SaaS for Developers

The last SaaS Developer video for 2022! Gwen talks about trends in the SaaS development space, and celebrates the growth of this community. Enjoy the holidays and we'll see you back with more SaaSy content in 2023!

https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas

When you want to introduce new "Premium" pricing for your SaaS, it may look easy to add a field in the product. But are you sure it won't break the billing system? what about business reports? The last few weeks, my twitter feed was all about data contracts, and it was hard to see the real value behind the hype.   

Benn Stancil, Chief Analytics Officer at Mode and one of my favorite thought leaders in the data space, agreed to join us and explain what are data contracts and how to use them for good rather than evil when building SaaS products. He highlighted what data contracts can actually achieve for an organization vs what we'd like them to achieve.  

Benn's blog with interesting opinions on data, culture, businesses and the world: https://benn.substack.com/

Our community newsletter: https://hackingsaas.substack.com/

Our community slack: https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas

A common challenge for SaaS products that got user adoption is balancing operational investments with a high speed of shipping new features. In the B2B world, moving fast and breaking things isn't an option. We need to move deliberately and reliably.  SLO, service level objectives, is a way to align the product requirements for availability with the engineering investment in operations.   

Ken Finnigan is a senior principal engineer at Workday, where he leads the SLO practice and aligns their engineering organization around the industry's best practices. He joined us to share these best practices.

SaaS applications typically have public APIs, and must be concerned with securing these APIs. Buchi Reddy answered many security questions on the SaaS Developer slack community, and we invited him to chat about his approach to API Security and how he sees the future of secure SaaS products.   

Buchi and Gwen followed up and shared resources on the SaaS Developer Slack - secure container images and opinions on JWT tokens. Join us in the community to continue the discussion: https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas 

And maybe you'll want to take Buchi on his offer to find all your API security issues in 5 minutes?

Access control is a vast and complex space. Dan Norwood will be our expert guide and take us from first steps all the way to advanced scenarios.

We start with overview of the popular approaches, match them with customer requirements, learned how to integrate access control in existing architectures and then explore how a good product design can take access control from "must have" to a delightful customer experience.

Sam Ramji is an odd duck. He is full of curiosity, insights and ideas. He is also is the Chief Strategy Officer of Datastax. 

In the most wide-ranging conversation I've ever recorded, we discussed the most interesting ideas in computing. From the 1980s - all the way to 2032.   Along the way you'll learn how to craft a career as an odd duck with talent for strategy, how to transform an organization, how to create a strategy, and you'll hear 3 future predictions and 3 big data trends that are happening right now.  

00:00 - Intro: Ducks and curiosity 

2:43 - Brief history of computing 

6:00 - Career as an odd duck 

8:00 - Product Management 

12:20 - Microsoft, you have a SaaS problem 

20:00 - Clouds, APIs and scale 

28:45 - How do we think together 

29:53 - APIs are eating the world 

33:00 - Advice for engineers in a transforming company 

43:40 - The Developer Experience Architect 

45:00 - How to Strategy 

56:10 - 3 Futuristic Predictions  

01:02:47 - 3 Trends in Data 

1:14:37 - D&D 5th Edition

In a recent blog post (https://docs.thenile.dev/blog/saas-is...) we gave a long list of reasons why building a control plane for Infra SaaS is tricky. In this video, we walk through an example - from requirements to design, and illustrate why things are always harder than they first appear.

Building Infra SaaS? Love control planes? - Ping me by email: [email protected] or join the community and continue the conversation https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas.  

Data Products are trendy, and all tech trends lead to a mess around what it even means and how different products fit in. This is a "highlights" version of my YOW! Data 2022 keynote. I included some of the key insights here, and the longer version includes all the details on the data architectures you need for each type of data product.

Reverse ETL is a bit of a buzzword these days. But why?  

Growth teams are cross-functional teams that have a clear goal - help customers get value from a SaaS service by improving the product itself. Great growth teams are metrics-driven and obsessed with the user experience. They optimize to experiment, learn and iterate fast.   

In this episode, I interviewed Laura Brouckman, the engineering leader of Confluent Cloud's growth team - about the value that growth teams bring to the right companies, the team culture that leads to success and the hardest challenges that they are facing (hint: data is the problem, and the solution).  

Growth engineering sounds fun? Laura is hiring: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-brouckman-792a41aa/ 

Want more SaaS engineering conversations? Join our Slack: https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas