Welcome

On occasion, I have created content for and taught computing subjects to students, ranging from absolute newcomers to computers and coding to professionals wanting to top up their skills. When I first started, options for learning to code were limited, restricted to university and college courses that often assumed some prior knowledge and required commitment, time, and money.

Big data analysis generally involves piping large data sets into processing systems such as Apache Spark and Hadoop, walking away for a very long coffee, and returning later to a hopefully successful result. The DevOps and continuous build ecosystem have long employed linters, code analyzers, and application profilers to discern potential trouble and optimization points in code, and Pepperdata wants to bring that practice to the big data world.

As anyone who’s traveled widely before the days of connected smart phones and GPS knows the pain when travel plans go awry and you end up at your place of accommodation only to find yourself locked out in the middle of the night.

This week Cate and Chris discuss how smart phones are destroying a generation, cybersecurity, documentation, tech diversity and more.

Few people would argue that cybersecurity is in a parlous state. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a connected car wash and fish tank hacked respectively and a smart gun unlocked and fired thanks to a magnet at the latest DefCon.

In the western world, we often forget that we are fast becoming a smaller part of Internet users than we might like to think. Despite lower internet penetration, India and China already have more actual internet users and this number is growing at an outstanding rate. I discovered IndiaStack at a meetup earlier in the year, and whilst you may not have plans for creating applications that target the Indian market, the example of such a large government creating such a platform is an interesting one to learn more about.

Any of you follow my writing will know that one of my passions is explaining technical concepts and projects clearly and concisely. One of the common locations for starting these explanations is documentation, and as a majority of documentation is delivered as HTML, I am constantly encouraging developers and writers to embrace all that the format gives you. Scrimba is one of a handful of options I have seen over the past 18 months that integrates code explanations and examples into one cohesive package. It’s aimed more at screencast creators than documentation writers, but in my mind, anything that helps explain concepts to users is documentation.

Coralogix released a new addon for Heroku. In this post we cover best Logging practices, how different cloud providers enable them, what makes Heroku logging special, and how Coralogix utilizes Heroku’s approach to provide it’s 3rd generation logging experience.

Podcasting is undergoing a renaissance with listeners consuming on-demand shows at unprecedented levels, and creators enjoying surprising levels of success with their work. One thing that sets apart the amateurs from the professionals is good content, but the other is production values. Here are some of the things I’ve learned, along with recommendations on the hardware, software and techniques to get you started podcasting using your Mac.

For those involved in the IoT space, it feels as if not a day goes past without the launch of yet another IoT platform, promising a seamless conduit between connected devices and user applications.

While sci-fi predicted sweeping changes in cyborgs, like limb replacement, the truth probably lies in a smaller start, like embedding sensors in our bodies. Liviu Babitz, Founder of Cyborg Nest, agrees, predicting that we will instead look to add new senses or enhance those we already have in small and subtle ways. Liviu began with a small sensor that vibrates when he is facing north, in itself not the most useful sense to possess, but a step in the right direction to show what could be possible.

Yael Eisenstat has an interesting past. She ‘came out’ as a long term CIA employee in January 2017 after Donald Trump delivered a poorly received speech in front of the C.I.A. Memorial Wall. She didn’t intend to be sensationalist or release state secrets like some previous ex-secret service employees who revealed their identity, rather she had had enough of Trumps stream of insults to her country and hoped that her actions could make a difference. She has advised vice-presidents and major corporate companies and now works at New York University as an adjunct professor. Whilst at the eccentric and eclectic Tech Open Air in Berlin, I spoke with Yael to discuss technology, its impact on society, and we, or tech companies can and should do about it.

The acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon has been the focus of much attention over the last week. And it’s not only retailers that are taking notice. With our increased desire for delivered goods, drone companies are looking toward Amazon as a way to shepherd in the use of drones in mainstream retail.

It’s not often I interview someone who has been the founder of a major tech company, an accomplished novelist, and describes containers and chatbots as "pasé," but Lucas Carlson is an intriguing individual. In this interview, we talk about his role at Automic, recently acquired by Computer Associates, who aim to bring DevOps style automation and practices to anyone in a business, no matter their role. We sat down to discuss why the company hopes to achieve, the flaws in modern DevOps techniques, and much more.

Flexera offers tools for producers and consumers of open source software to help them along this journey, one that, with increased reliance on open source components, is becoming increasingly necessary and relevant. I spoke with Jeff Luszcz to discuss how their tools help, why they are needed now more than ever, and how to secure the Internet of Things.

Around me are dozens of vintage cars in an old warehouse, tucked into a corner of Berlin’s north west. Those into cars are in heaven, dashing around the vast building, snapping photos of shiny vehicles as old as most attendees. I on the other hand head straight to the coffee and snacks.

The Docker API has allowed for a plethora of options for interfacing with Docker, your containers, and images to emerge from CLIs to desktop applications and web-based management tools. I am a fan of graphical user interfaces and thought it was time to survey the current landscape of GUIs for interacting with Docker.

I listen to hours of developer-focused podcasts each week covering tech, current affairs, board games, and general geekery. I even started my own podcast, which I have a lot of fun making. Hundreds of developers have written blog posts recommending thousands of different podcast series. There's no shortage of such recommendations for software engineers, so I won't subject you to another one of those lists. Instead, I'll idenfity specific podcast episodes that I think nailed a particular topic and were extremely engaging and fascinating from a developer's or technologist's perspective. For some of them, the interview subject or guest was especially interesting, or a discussion cropped up that was really compelling. For some reason, these episodes were very memorable, and that's why I think each one is worth your time.

Now in its second year, the Chatbot Summit has grown into a series of international events that span cities. We attended the Berlin summit to find out more on a tech trend that is growing at an unprecedented pace.

When you think of wearable tech, a wristband, watch or at a stretch, ring most likely springs to mind. Despite the hopes of early predictors that tech embedded clothing would become a useful, functional component of our wardrobe, we are largely left with a series of functional sports and exercising clothing for the super athletic and a bunch of creative one-off prototypes and made for show catwalk couture that spends its life languishing in museums and galleries. Where is the wearable tech that we thought might come to fill our wardrobes? I spoke to Alexander Gruber, founder, and CEO of Colorfy who recently attempted to kickstart their first shirt, to find out what the lived experience is for people working in wearable fashion.

One of the things I love most about interviewing the people behind tech projects is coincidentally discovering your subject is a bonafide technology visionary. Brian Behlendorf was one of the key developers behind the Apache Web Server and is a Mozilla and EFF board member, three projects I respect massively. For this interview, we only had time to cover his current role, as Executive Director of the Hyperledger Foundation, a project that aims to bring blockchain mainstream.

Over the last year, I’ve noticed a renewed interest in wearable glasses. Sure there’s plenty of mask-like goggles on the market for game playing, but glasses have emerged as a product in development by a number of tech companies. There’s been plenty of rumors that Apple glasses will be with us by 2020. The rumors have been given stronger credence by a leaked Occupational Health and Safety report at Apple that referred to "After BT4 user study, user advised study lead, that she experienced discomfort in her eye and said she was able to see the laser flash at several points during the study. Study lead referred her to an optometrist and secured prototype unit for analysis.”

In garages, parking lots, and maker spaces, a quiet revolution has been taking place. As electronics gradually take over the mechanics of vehicles, car hacking is gaining a growing number of enthusiasts, all wanting to understand what their car can do and could do with modifications to its hardware and/or code.

I sat down with Pravin Halady, product manager at NodeSource, to discuss why enterprise developers might need a safer and more secure version of Node.js and npm and what it's like running a business where your biggest competition is the creator of the product you sell.

Anyone who works in the smart city space knows the power of data: it’s held up as the rich oil that can be revealed through smart sensor technology embedded throughout the public landscape including train stations, parks and recreation areas and various neighborhoods or districts. It intersects across various components of a city including traffic management, public safety, infrastructure and city planning.