Best Programming Master

Overnight, every company in the world became a software company. Those companies are either on the journey to becoming a world-class software company or they are going extinct. One key step in a successful journey requires connecting the daily work done by software teams to corporate goals and embracing autonomy with alignment.  Software development is a business differentiator that requires strategic investments to improve the bottom line. Having worked in all aspects of the software development lifecycle, I know most people in the industry think in terms of two types of deliverables – creating new features and fixing bugs. In reality, that’s too limiting. I hear management complain that developer productivity is down simply because developers are responsible for what appears to be everything now and may spend less than 50% of their time writing code. The amount of time a developer has available for coding is tracked, but many other activities are hidden and considered “tax” of t...

March 13, 2020. Friday the 13th. That’s when a large number of companies shut their offices to prevent the spread of a deadly virus – COVID-19. Many thought this would be a short, temporary thing.  They were wrong. The remainder of 2020 and 2021 were spent trying to figure out how to get an entire workforce to work remotely, while still being able to collaborate and innovate. Sales of cloud solutions soared. Much of the new software companies invested in required training just to get up to speed. But training in the form of in-person conferences ceased to exist, and organizers sought to digitalize the live experience to closely resemble those conferences. Fast forward to 2023. The software and infrastructure organizations have put in place enabled them to continue to work, albeit not necessarily at peak performance. Most companies today have figured out the ‘what’ of remote work, and some have advanced to the ‘how.’ But this move to a digital transformation has provided organi...

OptaPlanner is an open-source, lightweight, embeddable planning engine. With this, organizations can reduce costs, improve service quality, fulfill employee wishes, and reduce carbon emissions.  It is object oriented programming and functional programming friendly and, according to the company, it works to allow programmers to efficiently solve optimization problems. This open-source tool improves plans and schedules with hard constraints and soft constraints which apply to plain domain objects and can call existing code.  OptaPlanner also supports continuous planning to publish the schedule weekly, three days before execution; non-disruptive replanning for changes to a published schedule; real-time planning to react quickly on disruptions, overconstrained planning for when there are not enough resources to cover work; and pinning so the user is still in control of their schedule. It combines artificial intelligence optimization algorithms such as Tabu Search, Simulated An...

Charles Babbage was a great Mathematician, Inventor, and Mechanical Engineer. He originated the big idea of a digital programmable computer. Charles is considered “The Father of Computer”. Charles invented the first Mechanical computer. Early Life and Education Charles Babbage was born on 26 November 1791 in London, England. His father’s name was Benjamin Babbage and his mother’s name was Betsy Plumleigh. His family moved into the old Rowden house in East Teignmouth in the year 1808. Charles was sent to a country school in Alphington when he was only eight years old. After some time he joined the 30-student Holmwood Academy. This academy had a library that motivated Charles toward mathematics. When Charles was 16 or 17, he returned home to attend Totnes school. Later he went to Trinity College, Cambridge in the year 1810. Charles’s wife’s name was Georgiana. He had eight children’s but only four survived childhood. And his wife also died on 1 September 1827. Name Charles Babba...

Marketing leaders will continue facing uncertain and volatile conditions in 2023, while still being under pressure to drive growth. These include things like changes to third-party tracking in browsers, the economy, marketing budget cuts, and more.  The tech industry in particular has been impacted by these volatile conditions in the market and in the workforce. Following The Great Resignation, which saw employees leaving their jobs at heightened rates, there were also a number of highly publicized large layoffs at companies like Amazon, Meta, and Stripe, not to mention half of Twitter being laid off upon being taken over by Elon Musk.  To help these marketing leaders plan ahead, the research firm Gartner has published three trends that it believes marketing leaders will need to face in 2023. Being aware of the challenges can help leaders understand the best ways to move forward and be successful in meeting their goals.  “As CMOs enter 2023, the current environment d...

GitHub has added new features to GitHub Actions that will help standardize CI/CD practices and reduce duplication.  Required workflows is the first new feature and it can be used to define and enforce CI/CD practices across multiple source code repositories. By utilizing this feature to accomplish this, teams won’t have to manually configure each repository individually. Other benefits include the ability to invoke external vulnerability scoring tools, ensure code meets compliance requirements, and ensure code is continuously deployed.  Required workflows get triggered as a status check on open pull requests on the default branch. Merges won’t be able to be completed until the workflow succeeds.  The second feature is configuration variables, which allow developers to store non-sensitive data as reusable plain text variables. Examples of non-sensitive data include compiler flags, usernames, and server names.  Before this feature was introduced, developers needed...

Veracode, provider of modern application security testing solutions, today released the results of the Veracode State of Software Security 2023 report , revealing that flaw build up overtime poses a real issue for many businesses. According to the report, nearly 32% of applications are found to have flaws at the first scan, jumping to almost 70% once they have been in production for five years.  “As with all our studies, we set out to provide insights that developers can put into action right away. From this year’s findings, two important considerations emerged: how to lower the chance of flaws being introduced in the first place, and how to reduce the number of those flaws that are introduced. Aside from technical access controls, secure coding practices are all the more crucial for cybersecurity in 2023 and beyond,” said Chris Eng, chief research officer at Veracode. The report also stated that after the initial scan, most apps enter a safety period of about a year and a half...

Cybersecurity company Armo has announced that an open-source project it developed is being donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project. Kubescape is an end-to-end security platform for Kubernetes, and is the first security scanner under the CNCF umbrella, according to Armo. “ARMO’s commitment to open source means ensuring Kubescape is free, open and always improving to become the end-to-end open-source Kubernetes security platform of choice,” said Shauli Rozen, co-founder and CEO of ARMO. “I’m proud that Kubescape’s acceptance by the CNCF cements this commitment. ARMO remains dedicated to making Kubescape the best open source Kubernetes security platform, and ARMO Platform the best enterprise version for Kubescape.  We strive to provide the best and simplest option for organizations to get the benefits of Kubescape with enterprise-level service support and features, to ensure the most complete security experience.” Armo will continue to lead d...

Perforce Software , provider of enterprise visibility, productivity, and scalability solutions, today announced the launch of real-time collaboration within Confluence Cloud for its technical diagramming solution, Gliffy. This release is geared towards improving collaborative working sessions and driving innovation within one application.  According to the company, with collaboration integrated directly into Confluence, the need for teams to use several external tools, remember additional logins, or open extra windows in order to share ideas or insights is significantly reduced.  The new collaboration capabilities enable users to invite others to participate on one diagram. Additionally, the diagram owner can monitor the level of access for each individual user and collaborators can follow each other’s activity during a specific work session. With this, everyone participating on one diagram can view all the changes that were made in real-time, simplifying the process of co...

UI component company Syncfusion has announced the latest version of Essential Studio 2022, which is a library of over 1,500 components and frameworks across .NET, JavaScript, Flutter, React, and more.  Essential Studio 2022 Volume 4 adds eight new controls for .NET MAUI, compatibility for .NET 7 and Angular 15, and a new Rating component. Among the new .NET MAUI controls are PDF Viewer , Funnel Chart for representing stages in a process, and Pyramid Chart for representing hierarchies in a pyramid-like structure, Calendar, DataForm, Rating, and Text Input Layout. Also, 19 controls that had been in preview in the last release are now officially production-ready.  The new Rating control allows users to provide a star rating and see other users’ ratings. The component is available for .NET MAUI and web platform in Syncfusion.  The Syncfusion Blazor suite also adds two new components: Media Query , for tracking changes to browser size, and Mention , which displays a p...

LEADTOOLS released version 22 of its platform, which adds support for .NET 7, eSignatures, OCR Enhancements, Medical Web Viewer updates, and more.  LEADTOOLS is a suite of software development tools that can be used to create applications for document, medical, and multimedia imaging. It includes software components for capturing, manipulating, and viewing images, as well as features for OCR, barcode, forms recognition, DICOM, and more.  While LEADTOOLS has supported .NET 7 since its launch in November 2022, now all of the LEADTOOLS Document, Imaging, and Multimedia libraries and binaries, as well as fully-sourced demos, are built with .NET 6+ as the target runtime.  Also, programmers that are leveraging the LEADTOOLS Document Viewer in their application are able to view, convert, compose, edit, compare, and now also sign documents. They can now easily add electronic signatures to documents and PDFs.  “As the document management industry continues to evolve digit...

Marketing companies face a lot of pressure these days in delivering potential customers to their clients. With new laws restricting where data is stored and how it can be used, coupled with incomplete or inaccurate data being input into forms, the challenges are daunting. Recent laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) instituted in Europe, and the California Consumer Privacy Act in the United States have put limits on collecting and sharing data without the person’s consent. And while enforcement at first was lax, more companies have been hit with fines for not following the regulation. “The idea of GDPR is good, because the idea is to protect everybody’s personalized data, because you and me, you want to know where your data is used and why it’s used, where it’s coming from and what is recorded about you,” explained Cagdas Gandar, the managing director at the Germany office of data company Melissa. “Before, people had the liberty to just take that data and do what...

If you’re a regular reader of SD Times you may have gotten the sense that value stream management (VSM) is really taking off in tech. We’ve increasingly written about it, launched a new website just for value stream news, and even launched a value stream management conference that has been running annually since 2020.  And if that wasn’t enough proof of its growing popularity, a new survey from Broadcom provides numbers to back up. According to its survey of over 500 IT and business leaders, it is expected that 84% of enterprises will have adopted VSM by the end of the year. This is up from just 42% in 2021. According to Broadcom, early adoption of VSM started around four years ago, and within the past two there has been a shift to mainstream adoption. Sixty percent of survey respondents said they will use VSM to deliver at least one product this year.  Read the full story on VSM Times . The post Broadcom: 84% of orgs will be using VSM by end of the year appeared fi...

The arrival of the so-called Cookiepocalypse, as it has come to be known, has predictably placed marketing teams on the front lines. There has been upheaval in the multi-layered environment surrounding erosion of third-party data and that has set off a rallying cry to all teams involved in delivering the customer through CRM. As such, the front-line development troops are not alone as the landscape continues to change beneath them and around them. The IT, marketing, product and digital commerce teams stand together, more than ever, on this shifting ground. Industry analysts are calling for a broader look at how technology is being deployed in this new universe and whether marketers’ current investments remain wise going forward. A number of analysts are calling for them to be re-evaluated in different ways. Troubleshooting resembles ‘Whac-A-Mole’ “Marketing technology became a victim of its own success,” said Benjamin Bloom, Gartner VP analyst. “Now it is so complex and fragmented i...

There’s been an explosion of interest in SRE over the last 18 months and a lot of this has been from companies that are looking at scaling their DevOps or DevSecOps initiatives to look at the reliability concerns of their customers.  Vendors are recognizing this and a lot of general software interfaces (GSIs) and Managed service providers (MSPs) are offering some form of SRE-as-a-service, according to Brent Ellis, senior analyst at Forrester. Since the role emerged at Google in 2003 to build reliable and high-quality services while reducing costs, it has since evolved, according to Narayanan Raghavan, senior director of site reliability engineering at Red Hat. “I think the core SRE function, in many ways, becomes a foundation and then you build on top of it. So as the teams that focus on SRE capabilities start to mature, you get into ‘how do I get into robust CI/CD practices?’” Raghavan said. “How do I build capabilities for my development teams to onboard quickly and easily bec...