Digital disruption is building a voracious appetite for developers — and every area of home and business life is adapting to disruption. Platform-based business models, from travel and hospitality to recruitment and P2P funding, dominate the economy. Firms like Airbnb and Uber have no physical inventory of their own, but their platforms have revolutionized their … continue reading
The advantages of cloud computing have been talked about for years in the pages of this magazine. Yes, massive scaling, redundancy and data availability are benefits, but the primary driver has always been cost. Companies were told they could abandon their data centers — or significantly reduce them — and move their applications to the … continue reading
What does it mean to be a software developer today? Is it necessary to write code to qualify as a contemporary software developer? Are practitioners of low-code and no-code development software developers? Should business stakeholders who participate in software development using platform-as-a-service development tools be considered software developers? Moreover, do IT professionals, business analysts and … continue reading
We’ve all been part of this debate about whether we should have an open-plan office or not. In general, executives would advocate for the open-plan office, while the individual contributors would say, “Please, no!!!” Executives won’t listen because they feel they are the only ones who can see the full picture clearly enough to make … continue reading
Cell phone designs in its first years were incredibly fluid, with only one real constant — users, for whatever reason, hated screen phones. They were hard to type on, operating systems were a mess, there were no real apps, and they were comparatively expensive. One of the first powerful successes was the Motorola RAZR, which … continue reading
Privacy means different things to different people. It’s why some people build walls around their homes, yet others are totally comfortable walking on public beaches in the nude. Data privacy is another animal altogether, and there are varying degrees to what people will accept when it comes to giving up their personal information. People I’ve … continue reading
Green IT is nothing new, or so it would appear. Wikipedia, for instance, dates it back to 1992. But Green IT still concentrates very much on the operation and use of applications, with little focus on what goes on during their development. Up in our ivory towers, we software engineers often feel that such matters … continue reading
The software development industry is moving fast. Too fast, if you ask me, and for many practitioners I’ve spoken with in the last year at about a dozen events ranging from development to data to monitoring, to DevOps and testing. The folks I’ve spoken with over lunches, in session rooms and at post-conference socials tell … continue reading
Software developers create an intangible product — software — to define the initial configuration of a processor’s memory. The right memory configuration causes a processor to do what it’s supposed to do. We all tend to refer to the text representations of code as ‘software’ — when in fact, this text is just one step … continue reading
As software becomes more sophisticated, the need for a security culture in organizations becomes more urgent. However, organizations’ security teams rarely have the necessary resources and expertise to support developers. In fact, the BSIMM 2016 survey indicates that for every 245 software engineers, there is 1 security expert. Not only do organizations lack the resources … continue reading
Programming languages go through cycles of adoption. A nice visual timeline of popularity as measured by TIOBE shows Java dominant since the index began in 2002, with C showing close tracking and resilience throughout, and with C++, Python, and VB.NET falling into the next cluster that formed through 2018 at half the percentage rating. Other … continue reading
Knowledge is the foundation of intelligence— whether artificial intelligence or conventional human intellect. The understanding implicit in intelligence, its application towards business problems or personal ones, requires knowledge of these problems (and potential solutions) to effectively overcome them. The knowledge underpinning AI has traditionally come from two distinct methods: statistical reasoning, or machine learning, and … continue reading
When my girls were little, they were big fans of “The Little Mermaid,” so at bedtime I would read to them from a book called “Ariel’s Painting Party.” The story goes like this: Ariel saw a sunrise that was so beautiful that she decided to paint it. When she was finished, she showed it to … continue reading
The term ‘cloud native’ is responsible for significant confusion in conversations about contemporary application development because of a lack of clarity about its meaning. For example, contemporary usage of the term often equates it with applications that are optimized for cloud computing infrastructures. Another use of the term equate it with cloud-based applications that are … continue reading
