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Showing posts from December, 2022

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Open Assistant

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has had developers talking ever since it opened to the public last month. It is a chatbot that can do all sorts of amazing tasks: suggest code, convert code from one language to another, summarizing long text, answering questions, and so much more.  Now, a new open-source project has sprung up to provide an open-source alternative: Open Assistant.  “We are not going to stop at replicating ChatGPT. We want to build the assistant of the future, able to not only write email and cover letters, but do meaningful work, use APIs, dynamically research information, and much more, with the ability to be personalized and extended by anyone. And we want to do this in a way that is open and accessible, which means we must not only build a great assistant, but also make it small and efficient enough to run on consumer hardware,” the project maintainers wrote on its GitHub page . The goal of Open Assistant is to provide a large language model that is chat based. The maintainers

Qoppa Software introduces new version of its library of Java PDF development tools

PDF solutions producer Qoppa Software announced the release of the latest version of its Java PDF development tools and components.  According to the company, Qoppa’s PDF processing and conversion SDK is intended to bring users features to help them create, view, edit, print, or sign PDF documents. This works to allow organizations to incorporate PDF functionality into their web, server, or desktop applications as well as their workflows.  This new version provides several new features, including full support for Java 17 with 4k support while still offering back compatibility with Java 8, Java 11, and Java 16, in order to accommodate the needs of more users.  Additionally, this update offers enhanced support for LTV enabled and PAdES signatures. The company stated that a new public API was put into place in order to verify digital signature information to apply B-LT and B-LTA signatures. With this latest release, new improvements have also been made to Qoppa’s Microsoft Office to P

2023 predictions for software development

2022 saw business and technology come together under the banner of value stream management, more uptake in microservices and other cloud-native technologies, and a greater emphasis on software quality and security. What will 2023 bring? These industry experts share their thoughts. Nick Durkin, Field CTO, Harness Measuring developer effectiveness in 2023 In 2023, we will see a major shift in how businesses measure the effectiveness of developers’ work. I believe that companies will start analyzing developer activities and outputs, similar to how sales teams are evaluated, and that an element of gamification may come into play as well. With businesses now able to access critical tools that measure employee performance across departments, developer teams will be able to showcase the invaluable work they are doing, and how they are achieving those outcomes. I think this will be a positive shift in the way businesses run their tasks and teams because it will advocate for the most critic

The biggest security challenges of 2023

Security will continue to cause headaches in 2023. Not only will companies have to continue dealing with the normal issues like supply chain security and preventing ransomware, which they’ll continue to deal with, but a number of companies see other issues on the horizon for 2023.  Supply chain attacks are ones in which the attackers are targeting something within the business that the business depends on. In the context of software security, this usually means parts of the development toolchain are being targeted.  For example, a major instance of a supply chain vulnerability you might be familiar with is the one in the Apache Log4j library, which is a Java library for logging in applications that is widely used.  According to Matthew Appleton, e-commerce manager of candy company Appleton Sweets , supply chains can be really complex and challenging to comprehend, which makes them hard to manage. “Any entity’s security (and resilience) depends on the security (and resilience) of

Google announces innovations in privacy-enhancing technologies

Google is continuing its work to keep personal data safe with the announcement of new privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs).  Over the last decade the PETs it has invented include Federated Learning , Differential Privacy, and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) .  From the company’s standpoint, this allows them to protect users’ personal data while also continuing to provide the great user experiences that require personal data, such as finding the most popular dishes at a restaurant or providing recommendations as you type.  According to Google, adoption of these technologies has been slow for a number of reasons, such as large computational resource requirements, management complexity, and cost of implementation. Three years ago Google open-sourced these technologies to provide broader access, and now the company is making new strides to provide the community with new ways to deploy these technologies.  First, it announced it would be open-sourcing a new project called Magritt

Is API developer experience overrated?

A lot is being written about API Developer Experience (DX), and it sometimes feels like caring about DX is the most important aspect when it comes to what matters for API success. But is this really true? To be clear, I don’t mean to belittle the fact that DX is important, but it is equally important to see other parts of the “API success puzzle”, and this is what I’d like to discuss here. What is API Developer Experience (DX)? Simply said, DX refers to the question of how well an API works as a product that a developer is using to build an application. This means that very specifically, DX is not about the  functionality  of the API (i.e., about the service that is delivered through the API), but about the  usability  of the API itself. DX is just about the interface. Practically speaking, DX is measuring how easy an API can be used  by the developer  for building an application. Specifically, this does not include the question of how useful that application will then be for user

ASCII vs UNICODE – Difference Between Both Pulkit Govrani The Crazy Programmer

Unicode and ASCII are now the two-character encoding systems that are most extensively used worldwide. We can process, share and store text in any language through unicode encoding, as opposed to ASCII, which is used to represent text in computers as symbols, characters, and numbers. What is ASCII? American Standard Code for Information Interchange is referred to as ASCII. It represents text with numbers. Characters include digits (1, 2, 3, etc.), letters (a, b, c, etc.), and symbols (!). Each character in a text message is changed into a number using ASCII. This collection of figures is simpler to keep in the computer’s memory. If I explain it in laymen’s words then it is the process of giving a character a numerical value. Let us take an example, an upper case character ‘A’ is assigned as 65, lower case character ‘a’ is assigned as 97. Here’s an image of the ASCII table explaining all the values assigned to the character. What is Unicode? Just like ASCII, Unicode also provides o

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Point-E

Point-E is OpenAI’s new system which produces 3D models from prompts in only 1-2 minutes on a single GPU. Generating 3D models was previously very different from the image generation models such as Dall-E because those can typically produce images within seconds or minutes while a state-of-the-art 3D model required multiple GPU hours to produce a single sample, according to a group of OpenAI researchers in a post.  The method behind the project builds on a growing body of work on diffusion-based models and to build off of two main categories for text-to-3D synthesis.  One is a method that trains generative models directly on paired which can leverage existing generative modeling approaches to produce samples efficiently, but it is difficult to scale to diverse and complex text prompts.  The other method leverages pre-trained text-image models to optimize differentiable 3D representations which can handle complex and diverse text prompts, but require expensive optimization processe

Microsoft Graph PowerShell v2 is now in public preview

Microsoft today announced that its Graph Powershell SDK v2 is now available in public preview. With this, users gain access to several new features. Among these features is the ability to write more robust scripts that are both less prone to errors and less ambiguous. V2 allows users to combine both production and preview in any necessary script, using v1.0 whenever possible and beta only when it is needed.  Next, users are enabled to choose between Microsoft.Graph module, for working with only stable APIs, or Microsoft.Graph.Beta module, to work with APIs that are still being worked on and in preview.  According to the company, users will also be able to further improve scripts by only installing the specific modules their scripts will use instead of the whole SDK. Additionally, v2 offers new authentication methods so the user can decide which is best suited for their specific use case. These authentication flows include managed identity, client secret credentials, environment var

Data transliteration is essential for ensuring data quality

With today’s expectation for companies to be able to reach consumers around the world, language barriers have become a hurdle that organizations need to be able to overcome.  Data transliteration tools are designed to tackle this potential problem by working to convert fields or characters from one alphabet into another without maintaining the underlying meaning of the words, focusing solely on the characters themselves.  This process is especially important when it comes to verifying customer addresses. It looks at addresses of any language, parses them, and standardizes them so that they can be read correctly and businesses will be able to properly service foreign customers.  Unlike data translation, which takes the intended meaning of the words into account, the process of transliteration works to provide the most accurate customer address information, when it is being shifted from one language to another.  Additionally, according to data company Melissa, around 20% of addresses

SD Times Q&A: Five things to look for in 2023

This time of year, organizations take stock of the year that’s ending and then strategize about what they want to accomplish in the year ahead. Forrester research director for software development Chris Gardner spoke with SD Times editor-in-chief David Rubinstein to talk about what they’re seeing for 2023. This is a transcript of that conversation, edited for length and clarity. SD Times: We’re here to kind of get a sense of what you folks are seeing coming up in 2023 for software development. Gardner: There’s a couple different things that we’re expecting. We’re predicting five different things happening. The first prediction is that, since the development’s taken off in a huge way, we’re getting a tremendous number of questions around low code and no code, particularly from folks that are building applications for the first time. We are seeing a significant number of traditional developers also use low code, no code, and they’re running into their own challenges. [Non-tradition

How Google improves video voice dubbing through deep learning

With less than 20% of the world’s population speaking English as their first or second language, Google is ramping up the efficiency of video voice dubbing with technologies for cross-lingual voice transfer and lip reanimation using deep learning and TensorFlow.  The first technology keeps the voice similar to that of the original speaker and the second adjusts the speaker’s lip movements in the video to better match the audio generated in the target language.  Google performs cross-lingual voice transfer by creating synthetic voices in the target language that best fits the speaker’s original voice. This technology was made possible by first pre-training a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) model based on the cross-language voice transfer approach. Then Google, fine-tuned the model parameters by retraining with a fixed mixing ratio of the adaptation data and original multilingual data  For lip reanimation, Google trained a multistage model that maps audio to lip shapes and the appea

Platform Engineering is Not New and DevOps is Not Dead

DevOps is dead! Long live platform engineering! Here we go again: another technology hype cycle hailing The New Big Thing, and how The Old Big Thing is dead. But as someone who still believes in DevOps (despite observing many sub-optimal initiatives) and as someone who really does believe in modern platform engineering, I’d like to pick apart the topic in a bit more detail and with a bit of history from my time in this space. All histories are imperfect, but some are useful. A Brief History of Platform Engineering Building digital platforms as a way to deliver software at scale is not a recent invention, and it predates the emergence of the DevOps movement in the late 2000s. Many large tech companies whose primary business was building software realized decades ago that they could enable developer teams to build, ship, and operate applications more quickly and with higher quality by standardizing infrastructure, building self-service interfaces, providing increasingly higher-level

Open Architecture Is the Innovation Differentiator

Strategically, it’s vital that businesses aren’t subjected to long-term vendor lock-in. Choosing a lakehouse architected with open standards and open formats eliminates that issue. People over 30 are cautious about not getting back into scenarios where, once a vendor has all your data, they turn the screws on you with maintenance bills and other contracted costs. What motivates the current crew and next generation of architects and engineers is that they know open architecture gives them the ability to use a wide range of new services and apps. That’s fundamentally better because it powers faster innovation in an increasingly cloud-native world. Architecting with open standards and formats envisions a world where, to use a travel analogy, you don’t have to worry about adapters and converters to plug into power and services. At its best, open is about stripping away costs and complexity and getting everyone on the same page so they can innovate unimpeded. More businesses than ever leve

5 Fundamental Concepts of Object Oriented Programming Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

Object-oriented programming is a programming model that revolves around an object or entity. Object-oriented programming has been an enormous success for both developers and programmers. Creating a more seamless process and system for their employees and clients has benefited multi-billion dollar corporations. However, a significant amount of time must be devoted to learning programming languages and coding techniques to achieve such a result. In college or university, a novice programmer typically has a ton of assignments to complete in addition to plenty of homework. Thankfully, there are online services like https://wowassignment.com/do-my-programming-homework/ where you can hire professionals to help you with your programming homework and entrust your projects to qualified, experienced programmers. Object-oriented programming is based on five fundamental concepts, namely: Class Object Encapsulation Inheritance Polymorphism We will tell you about each of these concepts s

Microsoft launches the stable release of Spring Cloud Azure 4.5.0 with passwordless support

Microsoft announced that Spring Cloud Azure version 4.5.0 has been released and is available from Maven Central. This is the first stable version to support passwordless connections to Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Spring Cloud Azure is a framework that provides a way to build cloud-native applications using Azure services. It provides a set of tools and libraries that enable developers to integrate Azure services with their existing applications and take advantage of the cloud for scalability, reliability, and cost savings. Since both Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL support integration with Azure Active Directory, users can authenticate using Azure AD users, applications, or managed identities. The company also designed the Azure Developer CLI template for the new version, which enables users to more easily experience PostgreSQL passwordless features on Azure.  Other updates include the removal of warning logs of Kafka passw

The phases and stages of the no-code development life cycle

Software development is in the midst of the no-code revolution, democratizing the process for knowledge workers by allowing non-developers to build applications. However, this space is still new and sometimes overhyped. Understanding what no-code development really is — and what it isn’t — is key to realizing the expected benefits and successfully starting your company’s no-code journey. What is no-code? Simply put, no-code and no-code platforms allow non-developers to participate in the application development process through visual drag-and-drop tools. Users can visually compose the forms, workflows, and data needed to build an application without understanding a programming language or having formal software development training.  This has the potential to vastly expand the supply of talent by enabling millions of non-developers with the ability to address application backlogs. Though no-code approach requires knowledge of the business process or domain, it does not require forma