Developer Experience at Experience Cloud

Transcript

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. My name is Jonathan Roeder. I think I’m coming through loud and clear. I hope so. Let me know if I’m not. I head the Experience Cloud Developer Experience organization, and I am pretty darn excited to stand here on stage in front of you all, or at least sit here alone in my home in front of a screen and kick off our second Adobe Developers Live conference event. We have an incredible set of sessions lined up for you, primarily focused on all things content and Adobe Experience Manager. I’ll thank people by name in the closing remarks tomorrow, but for now, without jinxing anything, I would like to thank the Adobe Experience Manager team for pulling together such a fantastic group of technical talks and great speakers. Nothing warms my heart like seeing a session titled Environment Variables with Adobe Experience Manager as a cloud service. And to be clear, I really mean that. Let’s get in the weeds. Let’s get deep. That’s what we’re here for. Okay, so as a developer myself, I feel a great privilege to lead the Developer Experience Award and the Adobe Developers Live conference series. More on that later. But I feel a special privilege to be kicking off today’s conference for two reasons. First, a few gray hairs ago, and years before I joined Adobe, I was leading efforts on my first software profit. I already had a decade or more of software development experience under my belt, commerce and content software. But this was my first product to be sold. A multi-tenant SaaS platform, and I still have the first line of code somewhere. Amongst other things, I was responsible for designing the content management system. I’m a big researcher, which is a fancy way of saying I use Google. So I get inspiration from everywhere and I come across something called Jackrabbit. Funny name. So I spend time poring over it. Hierarchical semi-structured content repository. Interesting ideas, good inspiration. I couldn’t directly use it at the time. It wasn’t on the JVM, but it helped me out greatly. And I always kept it in the back of my head and wish good karma on the developers who built it. Now, second reason. The platform that I was working on was API first. I was building my first REST APIs and doing that research thing I like to do, I wondered who the heck this Roy Fielding was. This was pretty early. We were trailblazing. And when I get to the hypermedia as the engine of application state that hadios, halitosis, I start to bog down a little. I maybe, you know, start to take it out on this unknown Roy person who makes some pretty bold acronym choices. Maybe I even print out his face, buy a dartboard and I’m denied by HR my request to put the dartboard up in the rec room at work. So fast forward just a few years. I’m now kicking off today’s conference. The makers of Jackrabbit back in the day and Roy Fielding himself are here and loud and proud. I work with the AM organization every day and have for a few years now and hopefully I’m paying back the good karma. As for Roy, if you’re all wondering, I’ve been so sheepish about the whole dartboard thing that I’ve never even tried to contact him. And of course now that I’ve told this story for the first time ever and for some reason today, maybe we never meet. Or maybe when this pandemic is over, we can grab a drink, laugh it off, workshop some exciting new long acronyms and play a game of darts. Okay. Enough fun stuff. Let’s crash back to reality. Take a lap around one of our favorite topics, 2020. So it goes without saying this was a horrific year on many fronts, but as an engineer, I can’t help but take pride in the part we all played to quickly digitize what could no longer be safely done in person. So some stats here. As you can see from the Adobe Analytics US shopping data that we publish every year, smartphone use kept climbing despite that we never leave our houses. Despite the facts, right? And what’s truly amazing is we’ve seen two years worth of growth in online spending in the US in this last year. And of course this is commerce data, but commerce and content are deeply intertwined and it’s a solid indicator of how much digital transformation and content consumption is shifting. But some sobering stats, the pandemic has definitely been impactful for us as developers and obviously our personalized, our professional lives as well. And almost half of developers are reporting an increase in deployment velocity and in work hours and more than half are working outside of the tech industry now over 10 million. So talk about digital transformation. Developers, knowledge workers, IT professionals, we’re all doing our part, keeping people connected and keeping businesses afloat in this incredibly challenging time. And so I’m very proud of the work that we are all doing together. And speaking of developers and missions, as I mentioned, I run the Developer Experience organization that’s part of Experience Cloud. We work across all of the products in the suite and our goal is to empower the world’s best customer experience community, ecosystem and platform. We think this incorporates four core pillars. First, one unified Adobe, bringing together a unified set of tools and developer capabilities that you can use across the entire suite of products. One inclusive community. If we’re combining our tools and tech, we earn the right to bring our diverse communities together and to be inclusive in how we build our combined community. It’s part of what we’re trying to do here today. And if we’re doing that well, we can come together and open collaboration. We can take the best ideas that come not just from inside Adobe, but from outside, we can amplify voices and we can all win together. And if we’re doing that well, then what’s our core job is that we are fostering innovation together. We’re a help. We’re helping to trailblaze what technology looks like, not just today at scale and enterprise, but what it really looks like tomorrow. So on a practical note, we’re very proud of this conference series that we started. This is our second one, the first one happening late last year, focusing on commerce. So we’re going to announce today that we’re coming back in the summertime frame. Over time, we’ll announce the dates and any particular areas of focus that we want to bring to your attention. You might be wondering why we’re taking three months off. Oh, you have little faith. That’s because in between now and the summer months, we will be driving our first Adobe Summit track focused on developers. So very exciting. Summit occurs this year virtually the 27th and 28th of April. It’s free. It’s full of fantastic content about all of the products in our suite. Obviously, there’s an entire track focused to Adobe Experience Manager, but we have a cross-sectional track focusing on developers. And we need you to show up, make some noise so we can expand the dev track further in the future. You can sign up now, maybe right after this conference at summit.adobe.com. And wait, there’s more. We’re also announcing Adobe Contribution Day, which will immediately precede Summit. So if you’re familiar with Magento, our commerce offering, there’s an open source core that is heavily contributed to by the Magento customer, freelance, and partner community. Magento Contribution Days in the past and in the present are held around the world to support code submissions in a community atmosphere. So we’re expanding this concept across all of Experience Cloud and hosting our first event at Summit. And we’ll be introducing additional projects that you can use, potentially contribute pull requests to, or just get more familiar with. So we think this is a great opportunity for us to all connect, and we’ll have more details to come. Speaking of how we communicate details, here on the screen are our communication channels. Please subscribe. Please engage in conversations with us. And a special note, the YouTube channel that you see here is where we upload video recordings from Adobe Developers Live. So please attend live and engage in conversations via our event platform today and tomorrow. But check out any sessions you’ve missed as we upload them to the site. You can go back in time and see our previous event as well. Okay. So as I said, our Developer Experience org is working across four pillars. Really, the majority of our efforts are spent building tools for developers and capabilities to unify the extensibility of our products. We have the privilege of working with not just the Adobe Experience Manager org, but the IO team, Magento, Adobe Experience Platform campaign, the list goes on. I would like to draw your attention to three efforts that touch on our mission to empower you and unify Experience Cloud. So first, near and dear to my heart is Project Firefly, a complete framework that enables developers to build and deploy web apps or APIs and logic to extend Adobe Experience Cloud. It runs on Adobe infrastructure in a serverless fashion. We use modern web technology so you can build JAMstack applications, serverless APIs, serverless event-driven logic. You can throw your own events. We support Node and React-based development and include best practices around opinionated GitHub action CI-CD or bring your own CI-CD and use our CLI and APIs. And combined with React Spectrum, developers can build applications leveraging Adobe’s UI components. So we’re very excited about Firefly. We’re working to evolve it and integrate it more deeply across all of Experience Cloud. There are multiple sessions on Firefly today and tomorrow with info on how to sign up for the ongoing early access program. To see an example of how Project Firefly is being used as a first-class point of integration with Adobe Experience Manager, check out the Asset Compute Service Extensibility session. So I mentioned React Spectrum. React Spectrum is our open source collection of libraries and tools that help devs build adaptive, accessible, internationalized, and robust user experiences for business web applications. This is our Adobe-wide investment to implement a consistent design system with full keyboard nav and touch interactions. So if you’re building on Experience Cloud using Firefly, React Spectrum allows you to deliver custom UIs via the same components we internally use, keeping experiences rich and consistent for our users. But even if you’re building outside of the Adobe stack, our ARIA and stately projects might be valuable. So please check out Spectrum on GitHub if you would like to learn more or potentially contribute to that effort. And then lastly, data collection. Another important pain point Adobe is tackling is streamlining data collection at scale. Historically, devs have had to work with disparate data collection stacks and libraries, which leads to bloat and friction with data deployment. Now with Adobe Experience Platform launch server-side, devs can leverage Adobe’s new web and mobile SDKs and worldwide data collection network, Experience Edge, to move work from the browser and mobile device to the server. You can take advantage of simplified data collection and immediately start to see improved site performance for faster page and app load times. There’s a session on launch server-side tomorrow. To make integration easier, Adobe Experience Manager has open sourced a client data layer and integrated it with AM core components. This library is agnostic to Adobe and open source, so if you just need a good data layer, please check it out. Okay, so we’re incredibly excited about what we’re all working on. We’re even more excited about connecting with you. We’re thrilled that we’re having this conference together. Can’t wait to see what great conversations happen, what sparks of imagination occur. So with that, I’ll hand it off. Thank you very much.