Top 5 Lessons from Developer Night @ Opticon
Last week, we hosted our first ever Developer Night at Opticon. Over 100 developers, product managers, and analysts showed up for a great evening of tacos, drinks, and lightning talks. Below are the top five lessons from Developer Night:
David Isquick
#1: How to Integrate a Messenger Bot with Optimizely X Full Stack
We kicked the night off with an overview of Optimizely’s developer platform by Andreas Bloomquist, Optimizely Demo Engineer. He showed off a way to experiment with a Facebook Messenger bot with Optimizely’s Full Stack Node.JS SDK.
#2: How to improve Optimizely Client-Side Performance
Next, our performance experts, Michael Hood and Greeshma Yellareddy shared some of the top tips for measuring and improving client-side website performance when using Optimizely. The three key tips they shared were:
- Reduce network calls by batching and controlling event timing with the new holdEvents and sendEvents APIs
- Reduce blocking time by breaking up the JavaScript snippet into multiple snippets using Custom Snippets
- Increase the time to live (TTL) cache expiration
#3: How to Programmatically Manage Optimizely Extensions with the REST API
Following that, Johanna Goergen an engineer on the Optimizely App Platform showed off how using the REST API, a developer could build a command line interface for programmatically managing and updating extensions at scale and made her application available as open-source on Github.
#4: How to QA Optimizely X Web and Full Stack Experiments
This was followed by a talk by Dyel Kassa Koumba, a Technical Support Engineer based in Amsterdam who showed off how to QA experiments in the Optimizely chrome extension for Optimizely X Web and the whitelisting feature for Optimizely X Full Stack.
#5: How to Make Optimizely X Web and Full Stack Work Together
Next, Christine Perry and Paul Colombo from the Solutions Engineering team showed off how to use Dynamic Customer Profiles to connect Optimizely X Web and Optimizely X Full Stack to allow for excluding people from being in both Web and Full Stack experiments and how to use web audiences for Full Stack projects.
You can check out the slides on Slideshare and below you can find the demo apps and tools that we showed off at Developer Night and during Opticon.
Useful experimentation apps and tools built by our engineers and demoed at Opticon:
- Facebook Messenger bot that enables Messenger bot A/B testing using Optimizely’s Node.JS SDK built by Andreas Bloomquist, Optimizely Demo Engineer
- Command-line tool for managing extensions via API built by Johanna Goergen, Optimizely
- Demo SMS A/B testing app that enables doing serverless testing with Optimizely’s Node.JS SDK and Twilio’s new Functions built by Joshua Wang, Full Stack engineer
If you’re based in the New York area, we’ve got another exciting developer event coming up in a couple of weeks. John Cline, Senior Engineering Manager at Blue Apron will be giving a fireside chat on how they built their experimentation program on top of Optimizely X Full Stack on November 7th at 6pm.
Sign up to reserve your seat!