Angular

ANGULAR NEWS: Using the Wordpress API, Developer Advocacy, PrimeNG, NgUpgrade & RxJS

Published Oct 28, 2019

Updated Jan 31, 2023

6 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

The Angular community is continuously rolling out new tools and resources to help increase the capacity of its members. Keep up with current Angular news as Tracy Lee (@ladyleet) and Taras Mankovski (@tarasm) discuss a variety of topics with Angular experts.

Featured in this article are interviews with Roy Sivan (@royboy789) from Walt Disney, John Papa (@John_Papa) from Microsoft, Kito Mann (@kito99) from Virtua, George Kalpakas(@gkalpakas) from the Angular core team and Ben Lesh (@benlesh) from Google.

Wordpress’ API for Mobile App Development & Content Management

The benefits of using WordPress API with Roy Sivan

Roy Sivan is a Senior WordPress developer at Walt Disney. He is a technology expert on WordPress and using WordPress in SPA and mobile development.

WordPress is still a strong contender a CMS solution. It has never been easier to decouple applications from WordPress and allow those working on site content to build out material which can then be used to create applications with any framework of choice, including Angular.

The WordPress API has recently become a popular choice for companies looking to build mobile apps. Because the WordPress API is decoupled from WordPress, you can use AppPresser to pull data from the main site and display it in a native mobile application.

If you have looked into WordPress before and been concerned about security, the open source community has been hard at work solving this problem. Security has always been an important consideration for WordPress due to the large size of the platform, but because of a recent uptick in contributions to this concern, there are now a variety of options for authentication.

Roy encourages those interested in pursuing WordPress to review the new developer handbook to better understand the variety of customization possibilities. It serves as a great resource with in-depth tutorials that walk you through everything from advanced customizations to building your own API endpoints. Chances are, whatever you are trying to accomplish with WordPress has already been thought out and is in the documentation.

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The Life of a Developer Advocate and How to be a Better Developer

Using advocacy to propel development in the community with John Papa

Working as a Developer Advocate is all about sharing experience and showing people new ways of doing things. John Papa has been coding for most of his life and a developer advocate for the past 10 years. He loves making contributions that make code easier so developers can focus on the real problems.

John Papa’s work as an advocate includes a variety of methods to promote development in the community.

In Angular, John’s work has played a key role in developer’s lives. He recently wrote VS Code snippets for Angular to help make writing Angular code easier. His snippets allow Angular developers to get rid of much boiler plate and add consistency to their code.

John also played an integral part in creating the style guide for Angular and AngularJS. His style guide work for Angular played significantly into the opinions Angular-CLI gives developers.

John is always encouraging people to get more involved in their development communities. He recommends getting on social media and engaging in conversations, contributing to open source projects, building extension tools, and finding other ways to help developers in their work.

You will often find him presenting at conferences and events. He stresses the importance of participating in hallway conversations and views this as a great way to see what people are saying about different tools. By talking to people between sessions and listening to people’s concerns as a developer advocate, he is able to help give that feedback to core teams and make improvements all around.

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PrimeNG

Getting started with PrimeNG with Kito Mann

If you’ve done development in Java, you may be familiar with PrimeFaces, a popular Java component library. We sit down with Kito Mann, a technology trainer and mentor at Virtua to discuss PrimeNG.

PrimeNG is an Angular component library that is a derivative of PrimeFaces. The library offers over 70 open source native Angular components along with a variety of theming options for developers.

PrimeNG has become popular amongst developers in organizations as small as 2–3 person shops and large organizations. The primary benefit developers see when using PrimeNG is help with developing complicated UI such as grids, charts and calendar components.

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NgUpgrade

Integrating ngUpgrade and the latest developments in Angular with George Kalpakas

Constant innovation in the Angular team has recently brought us ngUpgrade. NgUpgrade works by enabling upgrades (making AngularJS components available in Angular) and downgrades (making Angular components available in AngularJS) between components. The goal and vision of the ngUpgrade project is to make it easier for developers working with large AngularJS applications to upgrade to the latest version of Angular. To use ngUpgrade, developers simply need to add upgrade to their projects and bootstrap both frameworks using a sequence of operations.

George Kalpakas, a member of the Angular core team and core contributor to the ngUpgrade project, speaks with us about the project and the plans the Angular team has in store for developers.

There have been a significant amount of improvements to the ngUpgrade project as of late. Recently, ngUpgrade was re-written to incorporate AOT compilation. Another recent addition was improving the interoperability of things like ngModel and control access monitor in order to make it easier to use components and interpolate between Angular and AngularJS.

The path to creating ngUpgrade has not been an easy one. Some of the challenges the team has faced through this process was getting both frameworks to be aware of each other. Current challenges the team is working on is the debugging story for ngUpgrade and solving challenges around users not configuring ngUpgrade correctly and running into errors.

Looking forward, the ngUpgrade team is working on docs and other resources to help people get started using ngUpgrade. Additional plans include improving the performance of ngUpgrade apps and providing more tooling and more boiler plates for various use cases.

If users have questions or feedback through the upgrade process, you can reach George through the ngUpgrade GitHub project where the Angular team is always looking to hear more from their users.

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RxJS

RxJS 6 and 7, Testing, and more with Ben Lesh, Author and Project Lead of RxJS 5+

Ben Lesh is a Software Engineer at Google and is the author and project lead for RxJS 5+. He provides us with an update on the current state of RxJS. Currently, the size of RxJS (minified, bundled, and gzipped is 33k. However, Ben has created a library that shrunk the size of RxJS to only 3k!

To do this, he moved all the error handling into one central spot so v8 can inline all the other functions without having to deal with the de-optimized functions that you get if you have a tryCatch block in a function.

There were some compromises that Ben had to make in order to get it to a smaller size, but the new improvements to the library should be roughly the same speed and about 10x smaller.

Though RxJS does not currently take advantage of Angular’s compiler, an ideal scenario would be to get Angular’s template compiler and use it at build-time to produce functions able to handle updates in the DOM based on the compiled template.

Many who use RxJS wonder about RxJS’s testing story. RxJS has a great testing suite that runs a battery of more than 2,500 tests within a second. Unfortunately it does not provide much utility to the average user yet. The test suite currently schedules synchronistic tests on things that would normally run asynchronistically but does it in a determinate way. It makes some assumptions based off the fact that it is only really used in RxJS’s core library, but there is work being done to make this more useful externally. A lot of challenging problems remain to be resolved before it is successful.

New updates on the testing story include a prototyping of a testing suite in T-Rx. Ben tells us he was able to re-write the schedulers meaning that he had access to a brand new virtual scheduler that he wrapped in a high order function that gives users access to everything you might need for testing. This automatically sets up the other schedulers so they work in an expected way with the test scheduler.

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There is more to come, so keep up to date with RxJS on the latest developments on the project in Github.

Co-written by Necoline Hubner and Tracy Lee.

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We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

Using HttpClient in Modern Angular Applications

Introduction With all the wonderful treats that the Angular team has given us during the recent "renaissance" era, many new developers are joining in on the fun. And one of the challenges they'll face at some point is how to call an API from your Angular application properly. Unfortunately, while searching for a guide on how to do this, they might stumble upon a lot of outdated information. Hence, this article should serve as a reliable guide on how to use the HttpClient in Angular >= 17. The Setup To make an HTTP request in Angular, you can take advantage of the HttpClient provided by the @angular/common/http package. To use it, you'll need to provide it. Here's how you can do that for the whole application using the bootstrapApplication function from @angular/platform-browser: ` With that, you should be good to go. You can now inject the HttpClient into any service or component in your application. Using HttpClient in Services Let's take a common example: You have a database object, say a Movie, and you want to implement CRUD operations on it. Typically, you'll want to create a service that provides methods for these operations. Let's call this service MovieService and create a skeleton for it with a method for getting all movies. ` Implementing the Method using HttpClient Let's assume we have a GraphQL API for our movies. We can implement our getAllMovies using HttpClient to make a request to fetch all movies. First, we will need to define a new type to represent the response from the API. This is especially important when you are using GraphQL, which may return a specific structure, such as: ` When working with a real API, you'll likely use some code generator to generate the types for the response from the GraphQL schema. But for the sake of this example, we'll create an interface to represent the response manually: ` Now, we can implement the getAllMovies method using HttpClient: ` > Note: The post method is used here because we are sending a request body. If you are making a GET request (e.g. to a REST API), you can use the get method instead. The getAllMovies method returns an Observable of MoviesListResponse. In this example, I have typed it explicitly to make it obvious at first glance, but you could also omit the type annotation, and TypeScript should infer it. > Note: While I'm excited about signals as much as the next guy, making HTTP requests is one of the typical async operations for which RxJS Observables are a perfect fit, making a great argument for RxJS still having a solid place in Angular alongside signals. Using the Service in a Component Now that we have our MovieService set up, we can use it as a component to fetch and display all movies. But first, let's create a Movie interface to represent the structure of a movie. Trust me, this will prevent many potential headaches down the line. Although using any at the beginning and implementing the types later is a valid approach in some cases, using data fetched from an API without validating the type will inevitably lead to bugs that are difficult to solve. ` Now, we can start implementing our standalone MoviesComponent: ` In this component, we are calling the getAllMovies method from the MovieService in the constructor to fetch all movies and assign them to the movies property which we will use to display the movies in the template. ` In this case, placing our code inside the constructor is safe because it doesn’t depend on any @Input(). If it were, our code would fail because the inputs aren’t initialized at time of instantiation. That's why it is sometimes recommended to place logic in ngOnInit instead. You could also put this call in an arbitrary method that is called e.g. on a button click. Another way to handle the subscription is to use the async pipe in the template. This way, Angular will automatically subscribe and unsubscribe from the observable for you and you won't have to assign the response to a property in the component. Due to the structure of the returned data, however, we'll need to use the RxJS map operator to extract the movies from the response. ` > Note using the pipe method to chain the map operator to the observable returned by getAllMovies. This is a common pattern when working with RxJS observables introduced in RxJs 5.5. If you see code that uses the map operator directly on the observable and wonder why it isn't working for you, it's likely using an older version of RxJS. Now, we can simply apply the async pipe in the template to subscribe to the observable and display the movies: ` Conclusion HttpClient in Angular is pretty straightforward, but with all the changes to RxJS and Angular in the past few years, it can pose a significant challenge if you're not super-experienced with those technologies and stumble upon outdated resources. Following this article, you should hopefully be able to implement your service using HttpClient to make requests to an API in your modern Angular application and avoid the struggle of copying outdated code snippets....

Mar 27, 2024

4 mins

AngularJavaScript

Incremental Hydration in Angular

Incremental Hydration in Angular Some time ago, I wrote a post about SSR finally becoming a first-class citizen in Angular. It turns out that the Angular team really treats SSR as a priority, and they have been working tirelessly to make SSR even better. As the previous blog post mentioned, full-page hydration was launched in Angular 16 and made stable in Angular 17, providing a great way to improve your Core Web Vitals. Another feature aimed to help you improve your INP and other Core Web Vitals was introduced in Angular 17: deferrable views. Using the @defer blocks allows you to reduce the initial bundle size and defer the loading of heavy components based on certain triggers, such as the section entering the viewport. Then, in September 2024, the smart folks at Angular figured out that they could build upon those two features, allowing you to mark parts of your application to be server-rendered dehydrated and then hydrate them incrementally when needed - hence incremental hydration. I’m sure you know what hydration is. In short, the server sends fully formed HTML to the client, ensuring that the user sees meaningful content as quickly as possible and once JavaScript is loaded on the client side, the framework will reconcile the rendered DOM with component logic, event handlers, and state - effectively hydrating the server-rendered content. But what exactly does "dehydrated" mean, you might ask? Here's what will happen when you mark a part of your application to be incrementally hydrated: 1. Server-Side Rendering (SSR): The content marked for incremental hydration is rendered on the server. 2. Skipped During Client-Side Bootstrapping: The dehydrated content is not initially hydrated or bootstrapped on the client, reducing initial load time. 3. Dehydrated State: The code for the dehydrated components is excluded from the initial client-side bundle, optimizing performance. 4. Hydration Triggers: The application listens for specified hydration conditions (e.g., on interaction, on viewport), defined with a hydrate trigger in the @defer block. 5. On-Demand Hydration: Once the hydration conditions are met, Angular downloads the necessary code and hydrates the components, allowing them to become interactive without layout shifts. How to Use Incremental Hydration Thanks to Mark Thompson, who recently hosted a feature showcase on incremental hydration, we can show some code. The first step is to enable incremental hydration in your Angular application's appConfig using the provideClientHydration provider function: ` Then, you can mark the components you want to be incrementally hydrated using the @defer block with a hydrate trigger: ` And that's it! You now have a component that will be server-rendered dehydrated and hydrated incrementally when it becomes visible to the user. But what if you want to hydrate the component on interaction or some other trigger? Or maybe you don't want to hydrate the component at all? The same triggers already supported in @defer blocks are available for hydration: - idle: Hydrate once the browser reaches an idle state. - viewport: Hydrate once the component enters the viewport. - interaction: Hydrate once the user interacts with the component through click or keydown triggers. - hover: Hydrate once the user hovers over the component. - immediate: Hydrate immediately when the component is rendered. - timer: Hydrate after a specified time delay. - when: Hydrate when a provided conditional expression is met. And on top of that, there's a new trigger available for hydration: - never: When used, the component will remain static and not hydrated. The never trigger is handy when you want to exclude a component from hydration altogether, making it a completely static part of the page. Personally, I'm very excited about this feature and can't wait to try it out. How about you?...

Mar 14, 2025

3 mins

AngularJavaScript

Docusign Momentum 2025 From A Developer’s Perspective

*What if your contract details stuck in PDFs could ultimately become the secret sauce of your business automation workflows?* In a world drowning in PDFs and paperwork, I never thought I’d get goosebumps about agreements – until I attended Docusign Momentum 2025. I went in expecting talks about e-signatures; I left realizing the big push and emphasis with many enterprise-level organizations will be around Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM). It is positioned to transform how we build business software, so let’s talk about it. As Director of Technology at This Dot Labs, I had a front-row seat to all the exciting announcements at Docusign Momentum. Our team also had a booth there showing off the 6 Docusign extension apps This Dot Labs has released this year. We met 1-on-1 with a lot of companies and leaders to discuss the exciting promise of IAM. What can your company accomplish with IAM? Is it really worth it for you to start adopting IAM?? Let’s dive in and find out. After his keynote, I met up with Robert Chatwani, President of Docusign and he said this > “At Docusign, we truly believe that the power of a great platform is that you won’t be able to exactly predict what can be built on top of it,and builders and developers are at the heart of driving this type of innovation. Now with AI, we have entered what I believe is a renaissance era for new ideas and business models, all powered by developers.” Docusign’s annual conference in NYC was an eye-opener: agreements are no longer just documents to sign and shelve, but dynamic data hubs driving key processes. Here’s my take on what I learned, why it matters, and why developers should pay attention. From E-Signatures to Intelligent Agreements – A New Era Walking into Momentum 2025, you could feel the excitement. Docusign’s CEO and product team set the tone in the keynote: “Agreements make the world go round, but for too long they’ve been stuck in inboxes and PDFs, creating drag on your business.” Their message was clear – Docusign is moving from a product to a platform. In other words, the company that pioneered e-signatures now aims to turn static contracts into live, integrated assets that propel your business forward. I saw this vision click when I chatted with an attendee from a major financial services firm. His team manages millions of forms a year – loan applications, account forms, you name it. He admitted they were still “just scanning and storing PDFs” and struggled to imagine how IAM could help. We discussed how much value was trapped in those documents (what Docusign calls the “Agreement Trap” of disconnected processes). By the end of our coffee, the lightbulb was on: with the right platform, those forms could be automatically routed, data-extracted, and trigger workflows in other systems – no more black hole of PDFs. His problem wasn’t unique; many organizations have critical data buried in agreements, and they’re waking up to the idea that it doesn’t have to be this way. What Exactly is Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM)? So what is Docusign’s Intelligent Agreement Management? In essence, IAM is an AI-powered platform that connects every part of the agreement lifecycle. It’s not a single product, but a collection of services and tools working in concert. Docusign IAM helps transform agreement data into insights and actions, accelerate contract cycles, and boost productivity across departments. The goal is to address the inefficiencies in how agreements are created, signed, and managed – those inefficiencies that cost businesses time and money. At Momentum, Docusign showcased the core components of IAM: - Docusign Navigator link: A smart repository to centrally store, search, and analyze agreements. It uses AI to convert your signed documents (which are basically large chunks of text) into structured, queryable data. Instead of manually digging through contracts for a specific clause, you can search across all agreements in seconds. Navigator gives you a clear picture of your organization’s contractual relationships and obligations (think of it as Google for your contracts). Bonus: it comes with out-of-the-box dashboards for things like renewal dates, so you can spot risks and opportunities at a glance. - Docusign Maestro link: A no-code workflow engine to automate agreement workflows from start to finish. Maestro lets you design customizable workflows that orchestrate Docusign tasks and integrate with third-party apps – all without writing code. For example, you could have a workflow for new vendor onboarding: once a vendor contract is signed, Maestro could automatically notify your procurement team, create a task in your project tracker, and update a record in your ERP system. At the conference, they demoed how Maestro can streamline processes like employee onboarding and compliance checks through simple drag-and-drop steps or archiving PDFs of signed agreements into Google Drive or Dropbox. - Docusign Iris (AI Engine) link: The brains of the operation. Iris is the new AI engine powering all of IAM’s “smarts” – from reading documents to extracting data and making recommendations. It’s behind features like automatic field extraction, AI-assisted contract review, intelligent search, and even document summarization. In the keynote, we saw examples of Iris in action: identify key terms (e.g. payment terms or renewal clauses) across a stack of contracts, or instantly generate a summary of a lengthy agreement. These capabilities aren’t just gimmicks; as one Docusign executive put it, they’re “signals of a new way of working with agreements”. Iris essentially gives your agreement workflow a brain – it can understand the content of agreements and help you act on it. - Docusign App Center link: A hub to connect the tools of your trade into Docusign. App Center is like an app store for integrations – it lets you plug in other software (project management, CRM, HR systems, etc.) directly into your Maestro workflows. This is huge for developers (and frankly, anyone tired of building one-off integrations). Instead of treating Docusign as an isolated e-signature tool, App Center makes it a platform you can extend. I’ll dive more into this in the next section, since it’s close to my heart – my team helped build some of these integrations! In short, IAM ties together the stages of an agreement (create → sign → store → manage) and supercharges each with automation and AI. It’s modular, too – you can adopt the pieces you need. Docusign essentially unbundled the agreement process into building blocks that developers and admins can mix-and-match. The future of agreements, as Docusign envisions it, is a world where organizations *“seamlessly add, subtract, and rearrange modular solutions to meet ever-changing needs”* on a single trusted platform. The App Center and Real-World Integrations (Yes, We Built Those!) One of the most exciting parts of Momentum 2025 for me was seeing the Docusign App Center come alive. As someone who works on integrations, I was practically grinning during the App Center demos. Docusign highlighted several partner-built apps that snap into IAM, and I’m proud to say This Dot Labs built six of them – including integrations for Monday.com, Slack, Jira, Asana, Airtable, and Mailchimp. Why are these integrations a big deal? Because developers often spend countless hours wiring up systems that need to talk to each other. With App Center, a lot of that heavy lifting is already done. You can install an app with a few clicks and configure data flows in minutes instead of coding for months. In fact, a study found it takes the average org 12 months to develop a custom workflow via APIs, whereas with Docusign’s platform you can do it via configuration almost immediately. That’s a game-changer for time-to-value. At our This Dot Labs booth, I spoke with many developers who were intrigued by these possibilities. For example, we showed how our Docusign Slack Extension lets teams send Slack messages and notifications when agreements are sent and signed.. If a sales contract gets signed, the Slack app can automatically post a notification in your channel and even attach the signed PDF – no more emailing attachments around. People loved seeing how easily Docusign and Slack now talk to each other using this extension. Another popular one was our Monday.com app. With it, as soon as an agreement is signed, you can trigger actions in Monday – like assigning onboarding tasks for a new client or employee. Essentially, signing the document kicks off the next steps automatically. These integrations showcase why IAM is not just about Docusign’s own features, but about an ecosystem. App Center already includes connectors for popular platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, Workday, ServiceNow, and more. The apps we built for Monday, Slack, Jira, etc., extend that ecosystem. Each app means one less custom integration a developer has to build from scratch. And if an app you need doesn’t exist yet – well, that’s an opportunity. (Shameless plug: we’re happy to help build it!) The key takeaway here is that Docusign is positioning itself as a foundational layer in the enterprise software stack. Your agreement workflow can now natively include things like project management updates, CRM entries, notifications, and data syncs. As a developer, I find that pretty powerful. It’s a shift from thinking of Docusign as a single SaaS tool to thinking of it as a platform that glues processes together. Not Just Another Contract Tool – Why IAM Matters for Business After absorbing all the Momentum keynotes and sessions, one thing is clear: IAM is not “just another contract management tool.” It’s aiming to be the platform that automates critical business processes which happen to revolve around agreements. The use cases discussed were not theoretical – they were tangible scenarios every developer or IT lead will recognize: - Procurement Automation: We heard how companies are using IAM to streamline procurement. Imagine a purchase order process where a procurement request triggers an agreement that goes out for e-signature, and once signed, all relevant systems update instantly. One speaker described connecting Docusign with their ERP so that vendor contracts and purchase orders are generated and tracked automatically. This reduces the back-and-forth with legal and ensures nothing falls through the cracks. It’s easy to see the developer opportunity: instead of coding a complex procurement approval system from scratch, you can leverage Docusign’s workflow + integration hooks to handle it. Docusign IAM is designed to connect to systems like CRM, HR, and ERP so that agreements flow into the same stream of data. For developers, that means using pre-built connectors and APIs rather than reinventing them. - Faster Employee Onboarding: Onboarding a new hire or client typically involves a flurry of forms and tasks – offer letters or contracts to sign, NDAs, setup of accounts, etc. We saw how IAM can accelerate onboarding by combining e-signature with automated task generation. For instance, the moment a new hire signs their offer letter, Maestro could trigger an onboarding workflow: provisioning the employee in systems, scheduling orientation, and creating tasks in tools like Asana or Monday. All those steps get kicked off by the signed agreement. Docusign Maestro’s integration capabilities shine here – it can tie into HR systems or project management apps to carry the baton forward. The result is a smoother day-one experience for the new hire and less manual coordination for IT and HR. As developers, we can appreciate how this modular approach saves us from writing yet another “onboarding script”; we configure the workflow, and IAM handles the rest. - Reducing Contract Auto-Renewal Risk: If your company manages a lot of recurring contracts (think vendor services, subscriptions, leases), missing a renewal deadline can be costly. One real-world story shared at Momentum was about using IAM to prevent unwanted auto-renewals. With traditional tracking (spreadsheets or calendar reminders), it’s easy to forget a termination notice and end up locked into a contract for another year. Docusign’s solution: let the AI engine (Iris) handle it. It can scan your repository, surface any renewal or termination dates, and proactively remind stakeholders – or even kick off a non-renewal workflow if desired. As the Bringing Intelligence to Obligation Management session highlighted, “Missed renewal windows lead to unwanted auto-renewals or lost revenue… A forgotten termination deadline locks a company into an unneeded service for another costly term.” With IAM, those pitfalls are avoidable. The system can automatically flag and assign tasks well before a deadline hits. For developers, this means we can deliver risk-reduction features without building a custom date-tracking system – the platform’s AI and notification framework has us covered. These examples all connect to a bigger point: agreements are often the linchpin of larger business processes (buying something, hiring someone, renewing a service). By making agreements “intelligent,” Docusign IAM is essentially automating chunks of those processes. This translates to real outcomes – faster cycle times, fewer errors, and less risk. From a technical perspective, it means we developers have a powerful ally: we can offload a lot of workflow logic to the IAM platform. Why code it from scratch if a combination of Docusign + a few integration apps can do it? Why Developers Should Care about IAM (Big Time) If you’re a software developer or architect building solutions for business teams, you might be thinking: This sounds cool, but is it relevant to me? Let me put it this way – after Momentum 2025, I’m convinced that ignoring IAM would be a mistake for anyone in enterprise software. Here’s why: - Faster time-to-value for your clients or stakeholders: Business teams are always pressuring IT to deliver solutions faster. With IAM, you have ready-made components to accelerate projects. Need to implement a contract approval workflow? Use Maestro, not months of coding. Need to integrate Docusign with an internal system? Check App Center for an app or use their APIs with far less glue code. Docusign’s own research shows that connecting systems via App Center and Maestro can cut development time dramatically (from ~12 months of custom dev to mere weeks or less). For us developers, that means we can deliver results sooner, which definitely wins points with the business. - Fewer custom builds (and less maintenance): Let’s face it – maintaining custom scripts or one-off integrations is not fun. Every time a SaaS API changes or a new requirement comes in, you’re back in the code. IAM’s approach offers more reuse and configuration instead of raw code. The platform is doing the hard work of staying updated (for example, when Slack or Salesforce change something in their API, Docusign’s connector app will handle it). By leveraging these pre-built connectors and templates, you write less custom code, which means fewer bugs and lower maintenance overhead. You can focus your coding effort on the unique parts of your product, not the boilerplate integration logic. - Reusable and modular workflows: I love designing systems as Lego blocks – and IAM encourages that. You can build a workflow once and reuse it across multiple projects or clients with slight tweaks. For instance, an approval workflow for sales contracts might be 90% similar to one for procurement contracts – with IAM, you can reuse that blueprint. The fact that everything is on one platform also means these workflows can talk to each other or be combined. This modularity is a developer’s dream because it leads to cleaner architecture. Docusign explicitly touts this modular approach, noting that organizations can easily rearrange solutions on the fly to meet new needs. It’s like having a library of proven patterns to draw from. - AI enhancements with minimal effort: Adding AI into your apps can be daunting if you have to build or train models yourself. IAM essentially gives you AI-as-a-service for agreements. Need to extract key data from 1,000 contracts? Iris can do that out-of-the-box. Want to implement a risk scoring for contracts? The AI can flag unusual terms or deviations. As a developer, being able to call an API or trigger a function that returns “these are the 5 clauses to look at” is incredibly powerful – you’re injecting intelligence without needing a data science team. It means you can offer more value in your applications (and impress those end-users!) by simply tapping into IAM’s AI features. Ultimately, Docusign IAM empowers developers to build more with less code. It’s about higher-level building blocks. This doesn’t replace our jobs – it makes our jobs more focused on the interesting problems. I’d rather spend time designing a great user experience or tackling a complex business rule than coding yet another Docusign-to-Slack integration. IAM is taking care of the plumbing and adding a layer of smarts on top. Don’t Underestimate Agreement Intelligence – Your Call to Action Momentum 2025 left me with a clear call to action: embrace agreement intelligence. If you’re a developer or tech leader, it’s time to explore what Docusign IAM can do for your projects. This isn’t just hype from a conference – it’s a real shift in how we can deliver solutions. Here are a few ways to get started: - Browse the IAM App Center – Take a look at the growing list of apps in the Docusign App Center. You might find that integration you’ve been meaning to build is already available (or one very close to it). Installing an app is trivial, and you can configure it to fit your workflow. This is the low-hanging fruit to immediately add value to your existing Docusign processes. If you have Docusign eSignature or CLM in your stack, App Center is where you extend it. - Think about integrations that could unlock value – Consider the systems in your organization that aren’t talking to each other. Is there a manual step where someone re-enters data from a contract into another system? Maybe an approval that’s done via email and could be automated? Those are prime candidates for an IAM solution. For example, if Legal and Sales use different tools, an integration through IAM can bridge them, ensuring no agreement data falls through the cracks. Map out your agreement process end-to-end and identify gaps – chances are, IAM has a feature to fill them. - Experiment with Maestro and the API – If you’re technical, spin up a trial of Docusign IAM. Try creating a Maestro workflow for a simple use case, or use the Docusign API/SDKs to trigger some AI analysis on a document. Seeing it in action will spark ideas. I was amazed how quickly I could set up a workflow with conditions and parallel steps – things that would take significant coding time if I did them manually. The barrier to entry for adding complex logic has gotten a lot lower. - Stay informed and involved – Docusign’s developer community and IAM documentation are growing. Momentum may be over, but the “agreement intelligence” movement is just getting started. Keep an eye on upcoming features (they hinted at even more AI-assisted tools coming soon). Engage with the community forums or join Docusign’s IAM webinars. And if you’re building something cool with IAM, consider sharing your story – the community benefits from hearing real use cases. My final thought: don’t underestimate the impact that agreement intelligence can have in modern workflows. We spend so much effort optimizing various parts of our business, yet often overlook the humble agreement – the contracts, forms, and documents that initiate or seal every deal. Docusign IAM is shining a spotlight on these and saying, “Here is untapped gold. Let’s mine it.” As developers, we have an opportunity (and now the tools) to lead that charge. I’m incredibly excited about this new chapter. After seeing what Docusign has built, I’m convinced that intelligent agreements can be a foundational layer for digital transformation. It’s not just about getting documents signed faster; it’s about connecting dots and automating workflows in ways we couldn’t before. As I reflect on Momentum 2025, I’m inspired and already coding with new ideas in mind. I encourage you to do the same – check out IAM, play with the App Center, and imagine what you could build when your agreements start working intelligently for you. The future of agreements is here, and it’s time for us developers to take full advantage of it. Ready to explore? Head to the Docusign App Center and IAM documentation and see how you can turn your agreements into engines of growth. Trust me – the next time you attend Momentum, you might just have your own success story to share. Happy building!...

Apr 29, 2025

14 mins

Software Engineering

“We were seen as amplifiers, not collaborators,” Ashley Willis, Sr. Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, on How DevRel has Changed, Open Source, and Holding Space as a Leader

Ashley Willis has seen Developer Relations evolve from being on the sidelines of the tech team to having a seat at the strategy table. In her ten years in the space, she’s done more than give great conference talks or build community—she’s helped shape what the DevRel role looks like for software providers. Now as the Senior Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, Ashley is focused on building spaces where developers feel heard, seen, and supported. > “A decade ago, we were seen as amplifiers, not collaborators,” she says. “Now we’re influencing product roadmaps and shaping developer experience end to end.” DevRel Has Changed For Ashley, the biggest shift hasn’t been the work itself—but how it’s understood. > “The work is still outward-facing, but it’s backed by real strategic weight,” she explains. “We’re showing up in research calls and incident reviews, not just keynotes.” That shift matters, but it’s not the finish line. Ashley is still pushing for change when it comes to burnout, representation, and sustainable metrics that go beyond conference ROI. > “We’re no longer fighting to be taken seriously. That’s a win. But there’s more work to do.” Talking Less as a Leader When we asked what the best advice Ashley ever received, she shared an early lesson she received from a mentor: “Your presence should create safety, not pressure.” > “It reframed how I saw my role,” she says. “Not as the one with answers, but the one who holds the space.” Ashley knows what it’s like to be in rooms where it’s hard to speak up. She leads with that memory in mind, and by listening more than talking, normalizing breaks, and creating environments where others can lead too. > “Leadership is emotional labor. It’s not about being in control. It’s about making it safe for others to lead, too.” Scaling More Than Just Tech Having worked inside high-growth companies, Ashley knows firsthand: scaling tech is one thing. Scaling trust is another. > “Tech will break. Roadmaps will shift. But if there’s trust between product and engineering, between company and community—you can adapt.” And she’s learned not to fall for premature optimization. Scale what you have. Don’t over-design for problems you don’t have yet. Free Open Source Isn’t Free There’s one myth Ashley is eager to debunk: that open source is “free.” > “Open source isn’t free labor. It’s labor that’s freely given,” she says. “And it includes more than just code. There’s documentation, moderation, mentoring, emotional care. None of it is effortless.” Open source runs on human energy. And when we treat contributors like an infinite resource, we risk burning them out, and breaking the ecosystem we all rely on. > “We talk a lot about open source as the foundation of innovation. But we rarely talk about sustaining the people who maintain that foundation.” Burnout is Not Admirable Early in her career, Ashley wore burnout like a badge of honor. She doesn’t anymore. > “Burnout doesn’t prove commitment,” she says. “It just dulls your spark.” Now, she treats rest as productive. And she’s learned that clarity is kindness—especially when giving feedback. > “I thought being liked was the same as being kind. It’s not. Kindness is honesty with empathy.” The Most Underrated GitHub Feature? Ashley’s pick: personal instructions in GitHub Copilot. Most users don’t realize they can shape how Copilot writes, like its tone, assumptions, and context awareness. Her own instructions are specific: empathetic, plainspoken, technical without being condescending. For Ashley, that helps reduce cognitive load and makes the tool feel more human. > “Most people skip over this setting. But it’s one of the best ways to make Copilot more useful—and more humane.” Connect with Ashley Willis She has been building better systems for over a decade. Whether it’s shaping Copilot UX, creating safer teams, or speaking truth about the labor behind open source, she’s doing the quiet work that drives sustainable change. Follow Ashley on BlueSky to learn more about her work, her maker projects, and the small things that keep her grounded in a fast-moving industry. Sticker Illustration by Jacob Ashley....

Apr 18, 2025

3 mins

Engineering LeadershipGitHub

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