Cloudinary Blog

Since the early 1990s, I’ve been watching with interest and intrigue the rapid evolution of the software industry and its developers, which ushered in the Internet age in the meantime. I’d like to share with you my observations on that subject. Because of the breadth and complexity of the related topics, I’ll chronicle them in a series of posts, starting with this one.

Look around any software company and you're almost bound to see developers, headphones on, coding away to their favorite tunes. For most developers, music plays an important role in their lives: from listening to it while they work to attending concerts or major music festivals, like Coachella and South by Southwest Music Festival (SXSW).

Doug Sillars, a digital nomad and a freelance mobile-performance expert, answers questions about video streaming and delivery, website optimization, and more.

Doug Sillars, a freelance mobile-performance expert and developer advocate, is a Google Developer Expert and the author of O’Reilly’s High Performance Android Apps. Given his extensive travels across the globe—from the UK to Siberia—with his wife, kids, and 11-year-old dog, Max, he has been referred to as a “digital nomad.” So far in 2018, Doug has spoken at more than 75 meetups and conferences!

If you're like most consumers today, you engage more with pictures or videos on a website than text. The stats don't lie - four times as many visitors would rather watch a video about a product than read about it, and sites with compelling images average twice as many views as text-heavy ones.

This year at SXSW, we’re infusing Cloudinary’s powerful Visual APIs to the SXSW Hackathon, where teams compete  on high-tech creativity during a straight 24-hour programming event. Taking place at TechSpace, this exciting event will culminate with demos and awards at the Hilton (Salon C) on Wed, March 15 at 2pm.

Nowadays, developers everywhere are introduced to an application development trend called serverless computing. The trend isn’t new but rather an evolution culminating from a number of development methodologies, including service-oriented architecture (SOA), distributed cloud computing, Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Containers/Microservices. A key defining element of serverless computing is the serverless application’s logic that combines custom-developed code and 3rd-party service functionality.