91912451
submission
snydeq writes:
Using a microservices approach to application development can improve resilience and expedite time to market, but breaking apps into fine-grained services offers complications, writes Adam Bertram, in an article on the benefits and hurdles to adopting microservices. 'Microservices is on the verge of going mainstream, as 36 percent of enterprises surveyed by Nginx are currently using microservices, with another 26 percent in the research phase. But what exactly is microservices architecture, and is it right for your organization’s culture, skills, and needs? Here we take a look at seven reasons you should consider microservices for your next application development project — and five hurdles you’ll have to clear to be successful.' What cautions do you have to offer for folks considering tapping microservices for their next application?
91749273
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snydeq writes:
From telling everyone they're your customer to establishing a cloud strategy, Bob Lewis outlines 12 'industry best practices' that are sure to sink your company's chances of IT success. 'What makes IT organizations fail? Often, it’s the adoption of what’s described as “industry best practices” by people who ought to know better but don’t, probably because they’ve never had to do the job. From establishing internal customers to instituting charge-backs to insisting on ROI, a lot of this advice looks plausible when viewed from 50,000 feet or more. Scratch the surface, however, and you begin to find these surefire recipes for IT success are often formulas for failure.' What 'best practices' would you add?
91430065
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snydeq writes:
In an industry that favors youth over experience, the best defense against age discrimination may be avoiding becoming a victim in the first place, writes Bob Violino in a report on your rights and how to deal with ageism in IT. 'How old is too old to work in IT? That depends on who is doing the hiring and paying the salaries of IT pros. But one thing is for certain: Widespread age discrimination has become a central issue, affecting many people working or seeking work in today’s IT industry, according to legal and career experts.'
91093803
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snydeq writes:
Rapid shifts in technologies—and evolving business needs—make career reinvention a matter of survival in the IT industry, writes Dan Tynan, in an article on IT jobs with short lives in the future. 'The IT industry has seen many such waves where the "next big thing" turned out to be smaller and shorter-lived than anyone expected, thanks to rapid shifts in technology. Back then, the internet was the big game changer. Today, automation, artificial intelligence, and _____ as a service are causing some jobs to disappear and others to radically change form. Here’s a look at the kinds of tech jobs—even some of today’s hottest, like developers and data scientists—that could one day find themselves on the digital scrap heap and how you can avoid that dead end.'
90225385
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snydeq writes:
From the Know It All to the Overwhelmer, succeeding beneath a bad manager takes strategy and finesse, writes Paul Heltzel in his round-up of bad IT bosses and how to keep them from derailing your career. 'While there are truly great leaders in IT, not all inspire confidence. Worse, you can’t always choose who will lead your team. But you can always map out new paths in your career. With that in mind, here is a look at some prototypically bad managers you may have already encountered in your engineering departments, with tips on how to deal with each of them.'
90065061
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snydeq writes:
Confidence in our power over machines also makes us guilty of hoping to bend reality to our code, writes Peter Wayner, in a discussion of nine lies programmers tell themselves about their code. 'Of course, many problems stem from assumptions we programmers make that simply aren’t correct. They’re usually sort of true some of the time, but that’s not the same as being true all of the time. As Mark Twain supposedly said, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."'
89845447
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snydeq writes:
Good-bye, programming peers; hello, power to abuse at your whim, writes Bob Lewis in a send-up of an all-too-familiar situation: The engineering colleague who transforms into a greasy political manipulator upon promotion into management. 'It’s legendary: A CIO promotes his best developer into a management role, losing an excellent programmer and gaining a bad manager. The art of management isn’t so much about assembling a dream team, helping others be successful, or solving technical problems. It’s about aligning everything you do in service of the business—the business of yourself.' What tales do you have of colleagues who broke bad all the way to the top?
88454185
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snydeq writes:
InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a long-term view of today's trends in programming to give a sense of where programmers should place their career bets in the years ahead. 'Now that 2017 is here, it’s time to take stock of the technological changes ahead, if only to help you know where to place your bets in building programming skills for the future. From the increasing security headache of the internet of things to machine learning everywhere, the future of programming keeps getting harder to predict.' How do you see technologies impacting the work of programming in the years ahead?
87178111
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snydeq writes:
'It’s been said that the uncharted territories of the old maps were often marked with the ominous warning: “Here be dragons.” Perhaps apocryphal, the idea was that no one wandering into these unknown corners of the world should do so without being ready to battle a terrifying foe,' writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner in a roundup of seven gnarly corners of the coding world worthy of large markers reading, 'Here be dragons.' 'Programmers may be a bit more civilized than medieval knights, but that doesn’t mean the modern technical world doesn’t have its share of technical dragons waiting for us in unforeseen places: Difficult problems that wait until the deadline is minutes away; complications that have read the manual and know what isn’t well-specified; evil dragons that know how to sneak in inchoate bugs and untimely glitches, often right after the code is committed.' What are yours?
86796907
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snydeq writes:
From video glitches to memory leaks, today’s browser bugs may be rarer, but they are even harder to pin down, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner, in his roundup of the types of bugs troubling today's Web. ' Of course, it used to be worse. The vast differences between browsers have been largely erased by allegiance to W3C web standards. And the differences that remain can be generally ignored, thanks to the proliferation of libraries like jQuery, which not only make JavaScript hacking easier but also paper over the ways that browsers aren’t the same. These libraries have a habit of freezing browser bugs in place. If browser companies fix some of their worst bugs, the new “fixes” can disrupt old patches and work-arounds. Suddenly the “fix” becomes the problem that’s disrupting the old stability we’ve jerry-rigged around the bug. Programmers can’t win.' What hard-to-pin-down browser bugs have given you the most fits?
86418771
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snydeq writes:
Whoever said working hard is a virtue never met a programmer, writes Peter Wayner in his roundup of tools and techniques that prove the power of lazy programming. 'Coders who ignore those “work hard, stay humble” inspirational wall signs often produce remarkable results, all because they are trying to avoid having to work too hard. The true geniuses find ways to do the absolute minimum by offloading their chores to the computer. After all, getting the computer to do the work is the real job of computer programmers.'
85695597
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snydeq writes:
The creator of Linux talks in depth about the kernel, community, and how computing will change in the years ahead, in an interview commemorating the 25th anniversary of Linux. 'We currently have a fairly unified kernel that scales from cellphones to supercomputers, and I've grown convinced that unification has actually been one of our greatest strengths: It forces us to do things right, and the different needs for different platforms tend to have a fair amount of commonalities in the end,' Torvalds says. Read the interview for Torvalds' take on OS updates, developing for Linux, the competition, containers, and more.
85666765
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snydeq writes:
Paul Venezia offers an eyewitness account of the rise of Linux and the open source movement, plus analysis of where Linux is taking us now on its 25th anniversary. 'I walked into an apartment in Boston on a sunny day in June 1995. It was small and bohemian, with the normal detritus a pair of young men would scatter here and there. On the kitchen table was a 15-inch CRT display married to a fat, coverless PC case sitting on its side, network cables streaking back to a hub in the living room. The screen displayed a mess of data, the contents of some logfile, and sitting at the bottom was a Bash root prompt decorated in red and blue, the cursor blinking lazily,' Venezia writes. 'Those enterprising youths were actively developing code for the Linux kernel and the GNU userspace utilities that surrounded it. At that time, this scene could be found in cities and towns all over the world, where computer science students and those with a deep interest in computing were playing with an incredible new toy: a free “Unix” operating system.' What's your personal history with the rise of Linux?
85467939
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snydeq writes:
Cheaper, faster, better side effects — sometimes a bad idea in programming is better than just good enough, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner. 'Some ideas, schemes, or architectures may truly stink, but they may also be the best choice for your project. They may be cheaper or faster, or maybe it’s too hard to do things the right way. In other words, sometimes bad is simply good enough. There are also occasions when a bad idea comes with a silver lining. It may not be the best approach, but it has such good side-effects that it’s the way to go. If we’re stuck going down a suboptimal path to programming hell, we might as well make the most of whatever gems may be buried there.' What bad programming ideas have you found useful enough to make work in your projects?
84575413
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snydeq writes:
InfoWorld's Roger Grimes lends insight on how to recognize the signs of your child's involvement in malicious online activity before the authorities do — and offers advice on how to help them direct their skills and curiosity into a more positive (and ethical) direction. The advice is based on Grimes' personal history helping reform his stepson, a former hacker, and in mentoring a number of other young ex-hackers as an IT security veteran. 'Hacking can provide a new world of acceptance and empowerment, especially for smart teenagers who are not doing all that well in school, are bored, or are getting harassed by other teens or by their parents because they "aren't working to their full potential." In the hacking world, they can gain the admiration of their peers and be mini-cyber rock stars. It's like a drug for them, and a good percentage can turn permanently to the dark side if not appropriately guided.'
