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Collaboration and APIs: The key to innovating with legacy systems

A key responsibility of my role is investigating how to create innovative solutions for existing or prospective customers. I am not unique in this endeavor. Organizations across all industries understand that innovation is the key to success, especially when it comes to markets that are seeing an ever-growing influx of digital challengers.  Financial services is a good example of an industry dominated by long-established firms with traditional technology at the core. Even if there is a desire to evolve systems, the process to rip and replace can be both cumbersome and costly. Technology also only gets firms as far as the potential of an idea.  Ideas are potential solutions, and solutions are business drivers. The key problem for firms today, however, is that technology is typically prioritized over innovation, which puts the cart before the horse. Two complementary factors are beginning to change this mindset: the advent of business-oriented APIs and an increasing culture of collabo

How to Uninstall Python on Windows, Mac and Linux Pratik Sah The Crazy Programmer

Many times we ran into problems where nothing related to Python seems working fine and we want to uninstall it completely and re-install it to remove the problem. So, in this post, we are going to see How to uninstall Python on Windows, Mac and Linux. Uninstall Python on Windows Uninstalling Python on Windows is an easy task. You just need to follow some steps and you are good to go. Below are the steps to uninstall Python from Windows. Open Control Panel Click on Uninstall a Program Scroll down till you see the installed Python version and Select it and click uninstall for each version. Once you are done with the above step, you are left with one final step; Removing it from Path . Although the python uninstaller removes itself from the path, it’s recommended to manually check the path to be sure. To remove Python from the system path, follow the below steps and it will be removed permanently. Click on the Windows button and search “ Environment Variables “. In the Env

Exadel announced the release of CompreFace, an open-source facial recognition application

Exadel , a global provider of digital software engineering solutions and services, announced the release of CompreFace, an open-source facial recognition application. CompreFace can be integrated as a standalone service or deployed via the cloud. It’s convenient API offers state-of-the-art facial recognition. To get started with Compreface, visit: ( https://github.com/exadel- inc/CompreFace#overview ) “Facial recognition technology is being rapidly adopted across a variety of industries, including retail, travel, and hospitality. However, not everyone has the machine learning experience necessary to develop and deploy facial recognition efficiently and effectively,” said Lev Shur, president of Exadel Solutions. “Exadel designed CompreFace as a facial recognition solution that can be leveraged no matter what level of machine learning knowledge the end-user has. And since it is an open-source solution, users can trust the quality and security of the app.” CompreFace features include:

3 major low-code app development pitfalls and how to avoid them

Low-code development has been around for many years and has experienced ebbs and flows in popularity, but has recently picked up steam again due to COVID-19 . Businesses are looking to ramp up their digital transformation efforts — whether that means just starting an initiative or making significant changes or improvements to digital products already in use. Low-code development can be a great way to quickly build prototypes that help take innovative plans from ideation to validation.  One thing is for sure: low-code app builders simplify and democratize traditional development, putting a large amount of responsibility on low-code platform developers to keep everything running smoothly. This article details three major issues that low-code developers need to consider in order to deliver the best possible user experience. Integrating with third-party services Integrating a mobile application with third-party services is an absolute must. End users and customers need to be able t

SD Times news digest: Infragistics updates Ignite UI for React and web components, GrapeCity .NET product line, and UiPath Automation Platform

Infragistics announced the release of Ignite UI for React, and Ignite UI for web components. The new releases   include new features to the Ignite UI Data Grid and one new preview component. The component includes cell editing in the data grid, which enables the user to edit the data presented to them in a web application, cell batch editing, ComboBox column, and more.  “Ignite UI for Web Components is a complete library of UI components, giving developers the ability to build modern web applications using encapsulation and the concept of reusable components in a dependency-free approach,” Infragistics wrote in a post . GrapeCity .NET product line GrapeCity’s Component One is now compatible with .NET 5, Microsoft’s latest release.  It brings new capabilities such as single-file applications, performance improvements (like 20% faster JSON serialization), web and cloud investments, ARM64 support, and much more. ComponentOne’s .NET 5 compatibility also includes new .NET 5-based Win

Codefresh launches GitOps 2.0 to solve limitations of GitOps

Codefresh is hoping to solve some of the limitations of GitOps with its new GitOps 2.0 initiative. As part of the initiative, Codefresh will be providing several tools intended to improve the experience and speed of CI/CD. GitOps is a software deployment model for cloud-native applications that has issues currently needing to be addressed, such as dealing with multiple environments, secrets, and observability. The goal of GitOps 2.0 is to “provide patterns and standards that improve software delivery and reliability.” Codefresh will work with the community to define those patterns and standardize approaches to delivering software. The company will offer tooling that provides a detailed view of everything released to a release, control over rollback, and larger aggregate views that make it easy to tell what’s going on across all applications. According to Codefresh, that visibility and control gives teams more confidence in release processes, leading to faster, more reliable deployme

SD Times news digest: WhiteSource announces Merge Confidence, Yellowbrick Data 5 released with new price/performance capabilities, Mac BigSur now available

Merge Confidence is a new automated solution that helps developers safely update and remediate their open source dependencies by using a badge to show how likely an open source component can be updated without breaking the build. “Open source components are updated at such a staggering rate, it is impossible to manage this process manually. With WhiteSource, dependencies are managed automatically, allowing developers to focus more of their time innovating your product,” said David Habusha, VP Product Management at WhiteSource.  The new solution uses extensive open source dependency data to determine whether updates are safe to apply.  Yellowbrick Data 5 released Yellowbrick Data Release 5 delivers new capabilities in price/performance. This includes more investments in business-critical reliability and performance, finer-grained security, and faster query building with SQL functions.  Release 5 adds rapidly self-healing clusters for fault tolerance and since Release 5 is more gra

How service virtualization helped Alaska Airlines straighten up and fly right

Airlines are all about safety. That’s their number one concern. And what they do to help predict that planes will take off and arrive safely is to run different scenarios based on variances in the weight of the plane and the fuel it would consume to test for safety. But Ryan Papineau, a senior software engineer at Alaska Airlines, said because the data coming in every day is different there was no way to determine if it is correct. “The system here is the ‘sign and introduce’ system, it’s the weight and balance for aircraft,” he said, which is absolutely critical for safely operating an airline.   RELATED CONTENT:  The top 3 pain points of test automation, and how to overcome them Their problem was they needed to control the data, because they couldn’t do performance tests against a moving target. Papineau explained: “While I started doing the control data to do the performance testing, we were like, ‘Wait a second, we could use this control data to do this other piece.’ And so that

PyTorch Developer Day brings a number updates to the machine learning library

The PyTorch team is making a number of updates to support MLflow usage and provide support for mobile and ARM64 architecture. The team held its first PyTorch Developer Day yesterday to provide PyTorch developers with technical talks, project deep dives, and a networking event with the core PyTorch team and developers.  Highlights from the event included:  MLFlow + PyTorch A number of announcements were made regarding end-to-end support for MLflow usage with PyTorch. These include support for autologging via PyTorch Lightning, TorchService integration through a new deployment plug-in, and a sample end-to-end workflow targeting HuggingFace Transformers.  These additions were the result of a collaboration between Databricks and MLflow core maintainers and the PyTorch core development team at Facebook. In the future, the teams plan on adding features such as end-to-end workflows for NLP and computer vision, support for hyperparameter optimization, programmatic interpretability using

SD Times news digest: Android Platform to migrate build systems to Bazel, Databricks launches SQL Analytics, and Secure Code Warrior Missions

Android announced that it would migrate all of its current build systems to Bazel.  While components of Bazel have been already checked into the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source tree, this will be a phased migration over the next few Android releases and will include many concrete and digestible milestones to make the transformation as seamless and easy as possible, according to the Android team. Migrating to Bazel will enable AOSP to provide better support for conditionals, allow for greater introspection into the AOSP build progress and dependencies, and more.  More information on what this means is available here . Databricks launches SQL Analytics to enable cloud data warehousing on data lakes  Databricks announced the launch of SQL Analytics, which enables data analysts to perform workloads previously meant for only a data warehouse on a data lake.  According to the company, this will expand the traditional scope of the data lake from data science and machine learni

Introducing the Neo4j Connector for Apache Spark

Neo4j  announced today the  Neo4j Connector for Apache Spark , an integration tool to move data bi-directionally between the Neo4j Graph Platform and Apache Spark. Apache Spark is the enterprise data orchestration layer of choice, particularly for complex data pipelines for machine learning applications and predictive data analytics. The Neo4j Connector for Apache Spark provides easy, bi-directional access between Neo4j graph datasets and many other data sources – including relational databases, semistructured and unstructured (NoSQL) repositories – transforming data from tables to graphs and back as needed. The new connector is available at no cost and is fully supported for Neo4j customers. The Neo4j Connector for Apache Spark comes in response to high demand from the Spark and Neo4j communities to apply graphs to machine learning pipelines, unify data silos and derive greater value from existing data stores. According to an independent survey, “ Technology Executive Priorities for

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: TrustyAI

The Knowledge is Everything (KIE) group recently released TrustyAI, an open-source solution that combines machine learning models and decision logic to enrich automated decisions by including predictive analytics.  It is the result of a new initiative, within the KIE group, to increase trust in decision making processes that depend on AI predictive models. The new initiative focuses on runtime, explainability, and accountability. “New laws such as GDPR include the right to access how your data has been processed. Therefore, domain experts must understand the way in which a customer’s data has been processed, so that they can pass this information back to them,” the KIE group wrote in a blog post . With TrustyAI, users can monitor the outcome of decision making and audit systems to ensure it meets regulations. Users can then trace the results through the system to help with a global overview of the decisions and predictions made.  TrustyAI also enables decisions to be regulated to

HCL Software addresses changing business needs at Digital Week

HCL Software is working to improve developer productivity and tackle changing business needs. The company made a number of announcements and updates at its inaugural Digital Week user conference. The HCL Digital Experience (DX) solution has been updated to address cloud-native deployments. Features include a new digital asset manager, developer toolkits, and cloud-native capabilities for hybrid cloud deployments. According to the company, these new features will enable developers to improve productivity by 60%, and admins to deliver capabilities 10x faster.  “It’s about more than creating a website. The power of HCL DX is to seamlessly combine digital content, complex business applications, and digitized business processes into a secure, impactful digital experience for an organization,” said Darren Oberst, CVP and head of HCL Software. “We’ve listened to our customers and developed a significantly easier and faster way to enhance and deliver user experiences that matter.” The gene

Angular 11 released with completed Operation Byelog goal

The latest version of the TypeScript-based web application solution is now available. Angular 11 spans across the entire platform including the framework, CLI and components. The team announced with this release, its Operation Byelog goal is now complete.  “When we shared Angular’s Roadmap, one of the items was Operation Byelog where we committed to putting a significant engineering effort towards triaging issues and PRs until we have a clear understanding of the broader community needs,” Mark Techson, developer advocate on the Angular team at Google, wrote in a blog post .  The team stated any new issues reported will be triaged within two weeks.  Other features of this release include: Automatic font inlining to make apps faster Component Test Hardness for testing Angular Material components Improved reporting and logging Updated language service preview Updated Hot module Replacement support Faster compilation with TypeScript 4.0 Faster process for installing dependenci

Data quality: It’s a matter of trust

Businesses rely on data to make decisions that drive their bottom. But if they can’t trust the data, or the analysis of the data, they lose the ability to move with more certainty that what they’re doing is correct. Data quality has many different inputs and dimensions. IDC research director Steward Bond said that among them are data accuracy, duplication, consistency, correctness and context. And the level of data quality that is available within an organization is going to change. Further, working with internal data is different than working with external data you receive as inputs. “So,” Bond said, “I don’t if there’s a really good answer” to the breadth and depth of the data quality problem. RELATED CONTENT: The SD Times Data Quality Project Data is key to returns on investment The first step to ensuring data quality is validation He went on to say that if even the data quality level is good, many of the data analytics tools inherently have some sort of human bias, because t