Why low-code is key to digital modernization
Low-code application development is increasingly on IT’s radar as application development and delivery (AD&D) leaders and product teams, who are under pressure to support their organizations’ digital modernization initiatives, look for ways to get new applications into production faster. But low-code isn’t just about "time-to-market." It’s about the agility and innovation that a low-code development paradigm can deliver.
Low-code application development platforms provide a drag-and-drop interface to allow programmers -- or even non-programmers with very little training -- to rapidly create applications, saving time during both development and testing. They are mostly offered as cloud native platforms.
Building an Alexa Skill without using the SDK
Amazon has written a "Hello World" example for building an Alexa Skill. At first glance, it looks like just what you need to get into Alexa Skills development because it's short and clear. But take a second look and you'll notice it requires an external dependency.
It brings in the alexa-sdk npm package. I'll show that not only don't you need the alexa-sdk to teach Alexa a Skill but you might actually be better off without it.
How to create your first Alexa skill
For the last couple of weeks, Graham, Marcel, Sinem and I, from Red Badger, have been experimenting with Amazon’s Alexa Echo Dot. An Electric Hockey Puck that uses voice recognition powered by Amazon Alexa voice assistant.
In this post, I’d like to explain how one goes about creating their first Alexa skill.
What are the most popular programming languages?
The software space is incredibly diverse and this is reflected in the sheer number of programming languages that you can learn today. If you are just starting out choosing one can seem daunting -- this list of the most-popular programming languages should help narrow down your options.
Each of the major programming languages has its fair share of fans, as you might have realized by now, but JavaScript, Java and Python have the most followers. RedMonk, which just posted its latest Programming Language Rankings, looked at both GitHub and Stack Overflow to give you an answer that reflects what developers are using and talking about in 2017.
5 things mobile developers need to consider in 2017
Android or iOS? Or both? It’s a question anyone who’s been involved in building a mobile app will have asked. Android is still the major player in the development world, due to the simple fact of the size of the market, but it’s foolish to write anything that’s grown from Apple off.
As with just about every trend in technology, it appears that flexibility and fluidity is the choice route. Here are five things developers will need to consider to stay relevant in 2017 and beyond.
What's next for containers, unikernels, and coding
Everyone talks about containers. It became so huge that we think Docker has existed for a long time. The fact is that it has only started. We can observe that by the amount of changes we are seeing. Docker from two years ago is very different than Docker today. Products in its ecosystem are appearing every day and many are disappearing just as quickly. If there is a space we should turn our attention to, that’s containers.
At the same time, we have already switched our focus to other areas. Containers, by themselves, are the old story. We know what they are, we did our proof of concept (PoC), and we adopted them. The real question is what should we focus on now? What will this year bring?
The drawbacks of hand coding
Those rare companies that decide to engage in hand-coding do it either because they lack the required information (they simply don't know there are packaged solutions out there) or, frankly, in my opinion, they are chasing a pipe dream. They often mistakenly believe that all a big data project takes is to feed data into a Hadoop cluster. They figure developing a dedicated on-premises infrastructure to feed and analyze big data will mean a 20 percent savings over a packaged solution.
However, according to Gartner, this approach results in a 200 percent increase in maintenance costs. And that's not all. Our past ten years’ experience in several integration projects, now in production, offers us the insight into the limits of a custom-coded approach. In reality, by developing in-house, companies expose themselves to three types of risks: operational, strategic, and economic.
Tips for adopting a DevOps approach
Today businesses are working in more agile and digitally connected ways. What’s more in the case of new software development projects, DevOps is a buzzword that chimes with this sentiment. But what does it mean and how should we view it? Is it a job role? Is it a team? A product? A vision?
Quite simply, DevOps is a mind-set. When companies choose to expand development across the organization they are driving collaboration. This adds powerful value back to enterprise leaders, who have the interests of the customer at heart. What makes it a mind-set is that its success depends on a combination of people and behavior changes.
Which programming language should you learn?
Students of all ages have always been encouraged (and even required) to learn multiple languages. But these days it’s not French or Latin that has the big impact. Forget accents and umlauts, many of the best and brightest students, business leaders and employers are taking the time to learn about tags, brackets, and commands -- that is, they are learning programming languages.
Today, 21st century business is founded on software and there is scarcely a brand on the planet that isn’t looking into how it can be transformed through data. To put it simply, the quality and performance of your software -- be it a web application, e-commerce platform or mobile app -- must be spot on or your customers will look elsewhere.
What you need to know about DevOps
The term DevOps is being thrown around a lot in the IT industry at the moment, but what exactly does it mean and, more importantly, how can it help an enterprise?
As a combination of developer and operations, DevOps looks to bring these two different areas of digital business together to provide the perfect combination of innovation and user-focused processes during software development. Continuous deployment and continuous delivery are both important aspects of this and, when adopting DevOps, it is vitally important that businesses assess which one is right for them. It also looks towards the automation of delivering changes to infrastructure and software.
Stack Overflow adds example-based Documentation to help developers improve
Having an example to go by can make a huge difference when you are dealing with something new, no matter how far you have progressed as a developer. Seeing how someone else has tackled the problem that you are dealing with, or one close to it, may help you to avoid running into the same issues as them or repeating their mistakes, get a better picture and, ultimately, find the path forward sooner than you would on your own.
Stack Overflow seems to agree, as today the famous website that provides answers to the toughest questions in coding launches Documentation. Touted as the biggest improvement to Stack Overflow since its launch, it gives users access to "community-curated, example-focused developer documentation" in a similar fashion to its Q&A platform.
Women are excellent coders, according to GitHub research
A survey back in 2013 found that only 11.2 percent of software developers were female. Working then on the premise that males would be prejudiced against female coders work, a group of students has now studied the acceptance rate of GitHub pull-requests by gender.
A pull-request is when volunteers submit work to a project and it receives some scrutiny by the project team, they often accept the work or reject it with some advice. What the study team has discovered is that 78 percent of work submitted by women was accepted, which compared favorably to only 74 percent for men.
Apple open sources Swift's Benchmarking Suite
Following the release of the Swift programming language as open source back in early December 2015, Apple has followed up by releasing the code for its Benchmarking Suite on GitHub.
By releasing the Benchmarking Suite as open source, Apple is trying to assist developers to create faster, more efficient code. It will allow programmers to find areas where their code is running slowly, so that they can find a faster way of coding their applications before they are committed. Specifically, the suite consists of tools, benchmark libraries and utilities.
Microsoft and Code.org use Minecraft to teach coding to kids
As part of the third Hour of Code, Microsoft has launched a coding tutorial based on Minecraft. The event is part of Computer Science Education Week, which runs from December 7-13 and uses the familiar Minecraft to teach coding to people aged 6 and above.
The tutorial is a collaboration between Microsoft, Code.org, and Mojang AB, the company behind Minecraft. It provides a gentle on-ramp to learning the basics of coding, with a view to inspiring the next generation of developers.
Australia's primary schools to teach coding
Australia is preparing for the jobs of the future by having children learn coding and programming at a very young age.
According to a report by Mashable, 21st century computer coding will be taught in primary schools from Year 5, and programming will be taught from Year 7. The curriculum was approved by Education Minister Christopher Pyne in one of his last acts before being sworn in as Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science.
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