The Build is a newsletter for software engineers dedicated to sharing useful technical content on effective development and collaboration techniques. In each release, we’ll share what we’re reading this month, open source projects we’re inspired by, and more news from the DevOps community. Read the December 2022 Build below, and subscribe to receive The Build every month right in your inbox.

With the onset of the pandemic and the shift in workplace behaviors, there was a sudden need to facilitate collaboration and digitization to enhance productivity and maintain consistency between team members across different locations and time zones. Satya Nadella and Bill Gates wanted to bid $8 billion USD to acquire Slack, the team chat SaaS company. Their meeting took an extraordinary turn, and instead of buying Slack, they decided to create their own app.

Leading a team of individuals is no simple task — it takes patience, technical experience, and a ton of leadership skills. If you work in tech, you’ve probably heard the terms “Scrum Master” or “Project Manager” being thrown around in many of the day-to-day conversations you’re having. And if you’re new to the industry, you’ve probably asked yourself what makes the two roles so different.

You’re trying to focus on coding, but office chatter keeps disturbing you. You want to reach your teammates, but they don’t respond to their emails. You’re trying to find a piece of information related to your current project, but you don’t know where to start. Do these scenarios sound familiar? We hope not. Developers’ tasks are complex as is. But sometimes, productivity issues can add to their woe.

Slack is one of the most popular instant messaging tools for organizations of all sizes. Due to its easy interface and features, many clinics and healthcare establishments prefer to use Slack for their everyday communication. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is a law that guides how to protect sensitive PHI (patient health information).

Do you know that mental health memes not only make us laugh but also help us feel less stressed? Technology has made it easy to generate fun-filled relatable mental breakdown memes, emotional memes that can be shared with coworkers, clients, and others. This helps reduce stress in various ways, regardless of the industry. Let me familiarise you with mental health before you start thinking about it.

Distance learning and digital education have opened up many opportunities for students worldwide, allowing them to learn flexibly and conveniently. With course materials and lectures made available online, students can learn on their own terms. By leveraging online tools and resources, teachers can provide a personalized learning experience for students' needs and learning styles. Therefore, effective teacher-student communication is key to ensuring the success of digital education.

It’s not always obvious what exactly kills your productivity. According to a CareerBuilder survey, about 75 percent of employers say that more than two hours of efficient work are lost every day. It is very difficult to strike the balance between creating a collaborative environment and respecting the need for focus. What is the reason for that?

After the pandemic, remote work became mainstream. In IT, hiring global developers has become necessary for those who want access to a better talent pool. However, most of the benefits that remote work brings to the table are impossible without understanding how to enhance collaboration and dynamics between remote employees. Having the right working tools helps teams organize better and more efficiently, allowing them to coordinate time zones, manage workload, keep track of projects, and more.

Email localization is a strategy to effectively raise brand recognition, increase subscribers, and boost sales. It translates email marketing campaigns into clients' local languages and cultural contexts, but encompasses much more than just translating message headers and subject lines. International email marketing isn’t as complicated as it seems.

In 2020, companies were pushed to adapt to an unprecedented global pandemic. They shifted rapidly from an office-based workforce to a remote one. And with that went the protection of having employees connected through on-premise secure servers, which called for a remote work cyber security infrastructure to be installed. Employees had to configure the official devices through their home networks, and the IT department had to work at scale for remote work cyber security.

Employee burnout is a type of workplace stress – but not necessarily caused simply by an over-demanding workload. The person suffering from employee burnout probably doesn’t realize at first that it is happening to them. They say, for example, that a frog could boil to death without feeling any discomfort – as it is a cold-blooded creature that adapts to the temperature of its environment. In a similar way, employee burnout can ‘creep up’ on a person.

Organizations in FinTech are increasingly met with customer communication challenges due to their rapid growth. What are these challenges, and more importantly, how can you solve them? We’ve asked an expert: FinTech consultant Ellen Cibula.‍ Financial technology, or "FinTech," is a blanket term to describe any company that provides financial services using software and modern technology. The industry has exploded in recent years as more people opt for digital-only banking options.

It’s incredibly exciting to see BWI, the IT services provider of the German Armed Forces, launching an official beta version of BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration (öffentliche Verwaltung ÖV) including federal, state and local authorities.

Poor communication could be shrinking your paycheck and cost a single company over $60 million annually. Small companies aren’t immune to poor communication woes, either. Communication blunders cost $420,000 per year in companies with 100 employees or fewer. Big or small, poor communication costs companies money. This loss of revenue can certainly impact employee salaries and bonuses.

Starting a new project is exciting. There’s so much to think about — like how to make it scalable, reliable, maintainable, and secure. With so many moving parts to juggle, internationalization — or the process of designing software so it can be translated into many languages — is often not your first priority. Today, Mattermost is shipped in 21 languages. The entire Mattermost project contains more than 64,000 words in 9,500 sentences.

DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of techniques that product teams embrace to reduce the software development life cycle, improve collaboration and visibility. It accelerates time to market for new updates while also ensuring the top-notch quality of releases. DevOps involves the combination of software development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops) personnel into cross-functional teams capable of building, running, and monitoring their product releases.

Let's check the facts first, then move on to learning about the on-premises server. Do you comprehend that data is traded for more money than gold on the black market? Tech-savvy people were completely omniscient about how the world was changing and how vulnerabilities, threats, and other issues will be intertwined with achievements pertaining to technology.

After a 2 year-long investigation, the German Government’s Data Protection Office (Datenschutzkonferenz or DSK) has concluded that Microsoft 365 is not GDPR compliant and banned its use in schools all over Germany. This news further confirms a Europe-wide trend of government-related institutions moving away from US-based tech providers.

The future of selling is here, with tools that drive sales teams’ speed and efficiency.

Distance learning tools provide students with flexibility and convenience, enabling them to take courses at their own pace. In addition, it offers the opportunity to gain valuable knowledge and skills while still retaining the freedom to pursue other interests or commitments. Even through a computer screen, online collaborative learning tools can keep students interested and engaged. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that online education is continuing to grow.

Have you ever noticed how difficult it can be to communicate with your colleagues remotely? It can be challenging to communicate effectively with remote teams for several reasons, like lack of face-to-face interaction, time zone differences, and difficulties with technology. In fact, 20% of workers say communication is their number one challenge while working from home.

Did you know that 71% of employees say they’re more productive when they feel connected to their colleagues through communication? This shows the importance of effective communication in the workplace. No doubt, the communication techniques used in a work environment affect employee performance and collaboration efforts. Top-down communication is a common form of communication in the workplace and has both positive and negative impacts on collaboration efforts and employee engagement.

In the 1944 film Gaslight, Ingrid Bergman plays a woman who is manipulated by her husband to the point where she questions her own memory and even sanity. FYI, Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for that film. This phenomenon is not limited to fiction, nor is it confined to relationships. Gaslighting can happen in workplaces as well. Someone could be casting a manipulative web around you without your knowledge. You need to act wise and fast.

Today, patient experience encapsulates much more than it used to. Providing optimal healthcare is not enough on its own: it includes satisfaction with the overall service, which includes more than just a treatment. A satisfactory patient experience has the potential to drive profit and quality improvements in your practice, so it's no wonder that many healthcare providers are looking into improving it.

This blog is for you since any sane business owner wants to partner with the best platforms, most likely Twilio alternatives, as communication platforms. It provides an in-depth analysis of every Twilio competitor that has advantages or disadvantages over Twilio.