Welcome

Further consolidating Berlin as the Blockchain capital of the World, last week the 9984 Summit rolled into town, bringing together hackers, lawyers, academics and business people interested in Blockchain. With a handful of big names in the community littering the schedule, it was an interesting two days, showing the variety of ideas and personalities in this wide and wonderful community. Here were my stand out talks and topics.

Dell Technologies this Tuesday announced the formation of a new IoT solutions strategy, a new IoT division and a $1bn commitment in IoT R&D. Chairman and CEO Michael Dell called IoT “the infrastructure of the next industrial revolution. And that’s what we’re co-inventing with our customers and our partners,”

This week Cate and Chris discuss smarter ways to hire developers, ethics in tech and more.

In this episode, we talk about what’s going on in our lives as documentarians and product owners.

When it comes to smart city innovation, it’s arguable that most use cases are not that exciting to the average resident. A connected garbage bin, traffic light or parking meter is not going to cause applause and adoration for city officials at least in the first instance. But as more and more local systems start to communicate, it will start to make more sense and increase consumer satisfaction, at least until residents forget a life before they existed.

Anyone who likes to binge watch TV while cooking knows the pain of having to stop kneading dough to pause a show or move to the next episode. In comes Bixi, a device that’s the brainchild of French startup Bluemint Labs. It connects with iOS or Android phones and tablets via Bluetooth LE.

Despite being a Mac user for nearly 20 years, I have always had a soft spot for Ubuntu. Whilst they have not always been successful, I have respected their attempts to pull Linux into the mainstream and try new ideas and paradigms with it. They have weathered the storm of Ubuntu phone and Unity and are meeting success with two newer projects, The lean Ubuntu Core, and their universal Linux packaging format, snaps. I spoke with Dustin Kirkland, VP of product development and Jamie Bennett, VP of Devices and IoT Engineering at Canonical to understand more the strategy behind the projects.

I spoke with Thierry Carrez, Release Manager for the OpenStack project about how he coordinates a large number of contributors to the project, balancing diverse commercial and cultural differences whilst still maintaining a regular release cycle. We spoke in the week of the latest release, Pike.

As is traditional with the JavaScript world, there are a dizzying amount of options for node logging. In this article, I will dig into some of the better and lesser known options to see what’s on offer and help you log better in your Node applications.

Chris and Cate recount one crazy week in Berlin covering IFA, the France vs Germany IoT battle, Armenian startups and the long night of Startups.

Upon visiting Berlin’s IFA2107  — Germany’s answer to CES — recently,  there was one word I kept hearing: Alexa. In the consumer hardware space, it’s a great time to be Amazon, if the sheer number of hardware companies jumping on the Alexa bandwagon are anything to go by.

In this episode, we’re joined by Ellis Pratt from Cherryleaf to talk about chatbots in documentation. What are chatbots, and how can you incorporate them in your docs to enhance the user experience? Are chatbots the next evolution of wizards? What are some examples of successful chatbots? How does one get started using chatbots in documentation? Are there chatbot services you can leverage inexpensively to try them out? These are some of the questions explored in this podcast.

Before we begin, note that this post isn’t intended as an introduction to GraphQL. For a beginner’s guide, I suggest Derek Haynes’ Codeship post or howtographql.com.

Sencha’s ExtJS is a venerable web framework for creating data heavy cross-platform desktop and mobile components ideal for enterprise applications. Originally conceived way back in 2007, in times when JavaScript was less advanced than it is now, the team added concepts such as classes and objects to JavaScript, and made ExtJS self-contained, requiring no dependencies.

Anyone above a certain age will remember when household microwaves first came out. Cooking would often involve burn-inducing steaming or painting whole chickens with brown liquid so it would resemble a roasted version of itself at the dinner table. Rest assured, those days are long behind us, thanks to a “revolutionary” new cooking appliance, the Dialog oven by German company Miele.

Another year, another IFA, and as always, nestled among the room upon room of ovens, food processors, and fitness trackers are a handful of outliers and gems. This year IFA had a different feeling from previous years, with a more international flair, and the startup aisles from previous years expanded into an entire hall, which is where I spent most of my time. In this post, I will highlight some of my favorites and the trends I identified.

When you consider the trajectory of connected home innovation, it’s easy to see that the big wins have been more infrastructural elements like connected lighting, utilities, and alarms rather than homewares. Particularly when investors seem compelled to invest in products as ridiculous as Juicero.

Blockchain-based technologies have moved away from just supporting cryptocurrencies. One hot area for IT Ops is smart contracts, which let you store, verify, and execute code on a blockchain. And multiple projects now under way promise to replace traditional elements of the compute stack, from processing to storage to communications, with this approach. Here’s a survey of some of the more promising projects that could—eventually—have a big impact on IT operations.

Welcome to the first installment of ‘Blockwatch,’ my semi-regular observations on the world of Blockchain related events, news and projects. This time, what exactly is an ICO?

Chris speaks with Ben Maddox of the Perfect Information podcast to talk about the past, present and future of technology in Board Games.

Data science is the new hotness, with thousands of job postings (some of which really aren’t data science), to dozens of platforms promising to help professionals in the field do their job more effectively. In typical fashion, not all these tools are new, but re-purposed for new use cases, with tools such as Python, R, and Hadoop experiencing new surges in interest thanks to the ‘new’ field of Data Science. One of the most well conceived and cohesive tools I’ve seen is Dataiku. It aims to package together all the tools that a data scientist and the teams that work with them might need in one application.

It feels like barely a week goes by without another breaking news account of a terrorist attack involving vehicle ramming, a form of attack in which a perpetrator deliberately aims a motor vehicle at a target with the intent to inflict fatal injuries or significant property damage by striking with concussive force.

This week Cate and Chris discuss the intersections of journalism, immortality, music, romance and government with technology.

Valeo and Cisco recently announced a cooperation agreement for strategic innovation in smart mobility services at the Viva Technology conference in Paris. Their proposed product is Valeo Park4U, a connected platform and app that enables cars to park by themselves in connected car parks.

There’s one application I use on a regular basis for a lot of my work, Atom, the text editor from GitHub, built on the Electron framework. Recent versions of the framework introduced support for the touch bar, and version 1.19 of Atom brought that support to Atom. A couple of intrepid developers have released packages that add functionality to the touch bar, so I decided to take a look.