities to offer something to users that they want.

And still mobile ad spend lags behind mobile media consumption:

Screenshot shows time spend vs money spent on each platform

There is a reason why users spend more time browsing on mobile instead of buying – users crave instant gratification more when on their mobile devices.

Answer this question – how long do you wait for a mobile webpage to load?

According to data collected by Google and SOASTA 40% of consumers leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Three seconds.

That’s all the time you have to keep the attention of a user who liked your ad and clicked it. And if your webpage fails to load in the aforementioned time, you created the ad, regardless of how compelling it was, in vain. The bad news is the fact that according to data, most retail mobile sites take around 6.9 seconds to load, that’s more than double the amount of time 40% of users wait before abandoning the page.

4. Single-Page Applications

Single page application (SPA) is a single page (hence the name) where a lot of information stays the same and only a few pieces need to be updated at a time.

For example, when you browse through your email you’ll notice that not much changes during navigation — the sidebar and header remain untouched as you go through your inbox.

The SPA only sends what you need with each click, and your browser renders that information. This is different than a traditional page load where the server re-renders a full page with every click you make and sends it to your browser.

This piece-by-piece, client-side method makes load time much faster for users and makes the amount of information a server has to send a lot less and a lot more cost efficient. A win-win.

5. Optimized Voice Search

Voice search optimization is the process of upgrading and streamlining the information on your pages to appear in voice searches. Voice search optimization aims to optimize your page to answer the questions for people when they conduct verbal searches. This process allows you to have a chance to get your page read by the voice search device(Alexa, Siri, OkGoogle) whenever the user asks for information related to your page.

It’s no secret that voice search is on the rise. In fact, 58% of consumers use voice search to find information about a local business online. (Source: Search Engine Journal). That’s a pretty big number, and that’s why it’s so important to start optimizing your website for voice search today.

So, what can you do to make your website more voice search friendly? Here are a few tips:

  • Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. More and more people are using voice search on their mobile devices, so it’s essential that your website is responsive and easy to navigate on smaller screens.
  • Use long-tail keywords in your content. Voice search is particularly good at answering specific questions, so using long-tail keywords will help you target those queries.
  • Make sure your content is accurate and up-to-date. One of the main complaints about voice search is that results can often be inaccurate. To avoid this, make sure your website’s content is accurate and up-to-date.

6. WordPress Development

Low-code/no-code solutions can reduce the app development time by up to 90%. So there is no surprise that no-code platforms are taking more space in the development world, and WordPress is part of this change.

With the help of visual page builders like Elementor and plugins like Woocommerce for e-commerce and WordPress, you can have a fully functional website or shop in days and at a fraction of the cost you would spend to build it from scratch.

Considering the previous trend about the growth of no-code platforms and the use of WordPress to create fully working websites and apps, this one comes naturally. The no-code platforms simply make SaaS easier than ever to create.

SaaS products have various use cases for B2B and B2C clients, including automating tasks, streamlining business workflows, adding new functionalities or providing an alternative to expensive custom-coded options.

We predict that using WordPress and a suite of plugins will make more entrepreneurs develop and launch interesting SaaS products at a fraction of the cost.

7. Motion UI

Motion UI is the art of leveraging movement and animating within an interface to help guide the user experience and communicate a sequence, next step, transition or action for a digital product. Motion is also used extensively as a branding tool, reinforcing visual cues and interactions which we might associate with a particular brand.   

As humans, our brains are hard-wired to respond to movement. It’s part of our fight-or-flight response and the reason why over 40% of all the nerve fibres connected to the brain are linked to the retina. It’s super-useful when we’re using our peripheral vision to discern danger and protect ourselves. It’s super-annoying when our eyes are attracted to pointless movement and animation on a website which only serves to degrade the functional user experience. 

From the beginnings of motion on the web with the use of the <marquee> tag (to scroll text sideways) to today’s cinematic-quality Motion UI frameworks used by everyday web designers, motion has become one of the most important tools for delivering engagement and interaction across the web. 

These days, the majority of web interface motion is controlled through the browser, leveraging CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript Frameworks. This negates the need for 3rd-party plugins or video players to display motion and animation. 

As the online battle between platforms and brands rages on in the fight for our attention, the need to leverage motion and animation to cut through the noise of the web has never been more critical. When used with restraint, Motion UI is a powerful enabler of beautiful user experiences and can transform a flat, static interaction to a memorable moment of deep engagement with a brand. 

Many pioneering brands obsessed with great user experience have released their own design guidelines with standards and best practices around motion, including Google’s Material Design, Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and the incredibly motion-centric Lottie framework from AirBNB. These guidelines look to synthesize classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. It’s ultimately about the provision of a unified experience across platforms and devices. 

8. Serverless Architecture

Serverless architecture means the use of computing runtimes, also known as function as a service (FaaS) platforms, which execute application logic but do not store the data. The model offers a completely different economic model of “Pay as you Go” instead of the conventional ways of renting servers and setting up server instances to deploy the code.

Serverless Architecture is the base of serverless computing, a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of hardware capacity.

Serverless computing can simplify the process of deploying code into production. Scaling, capacity planning and maintenance operations may be hidden from the developer or operator. Serverless code can be used in conjunction with previously deployed code in traditional styles, such as microservices.

  • Serverless architecture offers “Pay as you Go” model which is perfect for code where you have to just send simple responses to IOT devices or upload an image or a document.

  • The function as a service (FaaS) platform offers dynamic scalability of machine resources in runtime.

  • In runtime function as a service, the platform finds empty instances on the cloud to run the code when a response is requested from client machines. Hence there is high latency in this architecture so it should not be used to a whole web application.

  • Serverless architecture is best for hosting functions that require high computation power like OCR engines, K-MAP solvers and Linear programming solvers.

  • To put this, in other words, the part of code for which you require a response or solution even if a billion user simultaneously request that code then you must host that code in serverless architecture in conjunction with rest of the code running on a separate server instance.

9. Mobile-friendly Development

Mobile phones have become an inseparable part of our lives. In the second quarter of 2022, mobile platforms account for 58.99% of overall web traffic, which is more than half of the global web traffic. Given this significant mobile usage, designers and developers must focus on delivering seamless website UX on mobile devices. Consequently, website owners must ask themselves.

Developing a website to be mobile-friendly is important but at the same time, the mobile-optimized website should sufficiently deliver a flawless user experience across any device-browser-OS combination.

Mobile devices have significantly changed how people use the internet daily. This trend is set to increase, and more people continue to access the internet primarily via mobile devices yearly. Additionally, as leading search engines like Google continuously seek to make the web a mobile-first search landscape, having a mobile-friendly website must precede developers and testers.

10. Dark Mode Standardization

Dark mode is a website treatment that involves replacing the classic white background, black text look of a website with a dark background and a lighter colored text. Though its current popularity has it feeling like a refreshing dip in a pool on a hot summer day after years and years of staring at bright white screens, the use of black screens in design is nothing new. 

Some of you Gen Y and Elder Millennials surely recall using a computer in the ‘80s with the classic monochrome black screen look. Most of the earliest home computers featured green or white text on plain black backgrounds. 

Habits and expectations have changed with the digital tides, and our understanding of what viewing information looks like — once established by books, notebooks, and newspapers — looks different. 

This has, in many ways, opened up a world of possibilities for the designers who build the websites we now use to obtain most of our information intake. Designers are going back to the drawing board, and rather than considering how to make screens emulate physical paper, they’re asking a different question: What could compelling digital displays be? 

Dark mode is a step in this direction, and also follows other major health-related questions as we all adjust to a life more defined by screens than ever before. For these reasons and more, dark mode isn’t just becoming more popular, but for some people, it’s becoming the expectation. 

11. Improved Native Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity — the practice of securing data, networks, and computers from misuse — is one of the most critical concerns of 2022. Every company, no matter its size, is vulnerable. For example, in June 2021, hackers were able to scrape the accounts of 700 million LinkedIn users to acquire personal information including full names, emails, and phone numbers.

According to CDN provider Cloudflare, the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks nearly doubled each quarter in 2020. Hours of downtime, significant loss of revenue, and a damaged reputation are just a few effects of DDoS attacks.

With such an alarming increase in cybercrimes, website development has adapted to make it easier to protect company and customer data. There’s already been a shift toward application-based multi-factor authentication like Google Authenticator, patch management, and Security Operation Centers (SOC).

We’ll be seeing a continuing rise in non-traditional methods to improve cybersecurity as well, beyond monitoring tools and analytics checkpoints. Danny Wajcman, Co-Founder and COO of the heatmapping and live chat software company Lucky Orange, notes the importance of human monitoring in addition to automation: “We firmly believe session recordings can help identify security issues like a DDoS attack or extreme bot traffic…Having a feel for your daily traffic trends and regularly following visitor journeys builds your ability to recognize when something isn’t quite right.”

24
Aug, 2022

Top 10 Backend Frameworks for Web Development in 2022

Web development is generally divided into two categories — Frontend development and backend development. A Backend developer is responsible for building the server-side of a web application.

As the frontend part interacts with the user, the backend part is responsible for the inner working. A frontend may or may not work without a backend but to create a fully functional web application, it is necessary to have a proper backend connected with a frontend.

The role of a backend developer is different from a frontend developer. A frontend developer is more focused on how the application will appear while a backend developer is focused on servers, databases, and how both ends are connected and interacting with each other.

A Backend developer should have many necessary skills. Understanding backend frameworks is one of them. There are several backend frameworks and this article will discuss the top backend frameworks which are used today.

The list includes the best backend framework based upon programming language and tech stack. This means you don’t need to learn all of them, instead choose the one which matches your choice of programming language and tech stack.

1. Spring Framework + Spring boot for Java Developers

Java is regarded as an evergreen programming language. One of its popular use is in backend development. Spring Framework is one of the best Java frameworks.

It was released in 2002 and today, it is one of the most popular backend frameworks that is used to create production-grade spring-based and standalone applications.

It is easy to use Spring boot because it omits various configuration overheads which Spring Framework has. You can get a lot of useful functionalities like caching, transaction management, configuration management, monitoring, security etch when you use Spring Framework projects like Spring Boot, Spring Cloud Spring Security, etc.

If you want to learn Spring Framework and Spring Boot in 2022 and need a resource, then I highly recommend you to join the Spring and Hibernate (includes Spring Boot) course on Udemy. More than 200,000 Java developers have joined this course to learn Spring, Hibernate, and Spring Boot, three of the most essential backend frameworks in Java.

best backend framework for java developers

2. Django for Python Developers

Django is the most popular Python framework used in web development. Based on the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle, Django focuses on code reusing, thus enhancing the development speed. It is also a very secure framework.

Being a Python framework, Django is very user-friendly and easy to learn. It’s also one of the most popular full-stack frameworks and provides a lot of functionality out-of-box like REST API support.

If you want to learn Django in 2022 then I suggest you join Python and Django Full Stack Web Developer Bootcamp course by Jose Portilla on Udemy.

Jose is a great instructor and this 32-hour long Django course is one of the most comprehensive resources to learn Django online.

best backend framework for Python developers

3. Express.js for JavaScript Developers

JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world. With the emergence of Node.js, JavaScript’s popularity in the backend development community increased rapidly and in the last decade, Node.js has become one of the top names.

This is why Express was released in 2010 for node developers. It is a minimal Node.js framework used to develop highly flexible applications.

Given that JavaScript is the most popular web development language and probably the only language which provides full-stack development from front to the backend to mobile learning Expressjs can be a great choice for programmers.

If you want to learn Express.js in 2022 and need a resource, I recommend MERN Stack Front To Back: Full Stack React, Redux & Node.js course by my favorite Udemy instructor Brad Traversy, this course is great for anyone who wants to learn full-stack web development using MERN stack, which includes both React and Express.js.

best backend framework for Javascript developers

4. ASP.NET core for .NET developers

ASP.NET core is the successor of ASP.NET. It is an open-source, platform-independent framework used to build web applications on the .NET platform. It is regarded as one of the best-performing backend frameworks.

It is basically a united version of ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API into a programming module, thus making it more powerful.

If you want to learn ASP.NET core in 2022 and need a resource then I suggest you join The Complete ASP.NET MVC 5 Course by Mosh Hamedani on Udemy. This 7.5 hours course is best for C# and .NET developers who want to learn ASP .NET.

best backend framework for C# developers

5. Laravel for PHP Programmers

PHP is one of the most used programming languages in backend development. Laravel is a PHP framework that is based on MVC architecture. It is a beginner-friendly framework that has a user-friendly interface, extensive library, and brilliant API support.

Using Laravel simplifies the backend development while building modern secure web applications. This is especially true if you are working on non-trivial applications.

If you want to learn Larval and looking for the best online course to learn Laravel for PHP developers then you can also check out PHP with Laravel for beginners — Become a Master in Laravel course on Udemy. This 43 hours long course is one o the best course to learn Laravael online.

best backend framework for PHP developers

6. Ruby on Rails for Ruby Programmers

Ruby on rails, commonly knowns as Rails is a server-side framework based on MVC architecture. It is a beginner-friendly framework that is easy to understand and learn.

However, its advantages and disadvantages are still debated, but it is loved by backend developers throughout the world for being user-friendly.

If you want to learn Ruby on Rails in 2022 and need a resource The Complete Ruby on Rails Developer Course by Rob Percival on Udemy is a great course to join. It has more than 46 hours of content and 157 articles, 8 coding exercises, and 1 downloadable resource.

best backend framework for Ruby developers

7. Fiber Framework for Golang Developers

Fiber is a web development framework for Golang programmers. It is built on top of Fasthttp, the fastest HTTP engine for Go. It’s designed to ease things up for fast development with zero memory allocation and performance in mind

Fiber is a lean but extremely powerful framework. Being extremely lean, it is easy to integrate third-party libraries with Martini. The framework offers more scalability and fewer overhead problems.

It’s similar to Express.js and has great support for routing, serving static files, building REST APIs, Flexible Middleware support, Template engine, and low memory footprint.

If you want to learn more about building web applications using Golang and Fiber, I suggest you join The Complete React & Golang Course by Rob Percival and CodeStars on Udemy. It’s a project-based course where you will build an admin app from scratch using React and Golang Fiber.

best backend framework for Golang developers

8. CakePHP Framework for PHP Developers

CakePHP is another PHP framework that is based on the concepts of another popular backend framework, Ruby on rails.

It follows MVC architecture and offers several useful features such as model-view-controller, front controller, active record, data mapping, and convention over configuration.

If you want to learn CakePHP from scratch and need a resource, I suggest you check out CakePHP for Beginner to Advance with Complete Project course on Udemy. This 6-hour long course is the highest-rated CakePHP course on Udemy and is suitable for beginners and experienced PHP programmers.

best PHP Backend Framework
12
Aug, 2022

Top 10 Web Development Projects in 2022

Humanity has come a long way when it comes to developing the internet and the force behind making it accessible in a convenient way, i.e., web development.

It has experienced an exponential-level evolution from its humble beginnings of developing a static website hosted on a physical system to multi-functionality-harboring web apps stored on distant servers that we commonly use today.

The best part of web development is that it will only be bigger and better from hereon. As such, it has become a lucrative career option in the surviving and thriving IT market.

1. What is Web Development?

Web development refers to the building, creating, and maintaining of websites. It includes aspects such as web design, web publishing, web programming, and database management. It is the creation of an application that works over the internet i.e. websites.

Web Development

The word Web Development is made up of two words, that is:

  • Web: It refers to websites, web pages or anything that works over the internet.
  • Development: Building the application from scratch.

 

Web Development can be classified into two ways:

Frontend Development: The part of a website that the user interacts directly is termed as front end. It is also referred to as the ‘client side’ of the application.

  • Frontend Roadmap:Frontend Development Roadmap
  • HTML: HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is used to design the front end portion of web pages using markup language. It acts as a skeleton for a website since it is used to make the structure of a website.
  • CSS: Cascading Style Sheets fondly referred to as CSS is a simply designed language intended to simplify the process of making web pages presentable. It is used to style our website.
  • JavaScript: JavaScript is a scripting language used to provide a dynamic behavior to our website.
  • Bootstrap: Bootstrap is a free and open-source tool collection for creating responsive websites and web applications. It is the most popular CSS framework for developing responsive, mobile-first websites. Nowadays, the websites are perfect for all the browsers (IE, Firefox, and Chrome) and for all sizes of screens (Desktop, Tablets, Phablets, and Phones).

Frontend Frameworks and Libraries:

Backend Development: Backend is the server side of a website. It is the part of the website that users cannot see and interact. It is the portion of software that does not come in direct contact with the users. It is used to store and arrange data.

  • Backend Roadmap:Backend Design roadmap
  • PHP: PHP is a server-side scripting language designed specifically for web development.
  • Java: Java is one of the most popular and widely used programming language. It is highly scalable.
  • Python: Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more efficiently.
  • Node.js: Node.js is an open source and cross-platform runtime environment for executing JavaScript code outside a browser.
  • Back End Frameworks: The list of back end frameworks are: Express, Django, Rails, Laravel, Spring, etc.

2. Best Web Development Projects

We know many people, especially students, love free courses, and that’s why we will be dividing our list into three subsections. Anyways, not anymore we will be digressing so, let’s go straight to our selection of the best 10 web development projects.

A Trivia/Quiz Game Using JS (and jQuery)

Objective(s):

  • Develop a basic quiz game that presents players with predetermined questions and multiple choices, out of which only one is the correct option. It can also have a scoring system.

Learning JavaScript – or some other web development technology – is one thing, and applying your knowledge of the same is another. Until you can implement what you’ve learned so far, you won’t be able to advance, whether it’s JS or some other programming language. So, it’s important to work on some projects alongside learning JS.

There are several simple JS projects that you can use to test your knowledge. One such is a basic quiz game. Developing the same will help you build a robust understanding of DOM manipulation, one of the key aspects of JavaScript programming and data management.

You can start with the JS quiz game by only adding a few questions, say 5 or 6. Each question will have 4 choices. You need to put a scoring system in place to make things a little enticing. Since building this game’s primary intent is to learn web development (or JS, particularly), you can easily deal with the game’s designing and styling using a simple CSS framework.

A Duplicate GIPHY (Using the GIPHY API)

Objective(s):

  • Using Giphy’s API to create a web app that takes in search input and displays relevant gifs.

Before you start to template data in JavaScript and display the same on the DOM, you must become well-acquainted with:

  • The DOM manipulation, and
  • jQuery or VanillaJS (just a fancy name referring to using plain JavaScript code)

A great web development project idea that will help you check how well you’ve become in the aforementioned is to develop a replica of GIPHY, the popular online source to conveniently find GIFs scattered across all over the web.

For this purpose, you need to make use of the GIPHY API. It is a beginner-friendly API as it doesn’t necessitate requesting an API key plus, you need not mull over configuration too much for requesting data.

One of the major issues you will face while working on this GIPHY replica project deals with asynchronous requests. You will have two options to do it; either use Vanilla JavaScript or leverage jQuery.ajax() method.

If you wish to increase the web development project’s complexity, you can plan to put data within the app and organize it. For this, you must leverage the namespacing architectural pattern for dealing with issues about scope and conflicts with closures.

With the GIPHY API, you will build a compact web app that will allow users to search gifs, present trending gifs to users following a column format, and hit the “LOAD MORE” button for displaying/loading more gifs.

A Basic To-Do Webapp

Objective(s):

  • Develop a basic to-do app that enables a user to add daily tasks.

Another great idea for a web development project is to develop a basic to-do list webapp. Completing this project requires a beginner to intermediate level adequacy in web development.

The to-do web app must allow users to add new items to a list, and items added to a list must be visible. Also, a user can mark a task “complete” upon its successful completion, and these completed tasks must appear on a separate list, say Completed Tasks.

You can also add a separate section titled Pending Tasks that will list all the tasks that require completion. In such a case, the to-do list will be a union of the Pending Tasks list and the Completed Tasks list. Irrespective of the list, a user must be able to delete or edit tasks from it.

To further increase the web app’s complexity or make it more detailed, you can add the date and time when a task is added and/or completed. If you do not leverage local storage, then the webapp will reset every time it is restarted. Therefore, you can implement the local storage to allow users to resume the app upon restarting, right from where they left it off the last time.

A Basic Survey Form

Objectives

  • To make a basic online survey form.

Surveys are essential tools for collecting data for organizations. More often than not, web developers need to prepare web survey forms, whether it is to get basic details of applications responding to a job opening or to collect user experience about a specific product.

This next web development project idea focuses on developing a basic web-based survey form or questionnaire. It is an easy-to-do thing when you’re well-versed in HTML5or even HTML.

The survey form project is very flexible, and you can prepare it as you find it suitable. Irrespective of the type of questionnaire you want to make, however, you need to add the following fields:

  • Name
  • Age/Birthday
  • Email address
  • Contact Number

The main idea of this project is to assess (or learn) webpage structuring skills. For project enhancement ideas, you can search the web.

Develop a Full Web Project using WordPress

Objectives

  • Develop a full-fledged website with WordPress.

This is a guided project offered by Coursera, the go-to platform for online learners. Build a Full Website using WordPress is an advanced project that necessitates candidates to have a robust working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The web development project is offered in a video lesson format that is 2 hours long. In addition to creating a brand new website from scratch, the Build, a Full Website, using WordPress guided project engages candidates into editing webpage content, images, and links. You will also learn to add and organize widgets to a webpage.

Stacey Shanklin-Langford delivers the project from the Freedom Learning Group. She flaunts a flashy 4.49-star rating – averaged over 184 ratings – out of 5 stars and has over 92k learners enrolled for her 24-course offerings.

The Complete 2020 Web Development Course - Build 15 Projects

Objectives

  • Learn web development by practice. Develop 15 web development projects.

Yes, I know this one is a web development course, but it is replete with projects. There’s not just 1, 2, or even 5, a whopping 15 of them! Moreover, the best thing about this Udemy course is that it is beginner-friendly and allows candidates with intermediate-level web development skills to pick up some more abilities and refine some of their existing ones.

Delivered solely in the English language by Development Island (UK), The Complete 2020 Web Development Course – Build 15 Projects is a comprehensive web development project/course for quickly learning web development. Averaged over 5,355 ratings, the Udemy course gets 4.5 stars out of 5, and over 24k learners have already benefited from the same.

The entire web development course is divided into 33 sections and 504 video lectures that total to 99 hours and 22 minutes of run time. The course starts with discussing the basic structure of a website and the functionality of the same. It discusses a range of technologies, including:

  • AJAX,
  • Bootstrap
  • CSS,
  • HTML,
  • JavaScript,
  • MySQL,
  • NodeJS, and
  • PHP.

It delves into the project building part after discussing a particular set of topics so that you can learn and assess the same simultaneously. The 15 projects that you will develop with this Udemy web development course – in the suggested order – are:

  1. Mathematics Tutorials Website,
  2. Maths Game,
  3. Fruits Slice Game,
  4. App Landing Page,
  5. Company Website,
  6. Our Lovely Course,
  7. Stopwatch App,
  8. Drawing App,
  9. Online File Explorer App,
  10. Online Notes App,
  11. Distance Between Cities,
  12. Website with Social Widgets,
  13. iOS and Android Mobile Apps using jQuery Mobile,
  14. Speed Reader for iOS and Android, and
  15. Car Sharing Website.

As this is a beginner-friendly course, there aren’t any prerequisites. All you need is the will to learn web development and a working computer.

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