News Aggregator

Hitch: Git Author Attribution Helper for Pair Programmers

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Hitch is a tool that enables pair programmers to attribute code to multiple authors in Git commits. "Just like Maverick and Goose, one dev flies, and one is pretty much the Radar Intercept Officer, having a more dedicated view of threats including syntax errors and stray whitespace," writes Wynn Netherland at The Changelog. "But just like there are two names on those Top Gun plaques, there are two devs in a pair, so there shouldn't there be two names on the Git commit?" Read more at ReadWriteWeb Hack

Micro Frontends - A Simple Demo

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There are many articles in DZone and videos on the internet on Micro Frontends. So I'll skip the details and jump to the article. This article is about demonstrating the development of Micro Frontends using vanilla web components. I consider two Micro Frontends that are deployed independently of each other to two sub-domains and using different code repositories. These frontends are then assembled as one SPA. I'll then discuss the communication between the frontends and then present a working online demo of this SPA. The SPA - The Desired Result The screenshot of the SPA for this demo is:

Clutter 1.6 & GTK+ 2.24 Tool-Kits Released

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There's good news in the land of GNOME tool-kits this week. In preparation for the release of GNOME 3.0, GTK+ 2.24 as well as Clutter 1.6.0 have been officially released... Read more at Phoronix

Critical Overview of Software Thought Leadership

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Software is a formal discipline (it has numerous links to logic and foundations of mathematics) and yet the industry is saturated with cargo cult practices. Most companies are not Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, etc. and they never will be but a lot of programmers uncritically internalize and advocate for practices developed at those companies. I'd like to critically analyze some of the thought leadership and technology that has come out of those companies and how their uncritical adoptions has been a net negative for the software industry. Netflix - Chaos Engineering Netflix is famous for seemingly bucking the trend when it comes to engineering practices and theories. If you search for "netflix engineering/work culture" you will find slide decks outlining their work culture and how they famously don't put up with "low" performing team members.

Android Will be Using Ext4 Starting with Gingerbread

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I received a trackback from Tim Bray’s Saving Data Safely post on the Android Developer’s blog to my Don’t fear the fsync! blog entry, so I guess the cat’s out of the bag. Starting with Gingerbread, newer Android phones (starting with the Nexus S) will be using the ext4 file system. Very cool! Read more at Linux Developer Network

Firebase Errors for Humans - aka Best Error Ever

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I'm working on a system for positive behavioral recognition and metrics using Firebase and React. This is a hobby/side project that I work on usually on nights and weekends. This weekend I had an issue with Firestore (the newer of the two data solutions inside the Firebase product). I was querying on multiple data attributes in a collection. This is not allowed in Firestore, unless you have created an index that includes those two attributes.

A Programmerâ€šÃ„Ã´s Discussion: Procedural vs. OO

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So I have been writing code of one sort or another for over 15 years (mostly Perl) and there is still one thing I don’t get ... what is the advantage of object oriented programming (OOP) over procedural programming (PP)? Read more at Linux Journal

DevOps Your Skill: Submit

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This is the last step of our pipeline. Previously we have run a lot of different tests and if everything is ok, it is time to submit our Alexa Skill to certification. It means, we have concluded the Continuous integration part, it is time to Continuous Deployment. These step are automated in the continuous integration system (CircleCI) and are executed in each new version of the software.

Cultured Perl: Perl and the Amazon cloud

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This five-part series walks you through building a simple photo-sharing Web site using Perl and Apache to access Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and SimpleDB. In this installment, get a feel for the benefits and drawbacks of S3 and SimpleDB by taking a tour of their architectures and starting to design your photo-sharing site. Read the rest on IBM developerWorks...

Designing Hardware With Software: Hardware Description Languages

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Here's an idea: Use your software development skills to learn how to define a digital circuit in a hardware description language. You can program your design into a field-programmable gate array, resulting in a fully functional, high-performance custom digital device. Low-cost FPGA prototyping boards contain sufficient logic elements to implement complex modern processor designs such as RISC-V, along with any customized extensions you dream up. Hardware description languages are not the exclusive province of digital designers at semiconductor companies; even hobbyists can make full use of these powerful, free tools. This article introduces the VHDL language, used widely in the development of FPGA circuit designs.

5 Python Pluses for the Enterprise

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By now, you should at least be passingly familiar with Python. One of the fastest-growing languages, Python has been gaining popularity for years and has reached a level of maturity that makes it a top choice for enterprise development. Companies from Microsoft to Google have embraced Python and are not only supporting its use, but also investing in its development. Google uses it to power some of the world's most scalable applications. Developers pick it up quickly and easily. Read more at LinuxInsider

API Security Weekly: Issue #85

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Vulnerability: Google Cloud Deployment Manager Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an infrastructure management service that makes it simple to create, deploy, and manage Google Cloud Platform resources. Ezequiel Pereira found an API vulnerability in Google Cloud Deployment Manager and collected his $31K prize from Google as result. Pereira found a way to make it invoke Google internal APIs that he was not supposed to invoke:

Guido on the history of Python

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Python creator Guido van Rossum has been writing a series on the history of the language; the latest installment is titled From List Comprehensions to Generator Expressions". "Why the differences, and why the changes to a more restrictive list comprehension in Python 3? The factors affecting the design were backwards compatibility, avoiding ambiguity, the desire for equivalence, and evolution of the language. Originally, Python (before it even had a version :-) only had the explicit for-loop. There is no ambiguity here for the part that comes after 'in': it is always followed by a colon. Therefore, I figured that if you wanted to loop over a bunch of known values, you shouldn't be bothered with having to put parentheses around them." Read more at LWN

IT Strategy Approach For Digital Enterprise

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Introduction Today, more than ever before, and often without noticing it, technology touches every part of our lives. The adoption of next-generation technologies, automated tools, Agile and DevOps methodologies by an organization made the role of IT as a crucial factor for the business transformation. The ability to harness these powerful technical capabilities and use them to support the business is both challenging and rewarding. Achieving synergy between people, processes, and technology is not an easy task by any measure. The CIOs of organizations have to formulate a modern IT strategy that is in line with the new realities. The IT strategy is also called a technology strategy. It guides how IT helps businesses to win in their chosen business context. In the first place, the business needs of IT to be successful are:

Next3: Ext3 with Snapshots

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The Next3 filesystem offers lightweight snapshots and is compatible with Ext3 Read more at The H

Deepmindâ€™s Gaming Streak: The Rise of AI Dominance

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Why Play Games? Humans have played board games at least since the ancient Egyptian game of Senet, with game pieces found in burials dating back to 3500 BC (although the precursors of Backgammon may be older). Playing in general is an essential part of learning for animals, including humans. Deepmind has proven games are also a fertile substrate for developing machine learning and artificial intelligence. Games, especially classic board games like chess and Go (Go is generally capitalized in English to differentiate from the verb) make good candidates for developing machine game players thanks to a few shared characteristics. Games where self-play is possible are especially ripe candidates for developing capable agents as an agent experiences an environment with an adaptive difficulty provided by an improving opponent.

Tales from a Cloud Software Firm

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Following on from a discussion about how people are using the cloud, the Simple-Talk Editorial Team sat down with the CTO of 10th Magnitude to talk about how they deliver Cloud software and services for their clients using agile methodology, and Azure.

Using EC2 Image Builder

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Modern CI/CD cycles force cloud infrastructure to be as agile as other components of the development and deployment process. After integrating security into the CI/CD cycle and adopting Infrastructure as Code, automation becomes the next thing to leverage. Automation in cloud infrastructure, however, can be limited in its application. With image management, for instance, automation can only be done through scripts designed to create snapshots and maintain images.

Cloud Services for the DBA

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A critical part of any DBA's role is implementing the systems that will improve in the long term their organization's guardianship, use and understanding of its data. Too often, however, this gets lost in the fog of immediate and urgent tasks. Gareth Marlow explains why he believes Cloud services will play an increasingly prominent role in helping DBAs achieve their strategic goals.

Native vs. Hybrid vs. Cross-Platform: How and What to Choose?

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After coming up with an online business idea, many people get confused between the app development approaches. It is crucial for them to decide the right approach from the Native, Hybrid, and Cross-platform mobile app. Having the reason that each type of app has its specification, pros, and cons, this confusion is reasonable. Finding out, what type of app building approach will connect the audience with the brand faster is a real hassle. You must know choosing the right harvesting ground is essential for successful outcomes. Hence, it is no brainer that choosing the right platform for mobile app development is paramount, and it depends entirely on the nature of your business.

An Introduction to Windows Azure Table Storage

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Windows Azure Tables are intended for the storage of large amounts of schemaless data. Tables are just containers of rows of data. Mike Wood describes the practicalities of getting started with using the system.

10 Tips to Become a Better Software Engineer

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1. Write It Out Before You Code Keep a habit of scribbling out the algorithm/pseudo-code before you actually convert the solution into code. Writing by hand can also help you plan your code before you move it to the computer. You can save a lot of time if you write out which functions and classes you will need, as well as how they will interact. Although more time consuming, this restriction will mold you into a more fundamentally sound developer. 2. Keep a Checklist of Tasks When you are implementing a feature, its always good to split the bigger tasks into smaller and clearer tasks which are individual logical units and can be tested individually. Keep a list of such small achievable tasks and keep ticking against them once you complete it. This will give you a boost and motivate you to keep ticking more boxes. The checklist can be either in a book or in any software (like Google Keep).

Windows Azure Management Certificates

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Although Windows Azure can be used from the portal, it comes into its own once provisioning, deployments and maintenance can be automated or undertaken with specialized tools. To reach this stage, you need to understand Windows Azure Management Certificates. Mike Wood brings all this information into one article and guides you through the process.

5 Mobile App Testing Trends to Surface in 2020

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The role of mobile apps in the currently thriving modernized setup has acquired an imperative stature. It is primarily to enhance the scale of convenience both at the consumer and enterprise-level that mobile apps have grown to become a major hit! For the success of any software or application, there are different stages of testing. App quality is the foremost factor that predicts the success of a particular mobile application. Over the years, mobile app testing trends have shown serious variations. The sole reason for this shift can be attributed to the rising count of mobile devices.

A Look into Windows Azure Media Services

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Windows Azure Media Services provides a fully-featured media management platform for Video-On-Demand solutions. Anton Staykov provides a first look at the benefits of this platform, some of the terms you should be familiar with, and how to get started.

3 Common Redux Bugs (and How to Fix Them)

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Web developers hate bugs because they lead to malfunctioning applications. Bugs make an application to behave in undesirable ways, something which affects the experience of users. Redux developers hate bugs, too. Because the JavaScript library is mainly used to manage state in applications, any occurrence of bugs often leads to inconsistencies and unnecessary breakages.

Backup to the Cloud: The Silver Lining

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Offsite backups are vital to data integrity, allowing for preservation and backup of data in catastrophic circumstances. Cloud backups have been around for a while, but are now really coming into their own. Tony Davis looks at how to get set up with cloud backups for restores and disaster recovery.

4 Common Bugs in Angular (and How to Fix Them)

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Angular developers often encounter bugs in their applications, which make them curse the framework and lament at some cryptic red lines on their consoles. However, because Angular is versatile, fast, and optimized for various platforms, it should not be frustrating when using it to build dynamic single page applications.

The Operating Systems of Windows Azure

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It is wrong to assume that moving to a managed cloud platform means never having to be concerned with upgrades to the operating system: It is important to be aware of how these updates are applied, and how they can affect the availability and maintainability of your cloud-based applications

Free Software vs Open Source vs Freeware: What's the Difference?

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In the software development industry, technical terms are often dropped here and there. While some people unknowingly use them interchangeably, some confuse their meanings altogether. Free software, open source, freeware, and shareware are some of the most commonly confused software terms in the industry.

Data Science Laboratory System - Key/Value Pair Systems

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Though the Key/Value pair paradigm is common to almost every computer language, there is no clear agreement yet for the definition of a Key/Value Pair database. However, Key/Value pair databases are valuable for special applications where speed of writing data is more important than searching and general versatility. It is certainly worth experimenting with in a data science lab.

Bridge the Gap of Zip Operation

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Despite Java not providing a zip operation, you don't need either 30 additional lines to implement it, nor a third party library. Simply compose a zipline through the existing Stream API. Abstract Java, from its 8th version onward, provides an easy way to query sequences of elements through its Stream Interface, which provides several operations out of the box. This set of operations is quite versatile but, as can be expected, it does not cover all the operations a programmer may require. One such operation is zip, as we can observe in one of the most visited posts about Java Streams in Stackoverfow: Zipping streams using JDK8 with lambda (java.util.stream.Streams.zip). Even 7 years later, we are now on Java 14 release and there is no zip operation for Streams yet.

An Introduction to Windows Azure BLOB Storage

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Azure BLOB storage is persistent Cloud data storage that serves a variety of purposes. Mike Wood shows the basics of how to use it, from start through to snapshots and metadata; both from .NET, and by using the free tool, Cerebrata Azure Explorer.

How to Attach an AWS EBS Storage Volume to Your Docker Container

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In an ideal world, Docker containers should be ephemeral without any reliance on external storage. In the microservice world, this is achievable when services are connecting to external databases, queues, and other services. Sometimes though, we need persistent storage, when we're running services such as Jenkins, Prometheus, or Postgres. Fortunately, there's a straightforward way to set this up now for our ECS Clusters using Docker volume drivers. In this article, you'll learn how to attach EBS volumes to your ECS Tasks, which detach and reattach automatically when your ECS Task gets restarted.

Data Science Laboratory System - Relational Database Management Systems

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There is no better way of understanding new data processing, retrieval, analysis or visualising techniques than actually trying things out in a lab system. Buck Woody continues his series by explaining why an RDBMS is essential for a lab, what that is, and how to install SQL Server into the lab.

Phizzle Breaks Through the 40-watt Challenge of Edge Computing

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Over the last few years, edge computing has gained traction in response to the ubiquity of IoT and the ever-expanding quantity of sensor data being collected. Cities are becoming connected through smart city initiatives focused on traffic patterns, weather, and the functionality of public utilities, such as lighting, parking meters, smart traffic lights, buildings, transport, and waste collection. These initiatives involve the deployment of high-bandwidth and latency-sensitive apps that draw information from multiple sources. The generated data cannot be useful when stored in a remote, centralized data center. It must be closer to the point of interaction; something edge computing can enable.

Big Data: Are We Looking at the Wrong "V"s?

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For once, business people are excited about the importance of data and are interested in the business benefits of extracting insights from the data. Perhaps this is more of a cultural rather a technical initiative, and so we in the data industry should participate by redefining the concept of the three Vs to reflect business values rather than technical challenges.

DBmaestro: A Complete SaaS Solution

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In January 2016, I reviewed the 4.8 version of DBmaestro, which provided the following conclusion: DBmaestro has dedicated their efforts toward filling the void of source control at the database level. Their products are focused at being the best of breed for the database vendors they support. While I wish they offered support for more databases than Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server (hint: PostgreSQL), I understand their decision to start with two of the market leaders and possibly expand from there.

Backups as a Cloud Service - an Alternative View

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In most databases, very small percentage of data changes between SQL Server backups. We tolerate this because it keeps things simple, and we have grown used to cheap storage and fast networks. To exploit the value of Cloud services, should we be rethinking this in favour of backup strategies that optimise resilience and minimise downtime?

DevOps Your Skill: Unit Tests

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A unit test is a method that calls functions or pieces of code from your source code with some inputs and then validates if the output is the one that you want to expect. Thus, these tests validates if the result is the one expected. The method or function to be tested is known as System under test (SUT). These tests are automated in the continuous integration system (CircleCI) and are executed in each new version of the software.

Uploading Data to Windows Azure SQL Database

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One way of getting the advantages of the Cloud without having to migrate the entire database is to just maintain a copy of the data that needs to be accessible to internet-based users in Windows Azure SQL Database. There are various ways of keeping the two in sync, and Feodor describes a solution based in using SSIS

DevOps Your Skill: VUI (Voice User Interface) Tests

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According to the Wikipedia definition, "a Voice User Interface (VUI) enables human interaction with computers through a voice/speech platform to initiate automated processes or services. VUI is the interface of any speech application." Thanks to machine learning, big data, cloud, and artificial intelligence, we have managed to communicate with "computers" through the most natural way of communication of the human being: speech.

Data Science Laboratory System - Programming and Scripting Languages

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Although every computer language is suitable for data, some languages lend themselves especially well for working with certain types or sources of data, or processing the data in certain ways, and so are of particular use to the data scientist.

Configuring Graceful-Shutdown, Readiness and Liveness Probe in Spring Boot 2.3.0

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The Spring Boot team has recently announced the release of version 2.3.0 release, which comes with lot of enhancements, upgrades and features (release notes). Specifically, the Spring team announced early on that release 2.3 would be focused on Kubernetes. With that in mind, this article we will try to explore some of those features.

Azure SQL Database Maintenance

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It is increasingly likely that DBAs are now given responsibility for maintaining Azure SQL databases as well as conventional SQL Server databases. What is likely to be required by way of maintenence? What are the differences?

Couchbase Eventing: Small Scripts hat Solve Big Problems at Scale

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Eventing: Simple Yet Powerful Eventing allows small scripts to overcome hard to solve problems. First off, let's look at the basic Eventing Lifecycle. The steps below show how easy it is to write and use an Eventing Function: Add (or import) an Eventing Function via Couchbase Server's UI. Assign a data source, a scratchpad bucket, and some bindings to manipulate documents or communicate with the outside world. Implement some JavaScript code to process the received mutation. Save your new Function and hit "Deploy" That's it; you now have a distributed function responding to mutations in your data set in real-time across your entire cluster. The Eventing service provides an infrastructure-less platform that can scale your Eventing Functions as your business experiences growth whether a one-time spike or a monthly increase in data stores or clients served without concern for the fact that your JavaScript-based Eventing functions are running in a robust reliable parallel distributed fashion. To learn more about Couchbase Eventing please refer to the Eventing Overview in our documentation. The examples in this article below show that in some cases Eventing can act like a drop of oil to needed "free up" the moving parts of your applications.

Planning for Failure in Cloud Applications

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Any IT application will suffer a failure at some point. A well-designed application can accomodate failure by reacting in such a way as to minimise the effect: to fail gracefully. Good Cloud software design should plan around mitigating the consequences of failure of any part of the system

Hazelcast: Introduction and Clustering

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Every time I read the term Hazelcast, it makes a picture of some weather forecast in my mind like a forecast of hazy situations. According to Wikipedia, Hazelcast IMDG is an open-source in-memory data grid based on Java. Hazelcast provides central, predictable scaling of applications through in-memory access to frequently used data and across an elastically scalable data grid. These techniques reduce the query load on databases and improve speed. Hazelcast is now one of the renowned caching technology in the market associated with distributed computing.

Data Science Laboratory System - Interactive Data Tools

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Data tools interact directly with data and are great for automating data data-aquisition, but they aren't always the best way to prototype or pilot a process. Interactive data tools also allow you to test and refine the process, until it is ripe for automation.

Top 10 Skills to become a full-stack Java Developer

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I often receive emails from my readers about how they can become a full-stack Java developer, what things they should learn, and which area they can work on to become a Rockstar Java developer. After answering them individually over the last few years, I thought to jot down a couple of points which I think will make you a better Java Programmer and Full-stack Application developer.