Here in Blogs Break Room, we’ve ripped every 2020 product Panini has put out. Some are obviously greater than others. In our humble opinion, however, there is no horrible product put out by Panini. They’ve done a great job at baselining quality to a certain standard to ensure collectors can get in on any product line and enjoy the cards. Here is our take on the top 5 best products for 2020 football.

Number One: Phoenix

Next month you will start to see some exciting changes to our box breaks! We want to detail some of those changes in this post as well as clarify some additional information.

First: What is a Box Break?

Great question! Box Breaks have become popular products for those interested into card collecting for several reasons. In the past, card manufacturers have kept prices low and sold lots of cards. This created a problem of devalued cards that weren’t worth keeping around. To solve this problem, the manufacturer started selling fewer cards but for much higher prices. In addition, special autograph and memorabilia cards have become much harder to come by. …

I’ll be honest, I’m still shocked I managed to make nearly 3x my salary for a month by selling nothing but…. I’m sure you guessed, Football Cards! My business started on a whim, a buddy of mine got me into sports cards again. I learned about these things called box breaks.

What’s a box break? Good question. People like myself would purchase a team such as the Kansas City Chiefs, hoping to pull some of the best autographed rare cards that might be in a mix of different hobby boxes.

It’s a form of gambling no doubt. Joe Burrow Autographed cards are selling for thousands of dollars! You can typically buy the Bengals in one of my breaks around $100. Not many other places you can get a 10x return on your investment for no work! …

In an agile world, self-directed teams rule the world. So why do we even have managers?

Many of you probably work for a large corporate company that has many layers of management in the corporate chain. Most of us with a strong technical background absolutely loath management and wish they would simply get out of the way so we can do our jobs better. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen some of the best technology managers and some of the worst. …

Even the best software development teams I work with struggle to solve the problem of completely automated deployments to their production environments. The biggest hurdles to this tend to take the form of:

• Production change management that requires manual approval
• Even microservices architectures that have dependencies on multiple services being bundled and deployed together
• Unable to separate the idea of a version and deployment

There are several strategies we can apply to solve those points individually, but one simple trick to solving all these issues with one pattern is to apply Feature Flags to your code.

Ultimate Shift-Left Development Practices

Automate everything! How many of you have heard that phrase? How many of you are tasked with doing that work? If you’re in software development or a DevOps Engineer then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe you even have several things you want to automate yourself but never given enough time to get that work done?

Any I.T. project struggles to get the right amount of resources, doing the right work at the right time. So how can you help communicate high-priority things that should be worked on now? Here’s a simple process to follow:

1. Define: Find the…

One of the biggest challenges software development teams face in 2020 is the need to deliver code to production faster. To do this seamlessly, we need a completely automated deployment process, and it must be repeatable through multiple environments. Also, to confidently deploy to production without service interruption, we must have successful tests pass in each layer of the testing pyramid.

Defining this process can be challenging, and visualizing it can be even more difficult, thankfully, Octopus Deploy makes both easy for us! …

If you’ve read an article or even some brief description of GraphQL, it probably included a line about what it does better than REST and other APIs. Glancing over the question like that isn’t really fair though is it? You won’t get the whole picture without really looking at each API’s uses and advantages so let’s try to dig a bit into that here.

GraphQL — the new standard