Welcome

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.

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.

You’re probably used to waking up to coffee, thanks to a pre-programmed machine. But what about an oven that offers breakfast options based on your health and recipes designed around your level of activity for the day? Or a thermostat that adjusts for the day’s weather and knows when you’re headed out? Or plumbing that alerts you to the exact location of a leak, or plugs that deliver electricity only when you need an item to work?

It was reported earlier this month that Intel will eliminate nearly 140 jobs after dropping three of its IoT-focused product lines. It followed news in June that last month’s news that Intel was discontinuing development of the company’s Galileo, Joule and Edison lines, originally developed to power a range of IoT-based devices and applications including wearables, smart speakers, and robotics.

I will assume you are at least familiar with the concept of microservices — loosely coupled services that provide discrete solutions to business use cases that you can combine to solve current needs and demand. The architectural pattern has gained popularity over the past years, and although not everyone is completely sure what “doing it right” looks like, it’s a concept that suits modern needs and is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

I spoke with Robert Reeves, CTO and co-founder of Datical, a company that aims to remove the pain that database administrators (DBAs) experience on a regular basis attempting to make changes to database heavy applications. They do this by bringing easy-to-use tools inspired by practices from the DevOps world to the traditionally messy world of enterprise databases with change simulation, rollbacks, rules engines, packaging databases as code, and strong monitoring.

In this episode, we’re joined by Beth Aitman to talk about what happened with the Stack Overflow Documentation Beta. What did Stack Overflow try to do with documentation, and why did they abandon the effort? Why did their effort to crowdsource docs fail but succeed so well with forums and niche content? Additionally, we discuss the difficulties of creating good documentation with open source projects. A recent survey found that incomplete or outdated documentation is the number one issue with open source projects. Why? What makes it so difficult to create documentation on an open source project?

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.