Developer

I love technology. I’m relentlessly optimistic that software can always be crafted better, and bring more joy. I think this can be achieved through better approaches, better tools, and through better attitudes.

While I don’t quite have a crystal ball, I’ve sat down with the rest of the Red Badger team, here’s a summary of our top three picks for better technology in 2017.

Amazon's Echo devices are incredible. I'll admit that I was a skeptic at first, but once I got my own, I was hooked. Not only can the Alexa voice assistant provide me with important data like weather, news, and traffic, but it can play music too. Most importantly, it serves as a brilliant IoT control unit. My house has several WiFi connected power outlets, and I can verbally tell Alexa to turn off my lamps. It can even control my television!

Much of Amazon's success with Echo and Alexa is thanks to third-party developers and hardware. Today, Conexant and Amazon announce the AudioSmart 2-mic Development Kit. This add-on for the Raspberry Pi should enable easier development of devices using Amazon's Alexa voice technology. This could ultimately lead to further growth and adoption of the Alexa voice assistant.

Although we’ve long since entered the digital age, many organizations remain saddled with legacy IT systems, unable to keep up with the growing and ever-changing demands of the business. Not only that, with resources stretched, many IT departments are left with no choice but to prioritize day-to-day management over business innovation. And yet despite considerable challenges like these, there’s also good news: Low-code platforms are helping to bridge the gap between business needs and IT capabilities.

Low-code platforms give businesses the ability to create the apps they need quickly and simply, taking much of the pressure off IT. The result is secure, reliable apps that meet critical business needs while also ensuring that IT maintains control over key business functions such as data management.

You're working in your browser, testing some new web development project, but there's a problem. And you've no idea why. So you open some documentation in a separate browser tab, more in your development environment, maybe a separate PDF or two until you find whatever you need.

Alternatively, you could just install DevDocs, a free Chrome app which gives you speedy access to documentation for 190 technologies from one interface.

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.

Created in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie, C is a dinosaur among computing languages. It’s large, powerful, and has dominated the programming ecosystem for over three decades. Technology changes every few years, and today there are hundreds of programming languages. It’s remarkable that one language has been able to remain so popular over the years, and there’s a reason for that.

Software developer Daniel Angel Munoz Trejo sums up C’s benefits well when he writes, "its closeness to the hardware, great portability and deterministic usage of resources make it ideal for low-level development for such things as operating systems kernels and embedded software. Its versatility, efficiency and good performance make it an excellent choice for high complexity data manipulation software...C is still unsurpassed when performance is the priority".

The winter holidays are fast approaching and, just like other workers, many folks in the tech industry are looking forward to their vacation days. But, before employees can celebrate and unwind, companies have to adjust their schedule accordingly and prepare their customers for the limited (or lack of) office hours.

Apple announces its schedule today, advising developers to submit their updates and new apps for approval in time, to avoid any delays and inconveniences.

IT buzzwords change like the wind. From big data, to containers, to the Internet of things, there is no shortage of often-used phrases that organizations must quickly become accustomed to.

DevOps is the latest trend that can increase agility and improve performance in the IT department. However, confusion is still rife, with many businesses unsure what it is, and how to capitalize upon it.

According to 80 percent of web developers, desktop applications are absolutely essential, and 93 percent say web technologies are critical to their strategy for desktop and mobile.

These findings come from development platform Sencha which commissioned Dimensional Research to survey over 1,100 web development professionals.

According to a new study 43 percent of app developers spend between 10 and 25 percent of their time debugging application errors discovered in production, rather than developing new features.

The survey carried out by ClusterHQ found that a quarter of respondents report encountering bugs discovered in production one or more times per week.

When Apple unveiled the latest MacBook Pro, it was the Touch Bar that stole the show. But if you were expecting this touchscreen addition to the keyboard to become an all-singing, all-dancing fun parade, you may be disappointed.

Apple -- loving, as it does, to remain firmly in control of everything -- has issued developers strict guidelines that restrict how the Touch Bar can (or should...) be used.

Sandboxes provide environments for developers and testers to reproduce even the most complex infrastructures, from data centers to public and hybrid clouds.

Sandboxes allow ITOps and dev/test teams to create personalized replicas of production environments with self-service, on-demand environments that can quickly allow even the most complex environments to be created, modeled, orchestrated and deployed -- from physical patch panels to distributed applications. This can rapidly speed up release cycles while drastically lowering cost and reducing risk.

A form is one of the most important elements on many websites because it is where conversions happen, leads are created, and relationships begin.

According to MarketingCharts, Lead Gen forms have an average conversion rate of just 17 percent. As dismal as these numbers are, the good news lies in the immense opportunity left by the 83 percent of visitors who do not convert on forms -- and the data-driven solution to help win over more of them.

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.

Google has just announced that a developer preview of Android 7.1 Nougat will be released before the end of the month. At the Pixel and Pixel XL launch, it was revealed that these two new handset would be running this version of Android, but a developer preview was pencilled in for some time before the end of the year.

The release schedule seems to have been sped up slightly, and this is something that will please developers and end users alike. Google promises dev that "we’ll give you access to this update so you can start getting your apps ready". Among the changes are new APIs (API level 25), and -- of course -- it's Google's own handsets that are in line to get the update first.