cloudControl PaaS add-on for cloud-based image management

William (iChuloo) Imoh, who hails from Lagos, Nigeria, recently embarked on a U.S. speaking tour, February 20-March 12, during which he powwowed with technical and product teams and communities at such renowned enterprises as Netlify, Pluralsight, Lucidchart, Twilio, and more in Salt Lake City, Dallas, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. On March 5, he gave an enlightening talk, entitled International Developers and Development: Building for the Next Billion Users at Cloudinary in Santa Clara, California. Below is a synopsis. For details, see the related slides.

Focus on customers has always been Cloudinary’s mantra. Because we owe them our success, we are constantly reaching out to our customers, not just for feedback on our offerings, but also for their vision, wish list, and buy-in of what Cloudinary can do to meet their needs and make them succeed. About six months ago, it occurred to us that it would be beneficial if we could meet regularly with those who are behind innovation at our key customers—executives, product gurus, developers, content managers—to swap strategies, product roadmaps, best practices, and such. In particular, we’d like to solicit actionable feedback as a foundation for our plans of product enhancements.

Static sites and the JAMstack are quickly becoming a standard for developing safe and performant websites with an optimal workflow for developers. Netlify CMS (not to be confused with the company that created it, Netlify) is an open source content management solution that works especially with static site generators such as Gatsby, Hugo, etc... enabling content storage in your Git repository along with your code for easier versioning, multichannel publishing, and direct content updates in Git.

If you're the developer for an online store, a news site, a social media app, or any other website that delivers new media content on a regular basis, you are probably painfully familiar with both the challenge and importance of delivering well-cropped images.

At Feature Upvote, we specialize in enabling product managers to consolidate and prioritize customer feedback through simple online boards with a built-in voting capability. Companies across the world use our boards either publicly or privately to source ideas from their internal teams or B2B clients.

Vitaly Friedman is a die-hard devotee of beautiful content. Born in Minsk, Belarus, he studied Computer Science and Mathematics in Germany, unearthing in himself a passion for typography, writing, and design in the interim. After a six-year stint as a freelance designer and developer, he co-founded Smashing Magazine, a leading online publication on web design and development. You can follow SmashingMag on Twitter @SmashingMag.