As a roboticist and engineer, one of the growing areas I’m most excited about is the advancement of swarm robotics. I love the idea of taking inspiration from biological systems to enhance what autonomous robots can achieve collectively, and re-contextualizing social animal behaviors like flocking, foraging, and transport to create new possibilities for humanity. From … continue reading
I’ve previously written about the “Three T’s” of shifting security left: training, tools, and teamwork. In this blog, we’re going to delve down a level and look at some of the tools needed to shift left, what they do, and where in the software lifecycle they belong. The lifecycle question is important to think about … continue reading
Project Verona is a research programming language to explore the concept of concurrent ownership. The programming language is being run by Microsoft Research with academic collaborators at Imperial College London. It was inspired by other languages such as Rust, Cyclone, and Pony. The language also introduces a new model of concurrent programming in the form … continue reading
This week’s open-source project is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Apache Subversion is a control software and source code management tool available on most integration servers, integrated development environments, and issue tracking systems. Apache Subversion (“SVN”) was created by CollabNet in 2000 in an effort to create an open-source alternative to the then standard CVS (Concurrent … continue reading
To be a great software architect, you need a creative hobby. That was the premise of a keynote talk by Kai Holnes at the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference today in New York City. Holnes, software developer at ThoughtWorks, compared CrossFit and weightlifting in general to technology. According to her, in both lifting and technology, there … continue reading
IBM wants to help developers identify and classify archietypes in data with the release of a new code pattern. Archetypes are formally defined as a pattern, or a model, of which all things of the same type are copied. According to the company, its Watson natural language understanding helps users discover archetypes in their text … continue reading
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has announced version 2 of the Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM). SAMM is an open-source framework that enables teams and developers to assess, formulate and implement better security strategies that can be integrated into the software development life cycle. “Our mission is to provide an effective and measurable … continue reading
Mint is a programming language for the front-end web that aims to solve the common issues of Single Page Applications (SPAs) at a language level. It is a compiler and a framework combined to provide great developer experience while allowing users to write safe, readable and maintainable code, according to the developers behind the project. … continue reading
Awareness around and adoption of Kubernetes has been nothing short of phenomenal. When it was new, and the KubeCon conference had just begun, sessions were highly technical, aimed at practitioners looking to build out and manage containerized applications. Most enterprise executives were likely not even aware. I attended last year’s event and spoke with quite … continue reading
Manifold is a visual debugging tool for machine learning developed by Uber. Machine learning is widely used across the Uber platform to support decision making and forecasting for features such as ETA prediction and fraud detection, the company explained. The tool aims to help engineers and scientists identify performance issues across ML data slices and … continue reading
With current data regulations in place like the CCPA and GDPR, it’s hard to imagine data privacy not being a top priority for companies. But unfortunately that’s still not the case, and companies still struggle to make it a priority. To remind companies to practice good data hygiene and privacy, Data Privacy Day is celebrated … continue reading
Scylla is an open source NoSQL database that leverages Apache Cassandra’s innovation and elevates it to the next level. According to the Scylla team, Scylla is implemented in C++14 and offers a “shared-nothing, thread-per-code design.” Scylla’s website claims: “You get the best of all worlds: the scale-out, fault tolerance of Cassandra, with the throughput of … continue reading
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is no longer looking to set short term New Year’s resolutions. Instead, he has a vision for 2030, as explained in a lengthy Facebook post, that spans augmented reality glasses, a large investment in small businesses, and a generational change in how social media is used. For a company that has … continue reading
Google is open-sourcing a “lite” version of their BERT natural language processing (NLP) pre-training technique. ALBERT is an updated version of BERT that improves 12 NLP tasks, including the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD v2.0) and the SAT reading comprehension RACE benchmark. BERT was first open sourced by Google at the end of 2018, and … continue reading
