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
Julia Lindsay was on a successful path in the investment and wholesale banking world, where — for the most part — she enjoyed her time. However, she eventually went through a rough patch where she found herself quite miserable, and that misery seeped into work. “I didn’t have a sense that I was looking forward … continue reading
Founded 10 years ago by a group of MIT scientists, Massachusetts-based biotech firm Ginkgo Bioworks has found great success in leveraging a number of open-source technologies to speed up and automate a wide variety of synthetic biology laboratory tasks. The organization’s main focus is the genetic engineering of compound-producing bacteria for a range of industrial … continue reading
If you were to make a list of important programming languages that have appeared in the past decade, Go and Rust would almost certainly be featured on it. Similarly, if you were to sit down and think about which programming languages are best suited to developing secure, microservices-friendly frameworks or applications today, you might find … continue reading
It’s safe to say that microservices architecture is no longer an emerging new trend, but a mainstream software development strategy. Microservices aren’t just ideal for developing new applications, but are also optimal when modernizing legacy applications. Writing functionality into bite-sized, reusable components is more efficient and speeds up development. It delivers code that meshes well … continue reading
Across industries, machine learning is augmenting and in some cases taking the place of human decision-making. In recruiting, legal sentencing, loan approvals and even college admissions, algorithms now play a part in determining candidate selection. The science behind AI provides a more efficient approach to complex decision-making. However, for those without a PhD in mathematics … continue reading
The Cloudera and Hortonworks merger that was first announced in October officially completed this month, paving the way for a new Cloudera. As part of the merger, the former rivals will live under the Cloudera name and offer an enterprise data cloud capable of supporting hybrid and multi-cloud deployments as well as provide machine learning … continue reading
As a football fan, I’ll be the first to admit that Sunday’s Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams offered little in the way of entertainment. As someone who has spent the better part of 20 years directly involved in the development and delivery of software, however, the game was nothing … continue reading
UX design and testing continue to evolve with the emergence of new technologies that enable new types of experiences. Mobile and web apps changed the conversation from UI to UX. Now, UX involves much more than graphical UIs and app performance. Organizations must deliver omnichannel experiences that contemplate voice interfaces, virtual elements and more. “We’re … 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
Did you know Gmail was born from a hackathon project? Same goes for LinkedIn’s “Year in Review.” Companies of all sizes and from all industries embrace hackathons as a way to foster innovation and collaboration — even the NBA does it. Silicon Valley is home to a number of famous projects and startups that were … continue reading
The work on a microservices project is always stressful. Such projects introduce larger data sets, faster update rates, more requests, more failures, more latency challenges, more service interdependencies, more developers, more documentation, more servers, more networks, more databases. Yet, all that doesn’t mean you should avoid microsevices-based projects. The right organization of your team … continue reading
Modern software organizations have two core goals: first, be responsive to customers and preemptively fix issues quickly and second, deliver the capabilities customers want, faster and/or better than the competition. If developers and testers are joined at the hip, it’s easier to achieve these goals. With release cycles getting faster all the time and customer … continue reading
Digital transformation has been a popular buzzword over the last year as businesses try to navigate what the term truly means and how it can be achieved. Research firm Gartner refers to the digital transformation of a business as “the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business … continue reading
In the digital age, consumers increasingly expect new services that meet their needs and enhance their experiences. As banking becomes more commoditized, innovation is key to remaining competitive, and banks are beginning to realize that collaboration is the fastest way to innovate. Innovating internally is a slow process, but the rise of low-code development tools … continue reading
Development teams thrive on precision. They need specific requirements to write clean, tight code. They need to write tests that will accurately reveal any flaws in that code. So when development managers are told they need to consider value when developing software, the reaction is, “Well, what do you mean by value?” In 2019, businesses … continue reading
Adoption of integration platform-as-a-service solutions for combining disparate services into a cohesive application has seen a steady but slowing growth among businesses. Gartner Research found in its “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service” report that more than 50,000 companies globally have implemented some form of iPaaS as of 2017. And, Gartner writes, … continue reading
All throughout our lives we are reminded of events from the past. History teaches us about what happened before us to help us understand how society came to be as it is today. But today we live in a digital age, and while leaders, laws, wars and other parts of our history will always be … continue reading
The software industry keeps expressing it is under immense pressure to keep up with market demand and deliver software faster. Automated testing is an approach that came out to not only help speed up software delivery, but to ensure the software that did come out did what it was supposed to do. For some time … continue reading
Almost exactly one year ago, Forrester confidently predicted that 2018 would be “the year of Enterprise DevOps.” The blog, authored by the late Robert Stroud, began: DevOps has reached “Escape Velocity.” The questions and discussions with clients have shifted from “What is DevOps?” to “How do I implement at scale?” Continuous testing is not far … continue reading
Scrum, the most popular Agile framework, is based on three very simple ideas: empiricism, self-organization / empowered teams, and a focus on improvement. These ideas enable a team, team of teams, or an organization to respond to their environment and deliver great products. Those three ideas are ultimately dependent on transparency. Transparency is easy to … continue reading
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is releasing a Top 10 interpretation for web application security risks in serverless. Serverless has been gaining a lot of attention as of late because of its ability to eliminate operations and improve speed, costs, and scalability for businesses. However, serverless is a new paradigm and with it … continue reading
In today’s fast-moving world, DevOps teams are struggling to solve the same problem: What is the best way to build, deploy, and maintain applications in a cloud-native world? From this problem has spawned a heated debate between the serverless and container communities. While I usually am a firm believer that the answer is somewhere in … continue reading
Agile has been around for nearly two decades now, and just like most things in life that we come to accept, it is starting to be taken for granted. It seems that somewhere along the way, the Agile approach has lost its mojo. “A lot of teams have been going through the motions and keeping … continue reading
The year 2019 will bring new approaches to increase software development productivity and better align development teams and organizations, according to a recent report by research firm Forrester. Among the new approaches are cloud native, value stream management and artificial intelligence-based tools. “New platforms for cloud-native app architectures, value stream management tools, and infusing artificial … continue reading
Application security threats continue to increase in sophistication and number as the technologies that enable them do as well. There have been reports of a 12 percent increase in banking trojans. Twenty-three percent increase in spyware. Twenty-two percent increase in botnets and other crypto mining malicious apps. While there are tools and technologies available to … continue reading
The Internet of Things is dead. Or so declared one of my colleagues recently. While I could dismiss the comment as flippant, it does point to an underlying cynicism of technology that has been nicely captured by Gartner’s eponymous Hype Cycle. As technologists we often focus on cool technologies themselves, and then get frustrated, or … continue reading
Project manager Adam sends his boss a status update for the weekly project status report. Adam’s project is delayed due to conflicting priorities with other projects, so he marks the schedule portion of the report red — an accurate reflection due to a missed milestone. Because of the delay, there will likely be a budget … continue reading
