Section Blog - Empowering Developers at the Edge

Section Co-Founder and CTO Daniel Bartholomew was recently interviewed on the L8ist Sh9y podcast. Hosts Stephen Spector and Rob Hirschfeld chatted with Daniel about the critical role that the developer experience plays in realizing the potential of edge computing.

Hotjar partners with companies of all sizes (from startups to Fortune 500 companies), providing a UX testing tool that delivers valuable insights to website and application owners to help them better understand visitor behavior and improve user experience. By installing a simple Javascript tag, site administrators gain access to a variety of web analytics, including heat maps, screen recordings and funnel analysis of shopping cart activity.

Similar to Cyber Monday, Click Frenzy is Australia’s most highly promoted online mega-sale event that drives an entire nation of shoppers to retailer websites on a single day. Participating retailers anticipate big sales, but must also ensure that their websites are equipped to handle the traffic blitz.

The Agile methodology was pioneered as an innovative approach to software development, but it can be effectively deployed across many areas. At Section, we choose to apply the Agile methodology as a framework across our entire organizational structure, from software development to customer engineering to marketing and sales.

We recently had a client approach us who was struggling with long tails in latency times with their previous CDN provider. They had a small portion of customers who were experiencing up to 30 second load times, which in their terms was “completely unacceptable”. For this particular client, reduction in overall average latency was important, but more important to them was getting the outliers under control.

At Section, we’re primarily focused on providing value for developers on the programming side of edge compute, but the scalability of our platform is heavily dependent on the edge infrastructure that we utilize. In order to meet the demand for increasingly vast volumes of requests that pass through our platform, we’re constantly looking for ways to optimize our infrastructure to continue to support highly performant systems.

As we look ahead to the future of edge computing, there are many use cases that are driving demand. However, one area that we are especially interested in is online gaming, where we believe that our platform has the opportunity to provide transformative value for game developers.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a way of monitoring performance through the capture and analysis of each transaction by the user of a website or application. By measuring your website or app performance in this way, you can see how your site is accessed from different browsers, devices, and connection speeds. This provides you with quantifiable metrics to benchmark and improve upon, such as load time and transaction path.

Among the primary customers that we serve at Section are SaaS (Software as a Service) companies that license and deliver software on a subscription basis from a central hosting platform. SaaS has become a popular delivery model for many business segments - from payroll processing to HR management, along with all types of other enterprise applications. The Section platform is a very compatible solution for SaaS companies for three key reasons.

Our team was in attendance at the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018. The agenda was packed with insights across 16 different areas of tech - from Application Modernization to Work, People & Culture. One of the highlights of the annual event is hearing what the Gartner experts have identified as the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for the coming year. This influential list highlights the key “changing or not yet widely recognized trends that will impact and transform industries through 2023”. Not surprisingly, this year’s list includes the Edge.