<img src="https://cosmic-s3.imgix.net/b5c88d00-bf14-11e7-929e-e520afee8cd7-secondwind.png?w=1200" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">In this <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic</a> Developer Spotlight, we sat down with Yew Wee Chua, Chief Technology Officer of <a href="http://www.secondwindnation.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Second Wind Nation</a> whose team has largely focused on data analytics and web development over the last several years. They&#39;re currently building out content-driven applications for teams of content editors with specific areas of focus to contribute content to a more comprehensive publication site. Read the <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/case-studies/second-wind-nation" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Second Wind Nation Case Study</a>. Check Yew out on <a href="https://twitter.com/weewey_" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Twitter</a> or <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/yew-wee-chua-7a987495/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a>, and enjoy the Q/A. 1. How long have you been building software? My team and I have been building software for about 2-3 years. Our background is primarily in data analytics and web development. 2. What is your preferred development stack? MERN. MERN stands for Mongo DB, Express.js, React and Node.js. To see all of the tools that Cosmic works well with and supports, check out the <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/knowledge-base" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic Knowledge Base</a>.&nbsp;<img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cosmicjs/5864c430-bf05-11e7-b4e6-bb80e0778af9-1741229_1.jpg" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"><img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cosmicjs/025cf2b0-bf0f-11e7-929e-e520afee8cd7-Screen Shot 2017-11-01 at 9.14.28 AM.png" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"> 3. What past projects are you most proud of and why? Building a web-based search application for a large mining company. We developed and brought it into production within 2 weeks. Additionally it has cool features such as a recommendation
engine based on the user&#39;s search history. I&#39;m proud of it because we only had 2 weeks to bring it to production. 4. Talk a little bit more about your process for building apps. &nbsp;How has Cosmic sped up your time to market for project delivery deadlines? We typically work using the agile scrum method, getting the software requirements from
the business, prioritizing features on the product backlogs, sprint planning and so on. Cosmic has freed us from worrying about the backend CMS and now we spend more time on building the front-end as well as deploying the application.&nbsp;Previously we were using WordPress. WordPress was limiting as whenever we needed new features to be added onto the application, we were required to add additional plugins which result in the clunkiness of the application. Thus we moved away from WordPress
and found Cosmic as our solution for a headless CMS. 5. What are some technologies you are excited about that you are using today, or want to learn more about? We will want to learn more about containerizing our application and employ a continuous deployment of our containerized application
on the cloud. To learn how you can contribute Apps, Articles and Extensions to the <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/community" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic Community</a>, contact us at <a href="mailto:support@cosmicjs.com"></a>
<a href="mailto:support@cosmicjs.com"></a><a href="mailto:support@cosmicjs.com">support@cosmicjs.com</a>.

Developer Spotlight: Yew Wee Chua

We&#39;re excited to announce that we are now expanding our Developer Program to include Premium Apps and Extensions. &nbsp;To kick things off, our first Premium App is now available: &nbsp;<a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/apps/bootstrap-landing-page">Bootstrap Landing Page</a>. <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/apps/bootstrap-landing-page"><img src="https://cosmicjs.imgix.net/6c2ab7e0-b8c0-11e7-9a91-1fa445eca758-bootstrap-landing-page.jpg" style="max-width: 500px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"></a> We know first-hand the problem of building websites and apps on a time crunch. &nbsp;And it&#39;s always nice to find something pre-built that you can simply pull &quot;off-the-shelf&quot; and customize to fit your needs. &nbsp;The cost savings on development hours makes it a great option and we&#39;re excited to add this option to help teams get projects finished faster. If you are interested in contributing Apps to sell in our Marketplace we would love to work with you. &nbsp;This is an opportunity to get paid recurring revenue every time your App is purchased. To get started offering your Premium Apps and Extensions, login to your account, go to Account Settings &gt; Developer Program and request access.To learn more about the opportunity please email us at <a href="mailto:build@cosmicjs.com">build@cosmicjs.com</a>. We&#39;re excited to see what you build!

Premium Apps

Helping you get where you need to go faster is a top priority for Cosmic. &nbsp;That&#39;s why you&#39;ll notice we recently updated our navigation (main menu and footer links) to help you get to Cosmic products, resources and information faster and easier. <img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/f8dc5950-b352-11e7-838a-497b4764a634-new-nav.gif" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"> Our simplified main navigation includes our most popular and most important pages: Products, Developers, Pricing and Company. &nbsp; We&#39;ve also added a new hub for our developer documentation: <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/docs">https://www.cosmicjs.com/docs</a> <img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/04a40370-b351-11e7-aa88-17d06cb0accf-Screen Shot 2017-10-17 at 10.36.42 AM.png" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">And finally in the footer, we&#39;ve organized links in a more thoughtful way to help you find what you need faster (see them below).Please let me know if you have any questions. &nbsp;We&#39;re always available to help in <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/community">our Slack channel</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/cosmic_js" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">on Twitter</a>.

Navigation Update

You can now add a link for your writers to be able to preview Object content. &nbsp;By setting up your Preview links on your Object Types, your writers will easily be able to preview changes to content in draft or published state. &nbsp;To add preview
buttons to your Objects, simply:1. Go to Your Bucket &gt; Object Type Settings &gt; Preview Link. 2. Add your Preview Link (dynamically add the object slug with the [object_slug] shortcode). &nbsp;If you would like to view Draft status Objects, you will need to make sure your web app queries the endpoint with ?status=all. &nbsp;View the <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/docs/rest">API documentation</a> for more information on how to access your Objects in draft status.<img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/df9ea630-a83c-11e7-ab7e-25f46d4715c2-preview-link-mark.png" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"> 3. Click the Preview button located at the top right in the Edit Object page.<img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/e535ec70-a83c-11e7-ab7e-25f46d4715c2-preview-btn-mark.png" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"> Then preview the content: <img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/3a22ea70-a7b7-11e7-b956-b3101583a440-Screen Shot 2017-10-02 at 4.17.51 PM.png" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"> Here it is in Gif format: <img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/abc8bb60-a83d-11e7-a69f-b9edbf41fd94-preview-link.gif" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">It is our hope that this feature will further help developers and editors collaborate to create great apps and write compelling content. &nbsp;If you have any questions about this feature or other ways to build apps faster and easier using Cosmic <a href="https://twitter.com/cosmic_js" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reach out to us on Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/community">join our Slack community</a>.

Preview Link Now Available

We&#39;ve rolled out a few updates that were requested by members of our community. &nbsp;Check them out below:1. Localization We&#39;ve consolidated Objects with multiple locales to appear on the same row with links to each localized Object in the Objects table view.<img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/8390fe60-a486-11e7-81e6-db0f42c0a9f7-localization.png" style="width: 80%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"> 2. Repeater Item Sorting You can now drag and drop sort your repeating items.<img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/6f5073e0-a472-11e7-81e6-db0f42c0a9f7-Screen Shot 2017-09-28 at 11.28.49 AM.png" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"> 3. Embedly We&#39;ve added <a href="http://embed.ly/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Embedly</a> functionality to our HTML editor to allow you to easily add GitHub Gists, Twitter cards <a href="http://embed.ly/providers">and more</a>.Add a link to the resource using the Embedly icon in the editor: <img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/ddd3c600-a472-11e7-9213-cd6969b1c63d-Screen Shot 2017-09-28 at 12.31.02 PM.png" style="width: 80%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"> Wherever this content goes, you will need to make sure you have the <a href="http://docs.embed.ly/docs/platformjs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Embedly script</a> installed on your webpage.And it will look something like this:<div class="fr-embedly " data-original-embed="<a href='https://twitter.com/CharlieMack7301/status/912774348750053376' class='embedly-card'></a>"><a href="https://twitter.com/CharlieMack7301/status/912774348750053376" class="embedly-card"></a></div>

Product Updates: Localization, Repeater Items and more

<img src="https://cosmicjs.imgix.net/573585d0-9d41-11e7-9022-cf144d5fea2d-goran-ivos-307271.jpg" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">We are excited to announce our Developer Program (in private beta) which gives developers the opportunity to join us in our mission to help others build apps faster using Cosmic. If you would like to contribute <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/apps">Apps</a>, <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/extensions">Extensions</a> and <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/blog">Articles</a> to help others learn and build using Cosmic, you can request access to join the Developer Program in Your Account Settings &gt; Developer Dashboard area. &nbsp;Once added to our developer community, you will be able to contribute content to show off the cool things you can build using Cosmic and get compensated for quality contributions. &nbsp;More active developers will have the opportunity to work on various projects that come our way. We look forward to seeing what you build and learning about how you build apps faster using Cosmic! &nbsp;For more information, please reach out to us in <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/community">our Slack community</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/cosmic_js">on Twitter</a>, or by emailing us at <a href="mailto:build@cosmicjs.com">build@cosmicjs.com</a>.

Introducing the Developer Program

<img src="https://cosmicjs.imgix.net/60ba6a80-674a-11e7-a522-2b0861658cb0-Brand_New_Congress_logo.png" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"> In this <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic</a> Developer Spotlight, we sat down with Ben Packer, a web developer who focused on natural language processing prior to turning his talents toward web development for non-profit initiatives. Ben serves as the Director of Technology for <a href="https://brandnewcongress.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Brand New Congress</a>, an initiative aiming to elect 535 new members of Congress. &nbsp;Check him out on <a href="https://twitter.com/ben_pr_packer" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Twitter</a> or <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpaulryanpacker/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a>, and enjoy the Q/A. How long have you been building software? I&#39;ve been programming for 4 years now, but only full-time professionally for 3 months since I graduated college. I&#39;ve done a bit of everything, previously focusing on natural language processing before turning to web development. What is your preferred development stack? I&#39;ve used lots of MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node), but have recently made the switch to Elixir + Phoenix + Postgres, which is what I&#39;ve done all of my Cosmic based development with. Despite the JS in the Cosmic name, Elixir&#39;s been a great fit due to its built-in in-memory storage solution, called &quot;ets&quot; (Erlang Term Storage). This, combined with Cosmic&#39;s web-hooks, has let me serve Cosmic-based pages very quickly out of a cache without managing a separate external Redis or Memcached instance. You can find our Elixir Cosmic wrapper and cache solution <a href="https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/cosmic_ex">here</a>. What past projects are you most proud of and why? My work with <a href="https://brandnewcongress.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Brand New Congress</a> and <a href="https://justicedemocrats.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Justice Democrats</a> has been building the tools required to effectively run a large scale and modern grassroots political campaign. I feel very fortunate that I get to focus and do this political work full-time, rather than volunteer and split my headspace as many developers do. Before working with Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, I developed an open source online meeting platform called <a href="https://github.com/ben-pr-p/assemble" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">assemble</a>, which uses WebRTC technology to bring the experience of breakout groups common in physical meetings to your browser. Talk a little bit more about your process for building apps. How is building apps for political or idealogical causes different than other client work? I&#39;m also very happy that I&#39;m able to develop all of these solutions in the open with an A-GPL license attached. Once our tools are mature and ready to be re-purposed, we&#39;ll have reduced the costs of running grassroots political campaigns for other organizations and future campaigns, who will be able to self-host what we&#39;ve developed at a fraction of the cost of traditional campaign software services. What are some technologies you are excited about that you are using today, or want to learn more about? Cosmic has made it much easier for me to enable the non-programming parts of our organization to configure the software I make, and to edit the content on our websites. Our use of it has evolved beyond a CMS to a general admin interface &ndash; we use it to <a href="https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/cosmic-shortener">manage a url shortener</a>, as a user whitelist for internal tools, to specify changing webhooks, etc. With Cosmic, after I recognize that a particular component of our website or process will need to change, I can implement a mechanism for that component to be edited or configured in a matter of minutes.I don&#39;t think that development for political causes is too different than more typical development &ndash; we move quickly, things break sometimes, etc. What may be different is that we have volunteers who contribute their own amount of time and/or expertise. If you have experience with Elixir, React, Node.js, or setting up AWS-based workflows and you want to help elect a congress full of individuals who support medicare for all, massive investment in our infrastructure and renewable energy, and refuse to take corporate money, send me an email at <a href="mailto:ben@justicedemocrats.com">ben@justicedemocrats.com</a> and we&#39;ll find the best way for you to help.Our internal tools are built using React, Ant.Design (a React UI toolkit), and communicate with our server over Phoenix Channels (websockets), creating a snappy user experience. Staff members and volunteers will end up spending a lot of their time in these tools, contacting our supporters, managing events, etc., and so it&#39;s important that they&#39;re performant, with as few pain points as possible.For our world facing websites, I&#39;d like to bring as much of the new web as I can to the political space. A lot of the things we&#39;re encouraging supporters to do are collective action problems &ndash; individually ineffective, but collectively powerful, and it&#39;s one&#39;s belief that you&#39;re all working alongside others that gives you the confidence to try. However, people are also overworked and worried about the future, including not only the future of our political system but also their next two weeks.So, it&#39;s my hope that in the coming months we&#39;ll be able to design experiences that not only inspire a sense of participation and belonging in collective political action, but that we&#39;ll be able to deliver those experiences while you&#39;re riding a bus and surfing the web on your friend&#39;s old Android phone.To learn how you can contribute Apps, Articles and Extensions to the <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/community" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic Community</a>, contact us at <a href="mailto:support@cosmicjs.com">support@cosmicjs.com</a>.

Developer Spotlight: Ben Packer

<img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/16fabe30-9a1d-11e7-8074-299a9406903d-web-design-and-development.jpg" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">In our latest installment of the <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic</a> Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Matt Cain, a web developer who took a physics undergrad and spring-boarded into the world of Java, Rails and ultimately, programming language agnostic APIs. In addition to his day job of being a web application developer and writing code, Matt is a <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/community" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic Contributor</a> and responsible for several apps and blogs in our ecosystem. Check him out on his <a href="http://mattcain.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">portfolio site</a> or <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcainpgh/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a>, and enjoy the Q/A. How long have you been building software? I&#39;ve been seriously building software for about a year. When I was a kid I liked to play around building static sites in Frontpage (the good old days) but moved away from it. Still, I continued to follow the web development world in the background and about a year ago, around last October, I decided to dive in and get my hands dirty. With the Java and <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/knowledge-base/python-cms" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Python</a> skills I picked up from my physics undergrad I was able to pick up <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/knowledge-base/javascript-cms" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">JavaScript</a> and <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/knowledge-base/ruby-on-rails-cms" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Rails</a> pretty quickly and started working with &nbsp;their respective frameworks. What is your preferred development stack? I love full stack <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/knowledge-base/javascript-cms" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">JavaScript</a> with NoSQL. I love language agnostic APIs. If I can get away with it, I prefer using services like <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic</a> as a database rather than something like MongoDB. I realize there are flaws inherent to those preferences but I&#39;m typically working by myself or in small teams, so keeping code in one language and data remote really reduces cognitive strain. What past projects are you most proud of and why? I always like to say my first real project is my favorite. I had spent a couple weeks learning Rails and some fundamental CS stuff and really wanted to build my own app. So I decided on a map data visualization app. I used Rails, jQuery, and hosted the maps with MapBox and basically learned everything as I went. The code&#39;s sloppy, it doesn&#39;t look great, but it was something that made me proud and encouraged me to keep going. Check the live website out here: <a href="http://pghmaps.mattcain.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">http://pghmaps.mattcain.io/</a>. &nbsp;More recently, I was pretty satisfied with the <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/apps/premium-content-blog" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Premium User Blog app</a> I built for <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic</a>. Talk a little bit more about your process for building apps, who they&#39;re for, and how Cosmic has helped.&nbsp; I&#39;ve been building a lot of small apps and prototypes for mostly small businesses and entrepreneuers. So I like to deliver things fast. <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic</a> being essentially a simple to use, one-stop-shop for everything I need to deploy is a blessing. What are some technologies you are excited about that you are using today, or want to learn more about? I&#39;m excited about using PWA&#39;s and integrating bots in sites more. I&#39;m very much looking foward to where AR goes.To learn how you can contribute Apps, Articles and Extensions to the <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com/community" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic Community</a>, contact us at <a href="mailto:support@cosmicjs.com">support@cosmicjs.com</a>.

Developer Spotlight: Matt Cain

In our latest installment of the <a href="https://www.cosmicjs.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cosmic</a> Developer Spotlight Series, we sat down with Garrett Sibinga, a web application designer and developer focusing on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In addition to designing and writing code, Garrett travels and actually wrote this piece from a cafe on a ferry on the North Sea (pictured below). Check him out on his site <a href="http://garrett.is/" target="_blank">Garrett.is</a> or <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgsibinga/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a>, and enjoy the Q/A.<img src="https://www.cosmicjs.com/uploads/92020f30-9963-11e7-bb10-1d2d57c848bf-unnamed.jpg" style="width: 100%;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"> How long have you been developing software? I&#39;ve been working in web development since 2013, so four years now. In most industries this isn&#39;t a whole lot of time, but when I think about some of the web technologies that we were excited about in 2013 I can&#39;t believe how outdated they sound. It&#39;s a landscape that is constantly changing, and with the exception of a few things the industry basically rewrites itself every few years. What drew you to Cosmic? Well, I think it was sort of precisely this thing -- the necessity for a certain amount of flexibility in an industry where the only thing that is certain is change. A programming language agnostic CMS seemed like a really appealing idea. I think I&#39;ve always sort of thought of myself as a language agnostic developer. It&#39;s not that I don&#39;t read certain languages better or feel more comfortable writing with the syntax of some languages, but I think as a general approach it is best not to get too attached. That&#39;s why I love the idea of a platform that works with a wide range of languages, where you can use the best languages or libraries depending on the project. What is your preferred development stack? I started out programming in Java, learned Python for some courses and projects I took on, picked up some Ruby along the way, and worked with a MAMP stack with WordPress for a while. Even if you fall in love with a language there are no guarantees that it will be widely used in 2 years, or even 2 months. I think you learn to adapt as a developer, and these experiences add to your baseline for learning and understanding new languages. It&#39;s all part of an exercise improving your code literacy in my view. I&#39;m new to Node.js, but I&#39;ve really been enjoying the flexibility and speed that it allows so far, and look forward to seeing where this new adventure leads. What projects are you most proud of and why? For development projects, I built a world clock app that used the Flickr API to pull images based on your location. It is part of an art piece which has showed at a couple of museums, and just closed out a show at the <a href="http://cphco.org/en/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark</a>. This was one of my first experiences working with API&#39;s in a JavaScript environment, and I really enjoyed working with external data so I guess in a way it was a precursor to working with Cosmic. How does Cosmic improve your process for building software? Cosmic is great for me because it allows me to entirely separate my code from my content. This is a wonderful feature because it really streamlines the process of creating web apps that aren&#39;t tied to one particular instance. I have also really enjoyed using <a href="http://www.cosmic-staging.com/features" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Imgix</a> to serve different sizes of images -- being able to add query strings for size to your image url&#39;s straight into your template is awesome and really powerful. It&#39;s a great way to build applications that perform really well at a wide range of screen sizes by serving only the content sizes that you need. The added bonus of integrated version control through <a href="https://github.com/cosmicjs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">GitHub</a> means that you are able to work very quickly to develop clean and concise codebases. What technologies are you excited about right now? I&#39;m excited about npm and Node because they are new to me, but really they are exciting because they open up a whole new realm of possibilities with npm&#39;s libraries and frameworks. Most notably among these is React, because of the added speed
bonus of being able to develop for multiple platforms at the same time. I&#39;m also looking forward to integrating asynchronous javascript into more of my projects because it&#39;s scary fast.When Garrett&#39;s not building new apps on the Cosmic platform he occasionally updates his website: <a href="http://garrett.is/" target="_blank">Garrett.is</a>. If you are interested in connecting you can find him on <a href="http://linkedin.com/in/jgsibinga" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a> or hit him up with an <a href="mailto:garrett.sibinga@gmail.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">email</a>.

Start building today