Enhancing Collaborative Work Environments with Proxies

The number of stakeholders in modern software development has constantly increased over the years. Our tools are mostly quick to reflect the change to more collaborative environments. HackMD already provides you with what’s needed to share and create with your team or even a larger community.

But new challenges arise when your team is spread across geographical boundaries or needs specific automation tools to collect data or perform many other tasks securely. Proxy servers can enhance the working environment for your team by solving these issues.

Proxy Servers

A proxy server is a system that acts as an intermediary between client devices and destination servers hosting websites or web applications. Depending on your setup, a proxy can accept all or part of your network requests and forward them as its own. The response is then similarly relayed back to you.

As a result, the visible IP address and its associated information (approximate location and the internet service provider (ISP) name) are changed. This information is key to identifying you online and imposing various access restrictions, which can stop your team from collaborating efficiently.

Unlike other similar tools, such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), proxy setups are highly customizable and come in a variety of types. The choice depends on your budget and the task you want to achieve, but generally, there are three main proxy types to consider:

• Datacenter proxies are hosted virtually in data centers using commercial internet connections. Being the cheapest and fastest, they are best for large-scale data collection or other tasks where the quality of IP addresses isn’t a top priority.
• Residential proxies are physical devices in ordinary homes with IPs acquired from ordinary ISPs. These proxies stand out for being the most difficult to detect, and so are best for bypassing online restrictions or automating tasks with high anonymity.
• Mobile proxies use smartphones and other devices with mobile internet to route your network traffic. They are best for tasks that require mobile IP addresses, such as managing social media campaigns or collecting mobile-specific data.

Residential proxies from a reputable provider are the safest choice for most teams that want to boost their collaboration. The legitimacy of the IP address and accurate location targeting ensure that everyone has the same workflow and resources available for their position.

Proxy Use Cases for Collaborative Work

Various businesses use proxy servers in their daily operations. While many use cases might overlap with software development teams, their team-based environments benefit the most from three aspects improved by proxy servers.

Access to Tools

Websites and online services, including those used for software development projects, might impose geo-restrictions limiting access for team members in different locations. This can prove challenging for efficient collaboration within international teams.

While internal knowledge bases in HackMD can be shared with anyone within your team, links to APIs, tools, or other resources within documentation might be geo-restricted. Supplying everyone with proxy servers will even out accessibility no matter where your team members are currently located.

A proxy from the United States, for example, can act as an intermediary, changing the IP addresses of your foreign developers and giving them access as if they were in the US. In some cases, a nearby proxy server might even improve the connection speed and minimize disruptions, enabling real-time collaboration.

With more and more developers working remotely, access to tools is becoming a crucial productivity issue. Other solutions for remote access, such as VPNs, might be more difficult to integrate into existing systems and raise the costs with unnecessary features. Besides, they rarely have other benefits that proxy servers bring.

Automation and Testing Tasks

Using your own IP address for some development tasks involves various privacy and security risks. You might want to keep your identity private when analyzing competitors' websites or not risk your IP address getting blocked while running Selenium automation scripts. Proxy servers are an invaluable tool for such development tasks.

Many other essential software development tools for tasks like monitoring, debugging, traffic analysis, and load balancing require proxy servers to function as intended. Ensuring stable proxy server access for the whole team is especially important when creating a continuous integration (CI) and delivery (CD) pipeline.

QA testing is also a noteworthy use case since legitimate residential IP addresses are invaluable for imitating real-life scenarios. Proxies can simulate traffic from real users across different locations and, with special tools, different devices. This helps the team to automatically detect device and location-related issues before actual users report them.

Data Collection

It’s hard to imagine a successful digital product that doesn't rely on quality data. All stakeholders, from QA analysts to product managers, are expected to make data-driven decisions in their work. But having access to the needed data is no longer enough, teams must be able to collect it themselves.

Web scraping is a process of extracting publicly available data from websites on a large scale and by automated means. Often, this process involves using various scripts and bots that websites are quick to restrict with CAPTCHAs, rate limits, or even IP address bans.

Even a simple web scraper might send too many requests or arouse other suspicions of automated activity. As a solution, most web scrapers include some means of integrating proxy servers to improve data access.

Integrating proxy servers into your web scraper is an essential part of online data collection. Having access to multiple IP addresses will not only avoid data collection restrictions but also allow teams to bypass geo-restrictions.

Usually, development teams are those who create tools for other departments, but there are plenty of use cases internally as well. Analyzing competitors or even reverse engineering their solutions often starts by setting up a web scraper and collecting data.

Conclusion

Proxy servers are an excellent way to enhance team cooperation by filling in the gaps that might arise from various online restrictions. Access restrictions, lack of automation, and data collection hurdles lower productivity. Combine HackMD with proxy servers to enhance your work environment — every day of waiting results in lost results.