April 2021 Newsletter

Partner Go-Live announcements!

We are so excited to announce another new Q2 Partner, Homebase! Homebase's software is focused on meeting small business needs, and will help our customer FI's stand out to commercial customers. Homebase's products help with employee time tracking and scheduling as well as invoicing, team communication, and more.

Contact innovationstudio@Q2.com today to learn more or bring Homebase to your institution.

Best Practice: Production Git Branches

A three-stage git branch approach is now the defacto standard for all Innovation Studio projects, both internally and externally. Having a test environment helps identify "works on my machine" issues, where the development environment is different than final deployment. It's also useful for sharing work in a state that's understandable to stakeholders. Rather than trying to have a local environment constantly running, possibly with unfinished changes, you can simply deploy the polished changes to staging through your master branch and share that environment.

Separating test environment code from production adds even more benefits. Changes that are ready to be shared with the dev team or with internal stakeholders can be pushed to master, with only completely finished bits cherry-picked into production. Without the added branch, deploys become a dance of trying to get master into the perfect state just for the deployment step, then another dance to bring it back to what the team needs.

We've found that standardizing this process with a few test partners has saved many headaches. If you want to know more of how this works, check out the docs!

Developer Improvements

Tecton Tab User Interface Update

Tecton has long had tabs for multi-page layouts for information or product selection. However, they were relatively limited because the tab container quickly filled up, with either no way to see the additional options or a large, ugly scrollbar. This problem was most pronounced on mobile. With more partners taking advantage of tabs, it was time to build a better solution.

Now, when the frame is too small for the number of tabs, scroll controls and smart selection are automatically added in place of a scroll bar. You can check them out on the tecton tabs page.

Q2 Vault updates

Last month, we launched the ability to scope vault depending on environment. This month, we added features to make that experience better and easier to use. The vault now allows for certificates to be set at and used at a scoped level. Also, we added a bit of railing guidance with the command line function q2 vault. This function has new methods to support the recent new feature and you can read about how it all works here.

Shared Development Server

With a growing number of developers joining our platform and using the shared development server (sandbox), we decided to not only optimize how the server works, but also double all the machine's resources (CPU, RAM, storage space). We've seen a marked improvement in uptime and have further plans to better distribute resources. Keep an eye on this newsletter for those improvements. If you're ever curious about the sandbox's current status, please see https://q2developer.com/status.

Team Changes

Our team continues to grow alongside the Caliper SDK developer community. We are excited to introduce our newest team member:

Justin Brewer – Justin joins Q2 from previously being an Application Engineer at a banking core. He is excited for something a little bit different, and he will be joining Mark and Jon for Partner Success. In the past, Justin has made an impressive automatic script that would install Python according to company requirements. Outside of work, Justin enjoys hunting and fishing as well as tinkering with computers. One of his favorite projects is he built an arcade box running on a Raspberry Pi.

Latest Releases

Caliper SDK (Python) 2.82.0 - CHANGELOG

Tecton SDK (Javascript) 1.4.1 - CHANGELOG

Marketplace (Python) 0.6.0 - CHANGELOG