Last week I had the opportunity to attend the three-day Product Academy for Teams course at the IBM Silicon Valley Lab in San Jose.

This brought together members of our team from across different disciplines - design, product management, user research, and engineering. It was fantastic to spend time face to face with other members of the team that we usually only work with remotely and to all go through the education together learning from each others approaches and ideas. The API Connect team attendees were split into three smaller teams to work on separate items and each was joined by a facilitator to help us work through the exercises.

We spent time together learning about the different phases of the product development lifecycle and in each looking at the process some of the best practices and ways to apply them to our product. It was particularly effective to use real examples from our roadmap in the exercises so we could collaboratively apply the new approaches and see how they apply directly to our product plan.

Each day of the course looked at a different phase of the product development lifecycle - Discovery, Delivery and Launch & Scale:

Discovery - Are we building the right product? - looking at and assessing opportunities and possible solutions we could offer for them, using evidence to build confidence and reviewing the impact this would have on our North Star Metric.

Delivery - Are we building it right? - ensuring we have a clear understanding of the outcomes we're looking for, how we can achieve them and how we can measure success.

Launch & Scale - Are customers getting value? - ensuring we enable customers to be successful in their use of the product and that we are able to get feedback and data to measure this and improve.

Each of these phases has an iterative approach to it and we looked at how we could apply these to our product plan. We also looked at some of the tools and techniques that can be used to help us apply this and members from the different product teams attending shared how they are using these today.

On the final day of the course I also had the opportunity to share some of our journey with instrumentation, how this has evolved and some of the lessons we learnt along the way - such as the benefits of having a data scientist on the team. I am looking forward to sharing this with the wider team and seeing how we apply some of the learning to improve our systems going forward. For example, better validation of decisions through measuring and improving our use of data.

This script originated as part of a much wider framework of tests that we put together when I was in the API Connect SRE team. However I’ve found this set of functions to be something useful to be able to validate quickly from time to time in different contexts to give a high level answer to ‘Is it working?’

The steps this script takes are as follows:

• Authenticate to the API Manager Platform API and retrieve an access token
• Take a templated API and Product and modify it to return a unique value
• Publish this API to a nominated catalog
• Invoke the API through the gateway (looping until a successful response is seen)
• Query the Analytics APIs to find the event logged for this invocation (again looping until found)

Whilst the entire test frameworks a lot of assumptions around how our environments are built and deployed, this test was relatively standalone - and I just needed to make a couple of updates to it to work outside of our cloud deployments - add support to turn off certificate validation and for username/password instead of API Key based authentication. Take a look at the script on GitHub.

If you want to try this in your own environment you can follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/ibm-apiconnect/quick-check.git
   

2. Install the python required dependencies

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

3. Identify the appropriate credentials to use for your stack - either username/password or an api-key if you are using an OIDC registry and set these as environment variables (APIC_API_KEY or APIC_REALM, APIC_USERNAME & APIC_PASSWORD) or use the command line parameters - either of:

   • -u <apim_user> -p <apim_password> -r provider/default-idp-2 (Local user registry or LDAP)
   • -a <apim_api_key> (OIDC e.g. SaaS)

4. Download the credentials.json file from the toolkit download page to identify the client id and client secret for your environment - these can either be set as environment variables (CLIENT_ID / CLIENT_SECRET) or as command line parameters (--client_id / --client_secret)

5. Run the script according to the usage examples

   python api-deploy-check.py -s <platform-api-hostname> -o <provider_org_name> -c <catalog_name> [credential parameters]
   

If successful, you should see output like this:

I'd be interested to hear if you find this useful or if you have other similar utilities you use already - let me know!

Originally posted on the IBM API Connect Community Blog

This walk came from the In Their Footsteps app from the South Downs National Park. The app is made in conjunction with historic venues and has a series of guides for walks across the South Downs. Each of the walks has a map, a text guide and audio clips along the walk to tell you more about what you are seeing and walking through.

We headed for Selborne for an early start before the day got too hot and arrived at the car park in the village for 7:15am. The first part of the walk was a fairly steep route up through Selborne Common from the car park taking the zig-zag path that Gilbert White and his brother had cut into the hillside. At the top the route took us along the top edge of Selborne Hangar, a woodland of mostly beech trees. When there were gaps in the trees we could see through to Selborne and Gilbert White's House. Nova seemed to have a great time exploring and played in the leaves.

It then took us down Gracious Street to the sunken lane - Old Alton Road which is a fascinating path cut into the landscape by many centuries of walking and the sides of the path seem to be held back by the roots of the trees, it was interesting to hear on the audio guide how in the past this flooded and in the winter, icicles formed from the trees.

After this the route took us across meadows, past ponds to Coombe woods, another peaceful shaded woodland where we could enjoy listening to the sounds of the birds along our way. Finally we headed back up to the church and into Selborne to finish the route at Gilbert White's house.

Overall this was a lovely walk with a good variety of things to see - I thoroughly enjoyed it and was glad we made the decision to head out first thing before it got too hot as some of the parts would likely have been tough going later in the day! It was also a great walk for dogs with sections where Nova could have a good explore off-lead as well as those where there are lifestock where she had to be on lead.

Whilst working from home it's useful for the family to know when I am on a video call or just a voice call. I was first looking at Busy bar which I came across via Hiro Report, but couldn't justify the cost of it and as I had a raspberry pi zero and a Blink! sitting around, I decided to build something simple myself. Maybe one day I could make it more complex and build a version using the Pico 2 W Unicorn Galactic?

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• Power Supply
• Blink!

Software Part 1 - LED Control Server

This is the application that runs on the Raspberry Pi and controls the lights based on a simple API call. I deploy this to my Raspberry Pi through Balena for ease of management and updates - then I can just push a new copy of the code into git and balena will automatically deploy it to my Raspberry Pi.

The API Call is very simple and currently accepts a GET request with parameters for the red, green and blue values (between 0 and 255) - really this should probably be a PUT request but using GET made testing with a browser simpler. The light is switched off with a DELETE call (or another GET with 0 for each parameter).

You can see the code for this in the light directory.

Software Part 2 - Webcam detection tool

This part runs on my laptop and detects when the webcam is in use through monitoring the system log - if a change in state is detected, it then sends an API call to the Raspberry Pi to switch the light on or off as appropriate.

The tricky part here was the detection of the webcam - I found a few different samples and a useful reddit thread (which I can't find now - will add the link later!) on ways to detect the webcam being operational on MacOS and it seems it is liable to change between MacOS versions - looking for eventMessages containing AVCaptureSessionDidStartRunningNotification, AVCaptureSessionDidStopRunningNotification or stopRunning seems to work for the things I've tested on Sequoia.

The alternative route I was considering was to use OverSight to trigger a CLI app and leave the detection to them - but having the CLI detect it was more interesting to build.

You can see the code for this part in the cli directory.

The code for this project lives at github.com/rickymoorhouse/status-light.

We decided to take a short family break on the Isle of Wight dung the school Easter holidays. We found accommodation in Yarmouth through Airbnb at a lovely spot overlooking the River Yar.

On Thursday morning we took the WightLink ferry over to the island in the morning and as we got there early they put us on the earlier ferry so we arrived to the Isle of Wight just after ten o'clock. We decided to head to Alum Bay and spend the day there. We first went to the viewpoint to see the Needles and then took the stairs down to the bay as dogs weren't allowed on the chair lift we knew we had to do this both ways!

We found a nice spot on the beach to sit and have our picnic and relax. Nova had a good time exploring around us and found her comfiest spot to sit was on Jess.

After a relaxing time on the beach we headed back up to the cliff top - Nova managed the just set of stairs but wanted to be carried up the bigger set. At the top we browsed the shops and had ice creams whilst listening to the live music. We then took the bus across to the Needles battery where we explored the headland and enjoyed the views all around before heading in to see the battery itself. From there you cold see exactly it why was a strategic point to be armed as it overlooked the entrance to the Solent - noone was getting in without passing into its range. We got drinks from the cafe before heading for the bus stop to return to Alum Bay.

We then checked into our cottage, had fish and chips and enjoyed the sunset - of course Nova managed to be the first one to try out the outdoor shower as she found something smelly to roll in.

The next day we explored from where we were staying down the route of the old railway line along the side of the river - we got to the End of the Line Cafe and then headed back and had a relaxing afternnon at the boat house - making use of the sauna and garden to enjoy the fantastic weather. In the afternoon Laura and I headed out for another wander along the railway path along to the end and back along the coast, stopping at Off the Rails for a drink along the way. Then in the evening we headed up into Yarmouth and out on the pier before collecting pizzas to take back to the boathouse to enjoy in the garden.