Freshworks Huddle Recap: Connect and Learn from the comfort of your homes🏠👩🏻‍💻
By: Juhi Singh
Tags: Freshworks Huddle, Developer Relations, Best Practices, Developer Community, Developer Event

It has been more than a year since the WFH age began, and we’ve found ourselves warping several years ahead into the “future of work” (RIP all those fancy industry trend reports). This is the new normal — zoom webinars in PJs, designer masks, and Clubhouse instead of clubbing — and it looks like it’s here to stay for longer than we expected. Welcome to the new era. 🙌

Who imagined still being here? (Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash)

In these uncertain and chaotic times, especially for those of you in geographies worst affected by the pandemic, folks continue to juggle their professional commitments, personal duties, and pandemic-related challenges. Keeping this in mind, we hosted a “mini” version of our typical Huddles — our goal was to give everyone maximum value while taking the least of our developers’ time! This edition highlighted some great tips and practices for building apps on the Freshworks Developer Platform. We had two fantastic community volunteers who shared their developer stories and talked about the challenges and approaches used when building apps powered by custom objects.

We could not see each other through more than a year of the pandemic, but that did not stop us from engaging with our developers virtually. We continued with our usual approach of playing lobby music and asking fun questions to keep up the energy and engagement. This time, our Developer Relations intern Teja Kummarikuntla took the stage for an entertaining quiz loaded with some tricky questions. Our own “Developer Relations DJ,” Saif Ali, took charge of the energizing background scores.

Kickstart with a look-back!

We kicked off the session by introducing our first speaker Satwik Hebbar, Senior Director of Engineering, Freshworks, who took over the zoom screen to welcome our developers. He gave a high-level picture of what has been going on in the developer platform in the last few months. He also showed glimpses of what we might expect in the coming weeks and months. This included -

The scale of the platform: As we plan to go upmarket with more enterprise customers, we have to make sure that our platform can provide scalable solutions; we’ve essentially grown from 1 million to 750 million serverless app invocations within four years.

Security: We continue to revisit and improve the security posture of our platform that enables us to offer secure solutions to our customers. Last year, we emphasized a lot on a scale, and this year, security will be one of our key focus areas.

App Management Portal: We decided to refresh the portal where you upload and manage your apps to make it more intuitive. It’s presently live for Freshcaller and Freshteam, and very soon, it will be live for other products as well.

Dev-Assist portal: We also realized developers needed a custom support pipeline for requests that could not be posted on our community forum. We decided to launch a solution-oriented support portal for the same.

We finally took a moment to congratulate our Custom Object #BuildToWin contest winners and Q1'2021 Community champions.🍾

Event Highlights

After Satwik’s insightful presentation, it was time for the developers to get into a deep dive through a hands-on session from Velmurugan Balasubramanian, Senior Developer Advocate, Freshworks, on building applications with React & Vue. As you may have noted, we recently announced support for building apps using your favorite front-end frameworks using the FDK. This session comprised a demo and a live coding interaction using Glitch, allowing our participants to code and debug in real-time.

After a short break, we had Ganesh Balaji, Product Manager, Freshworks, take over the huddle session and give a sneak peek into what is coming up this year, from a product perspective (some of the information is confidential and meant just for our developers!)🤫

Next up, Raviraj Subramanian presented the most awaited session for the day on Serverless Best Practices. Serverless apps is one of our most popular features, and we were keen to share some practices we had collected from the experiences of our developers. The session covered not just coding hygiene and maintainability, but also scalability and security”.👩🏻‍💻

Last but not least, the Huddle wrapped up with The Minnal Talks (where developers from the community share their experience of building apps). This time we had Mohammad Asan, Freshworks, and Ajith R, Spritle, two of the winners of the Custom Object #BuildToWin Contest, who shared their experience on the bleeding edge, building apps using our early access program for Custom Objects. The sessions certainly helped showcase the power of Custom Objects and get everyone excited for the General Availability of this much-anticipated feature.

Ciao, for now! 🤝

See you again soon! (Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash)

We want to thank all the participants and the team that made this event possible! Thank you for your active participation and enthusiasm. Also, we would like to apologize to all the developers who missed the live session because of scheduling inconveniences. Next time, we promise to come up with approaches that accommodate a broader group of developers in various time zones.

Until then, please do check out the recording of the sessions.

We want all our developers to be safe, and we will continue putting in efforts to make it a positive, productive, fun, and protected space for our community.

Stay Safe. Get vaccinated ❤️

Follow us on Medium to get regular updates on our blogs. You can also reach out to us at the developer community forum for further queries or suggestions.