I believe there is a part of the rich history of software development that will be a guiding light, and will support creation of the software that will run the Internet of Things (IoT). It’s all a question of scope. Figure 1 is a six-layer architecture, showing what I consider to be key functional and … continue reading
Millennials are quickly taking over the current workforce, and for some companies, this growing segment is bringing with them plenty of challenges. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way they’re changing the prevalence and use of technology in the workplace. From the devices that power their work to the software that drives their … continue reading
The latest contest facing modern business is the quest to become an “algorithmic enterprise,” the next step in the evolution of analytics. Rather than just finding insights within data lakes, an algorithmic enterprise uses insights to automate action. The shift is fundamental — we’re moving from an era of human-centric business to automation-centric business. The … continue reading
Amazon’s public preview of Lex, the natural language processing (NLP) platform used by the Amazon Alexa digital assistant, made a splash at AWS re:Invent. With it, developers can create mobile apps, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and chatbots that connect to Lex services, expanding Amazon’s NLP footprint beyond its own products, such as Amazon Echo. … continue reading
Agile development has been the norm across web and backend development for the last few years. No web developer could withstand the idea of deploy and forget, and no user would withstand a stale website. The benefits of agile development are well understood, faster iterations mean better quality of service for end users, security, and … continue reading
Many articles on DevOps tooling attempt to distill an ocean of products into a more drinkable process puddle, like for example: build automation, continuous integration, configuration management, and infrastructure deployment. And it makes sense, since any process that facilitates faster deployments and shorter lead times can result in the business benefits outlined in surveys like … continue reading
As companies progress on their digital adoption journey, they continue to invest in the next wave of modern application and deployment platforms, with containers by far the most high profile of these technologies. They have become instrumental in driving digital transformation within the enterprise, as they offer the kind of flexibility and portability needed to … continue reading
Agile is all about change. IT leaders adopt agile to accelerate the pace of change for their business-differentiable software. Adopting agile requires changes throughout the people, processes and technologies involved in building that software. Development teams must significantly change their structure, culture, tooling and daily activities for agile. And once agile is adopted, the applications … continue reading
Security, specifically application security, has become a huge challenge for IT companies worldwide. Actually, most companies in any vertical nowadays have some sort of IT platform they maintain. An increasing number of exploits, causing widespread financial and technical damage, are being reported on an almost daily basis. Yet the biggest vulnerability you have is sitting … continue reading
JavaScript developers are taking over the world. More applications than ever before are living on the client, using APIs to connect to any requisite (and most likely cloud-based) back-end services. With that, we’ve seen an explosion of tools and frameworks to make JavaScript development seem more like traditional programming, handling large codebases and issues such … continue reading
Barely five years ago, software developers in the United States and Europe were encouraged to look for other lines of work. India and China—according to those in the know—were destined to snatch up all the appealing coding jobs. That clearly didn’t happen. What did happen was an unexpected avalanche of new coding opportunities, brought about … continue reading
Here’s a little secret: No one got into software development to budget. Developers love to code and create. If they wanted to create budgets, they’d have become accountants. Still, creating a development plan for 2017 will inevitably require budgeting and estimating, a process that should be done in partnership with business teams. This will ensure … continue reading
Call it “citizen development.” Call it “low-code” or “no-code.” Call it “custom application development.” The goal of each is to make it easier to create business applications that increase efficiency, improve business processes or organize information. A recent study by FileMaker, an Apple subsidiary that began life as a database but now offers tools for … continue reading
Perhaps it is because Motorola is owned by Lenovo, or perhaps it is simply because there is some cross-pollination between PC and smartphone companies now, but of the smartphone vendors, Motorola is the only one aggressively applying a strategy out of the PC space. When the PC segment hit a wall, the experienced companies moved … continue reading
