Fairly often I am asked to recommend resources for learning computer programming and web development. There are multiple online resources I wholeheartedly endorse — Gordon Zhu’s Watch and Code for JavaScript, Smashing Magazine for more advanced front-end web dev tutorials, Free C … | Continue reading
Software originally created by SoundCloud to monitor a complex set of dynamically-provisioned software services has graduated from an incubation program sponsored by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Prometheus is the second open source software program to graduate fr … | Continue reading
The proliferation of new modern applications built upon Hadoop and NoSQL creates new operational challenges for IT teams regarding security, compliance, and workflow resulting in barriers to broader adoption of Hadoop and NoSQL. Unprecedented data volume and the complexity of man … | Continue reading
When I first started building TiDB with my co-founders, we encountered countless challenges, pitfalls, and critical design choices that could have made or broken the project. To build an enterprise-grade distributed database like TiDB from scratch, we have to constantly make diff … | Continue reading
An international team of researchers from the United Kingdom and India have developed a drone surveillance system that would use computer vision and deep learning AI technology to automatically detect when violence occurs in public places, such as physical fights breaking out amo … | Continue reading
This month saw the release of a fascinating oral history, in which 76-year-old Brian Kernighan remembers the origins of the Unix command grep. Kernighan is already a legend in the world of Unix — recognized as the man who coined the term Unix back in 1970. His last initial also b … | Continue reading
I’m still on my personal mission to explore and understand the value of metrics as a fundamental part of tech. We’ve entered an age of instrumentation, and I feel like I’ve been left behind. I’ve seen metrics used to monitor complex systems, analyze behavior (including that of so … | Continue reading
This week the European Union fined Google €4.3 billion ($5 billion) for abusing Android’s dominant position in the mobile device market. The argument is the same one used against Microsoft 20 years ago — that “forcing” OEM manufacturers to bundle its browser gives it an undue adv … | Continue reading
Shannon Williams has played a very hands-on role in launching software for over 20 years. Recently, after observing the power and potential of containerization, Williams co-founded Rancher Labs in 2014, after successfully creating Cloud.com (now owned by Citrix Systems). Since 20 … | Continue reading
While data is the new currency in today’s digital economy, it’s still a struggle to keep pace with the changes in enterprise data and the growing business demands for information. That’s why companies are liberating data from legacy infrastructures by moving over to the cloud to … | Continue reading
Remember the movie “The Imitation Game”? The tragic story of a brilliant man who decrypted secret German Enigma messages, indirectly shortened World War II, saved millions of lives, and was later charged for homosexuality, forced to undergo chemical treatment, and ended his life … | Continue reading
Is your team even using microservices? Or maybe miniservices are better fitting your features and business needs? As event-driven architecture becomes more of a priority, miniservices are rising as a realistic alternative to microservices and the monolith. | Continue reading
With “cloud” already an overloaded term, “cloud native” is the latest addition to the mix. The main concerns for your organization consist of assessing the options available to help further your IT strategy and how cloud-native alternatives factor in with other cloud-related deci … | Continue reading
In the microservices world, distributed tracing is slowly becoming the most important tool for debugging and understanding your application dependencies. During my recent conversations in meetups and conferences, I found there was a lot of interest in how distributed tracing work … | Continue reading
The rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence have put Nvidia on a roll. With GPUs becoming more important than ever, the chip maker is firing from all guns. Academic institutions, large cloud providers and enterprises are all relying on Nvidia’s GPUs for running ML an … | Continue reading
Sophisticated data analysis is creeping into more human endeavors — and even into professional sports. But as data technicians struggle to convert human movements into measurements for binary decision trees, some bar stool philosophers are already asking whether there are areas w … | Continue reading
The Apache Kafka distributed streaming platform is not changing but its typical use cases are. Commercial Apache distributor Confluent issued its third annual Apache Kafka Report, which surveyed over 600 users of the technology, a 71 percent increase compared to last year’s sampl … | Continue reading
The latest 2018 Open Source Jobs Report points to several ways employers can help developers. Based on a survey of over 750 hiring managers and 6,5000 people who use open source professionally, the Linux Foundation and Dice study indicates what developers want most from their emp … | Continue reading
Even though it’s highly discouraged to expose any kind of management dashboard directly to the internet, there are many users who continue to ignore this recommendation, and it seems that infrastructure admins are no exception. A recent study by cloud security firm Lacework found … | Continue reading
The myth of the 10x programmer persists, but the shine is wearing off. Ryan Scott Brown, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat speaking at the Serverless Conference, brought up the idea, in a talk about open source volunteers, that no matter how productive a developer is, the produ … | Continue reading
Apache Spark is an in-memory data analytics engine. It is wildly popular with data scientists because of its speed, scalability and ease-of-use. Plus, it happens to be an ideal workload to run on Kubernetes. Many Pivotal customers want to use Spark as part of their modern archite … | Continue reading
Machines have already begun quietly replacing human workers. The issue may seem abstract when it’s somebody else’s job. But what happens when they come for yours? Amazon began automating its warehouses years ago, but now “Amazon’s Clever Machines Are Moving From the Warehouse to … | Continue reading
Where the internet allowed computers to talk to each other over vast distances, cloud computing has allowed computers to think together, creating machines with virtually limitless storage and computing capacity. We can access this super-computing power for pennies on the dollar c … | Continue reading
IBM Research, with the help of the University of Texas Austin and the University of Maryland, has created a technology, called BlockDrop, that promises to speed convolutional neural network operations without any loss of fidelity. This could further excel the use of neural nets, … | Continue reading
Agile transformation has gone from an IT norm to changing the way whole organizations work. Could DevOps be next? There’s no doubt that DevOps is a hot cultural and technical trend in most digitally focused companies. The purpose of DevOps is to break down the walls (both physica … | Continue reading
Programmers are passionate about which development methodology is the best. Is it Agile? Waterfall? Feature Driven Development? Scrum? So everyone took notice when one of the 17 original signers of the seminal Agile Manifesto wrote a blog post last month headlined “Developers Sho … | Continue reading
Some news everyone seems to be interested in this week is the general availability of Google’s “low-code environment App Maker,” which promises to make it “easy for your team to iterate from prototype to deployed app,” regardless of their lack of coding experience and formal trai … | Continue reading
Open source enterprise application integration software provider WSO2 has launched a programming language built around supporting application programming interfaces (APIs) as a first-class entity. The company debuted the language, called Ballerina, at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon … | Continue reading
Once an icon of geek culture, RadioShack crashed through two bankruptcies — bewildering everyone who still had fond childhood memories of their electronics and gadgets. But as new independently-owned RadioShacks start opening for business, will it be the maker movement that final … | Continue reading
In the beginning, there was bare metal, and it was good. Single-tenant servers were fast, reliable and secure — beholden only to their master. Verily, though, also cumbersome to provision and scale. The need for agility and scalability begat VMs, and cloud providers brought unto … | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence has made enormous leaps in recent years. We are seeing this technology incorporated in autonomous cars, collaborative robots and polyvalent deep learning systems that can master various boardgames on their own or reason their way around a subway map or a g … | Continue reading
Like Dr. Frankenstein aghast at the monster he’d built, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl voiced some deep misgivings about his server-side JavaScript runtime engine at the JSConf.EU conference earlier this week in Germany. Dahl created Node for improving the event-driven JavaScript I/O … | Continue reading
There is no single, best set of tools for continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) with Kubernetes — each organization will use the tools that are best suited for its specific use case. For this reason, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) does not advocate f … | Continue reading
There has been a mad scramble to get data practices in order before and since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect May 25. The intent behind GDPR seems like a reasonable set of regulations to protect the user. However, many, if not most of us, feel a little c … | Continue reading
It’s been 10 weeks since ransomware crippled the network of city workers in Atlanta, and it has almost fully recovered. But after all the news stories about the dangers of anonymous bad actors online, are we ready for next time? If this serves as our new cautionary tale about net … | Continue reading
Building software in the cloud can be a tough proposition. In previous days, enterprises maintained production and test environments, allowing developers to build against internal systems in the safety of a sandbox, while still having access to all of the services and systems tha … | Continue reading
Microservices-based architectures are the future, but getting there can be hard. Modern application architectures are vastly more complicated than in decades past, leading to a host of specific challenges. This is where a service mesh plays a significant role. These days, adminis … | Continue reading
Last week I strolled down memory lane talking about old parts and early hardware scavenging days. Who could have ever imagined that we’d have “old” five or six-year-old microcontrollers collecting dust in our parts bins? Technology continues to move at breakneck speeds. Firmware- … | Continue reading
As we head towards a big data world, should we take one last look around to see if anything valuable is getting left behind? Last week a Stanford medical professor asked what we’ll lose with data-driven medicine. In a special “health issue” of the New York Times magazine, Dr. Abr … | Continue reading
SSGFS: static site generator fatigue syndrome. It’s a thing, people. With five hundred plus SSGs roaming the wild these days — everything from Ace, written in Ruby, to Zodiac, written in awk and sh — SSG-related announcements likely generate a collective ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ amongst develop … | Continue reading
With over 2.2 billion users worldwide, Facebook may very well be the most widely-used software platform on the planet. YouTube or Google still might generate more traffic, though neither of those sites are nearly as personalized for each user as Facebook’s, making the social netw … | Continue reading
Atlassian is known for keeping software developers and operations people organized. Traditionally, the company has focused on the collaboration and information management tools that track bugs, customer complaints, documentation, and source code. But like any good software tools … | Continue reading
Can energy usage data tell us anything about the quality of our programming languages? Last year a team of six researchers in Portugal from three different universities decided to investigate this question, ultimately releasing a paper titled “Energy Efficiency Across Programming … | Continue reading
While the idea of cloud-native computing promises to change how modern IT operations work, the idea remains vague for many who work in the profession. “GitOps,” an idea that generated some buzz at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU conference in Copenhagen last week, could bring som … | Continue reading
Bloomberg recently noted that companies seeking early-stage investments face “a stubbornly analog process” — a vague mix that includes the intuitions and gut instincts of venture capitalists. But a venture capital firm named Social Capital wants to change that — by taking humans … | Continue reading
Walmart is the largest company in the world and the single largest employer, with 2.3 million workers serving 200 million customers every week. So it’s a big deal when they roll a blockchain initiative into production, especially one designed to offer a new solution to what may b … | Continue reading
When organizations talk about microservices, we talk about using microservices as a vehicle for building business-agile IT systems: systems that enable a business to more quickly change, build new functionality, experiment and stay ahead of disruptors and competition. The industr … | Continue reading
What happens when Silicon Valley investors fight an already-entrenched giant, throwing a vast amount of new resources, experience, and the power of the cloud — not to mention the best of intentions — into a quixotic quest to change the shape of the online world? We’re about to fi … | Continue reading