Now that you're working from home and not spending all that time on a daily commute or regular showers, instead of binge-watching back episodes of Rick and Morty, you might want to use that time to up-level your skillset with some online education -- much of which is suddenly very affordable.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 23, 20200 comments
Here's an unexpected side effect of the pandemic: increased demand for COBOL programmers. The need seems to be particularly acute among states whose unemployment systems were originally written in the decades-old language -- systems suddenly tasked with processing a record number of unemployment claims. Estimates vary, but it's safe to say that there are a couple hundred billion lines of COBOL code currently in use. And it seems to be gumming up the works.
This news should provoke a bit of déjà vu in more than a few IT industry watchers. Remember Y2K? People were calling it the COBOL Programmers' Re-employment Act, as companies worldwide begged and bribed a virtually retired community to help them make changes to this language nobody seemed to understand anymore.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 16, 20200 comments
Java's silver anniversary is right around the corner; in May, the venerable language undergirding acres of the enterprise and still supported by a community of more than seven million developers turns 25. But Java wasn't the only technology hitting the mainstream in 1995. The folks at Red Hat sent me a list of ground-breaking technology platforms, which, "taken as a whole, are the ancestral equivalent of the way we work, play, and live today." The idea was "to put Java and its birth-year brethren in context."
Cool idea.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 15, 20200 comments
Calling all coders! The world needs you now to save us from COVID-19! Or to put it in less panicky, running-out-of-TP, could-we-eat-the-cat-if-we-had-to terms, we could all use a dose of your smarts and skill to help with this immediate, life-or-death challenge.
Yes, I'm talking about the third annual Call for Code Global Challenge, which is something of a clarion call to software developers around the world -- from crusty engineers to baby-faced programmers and everyone in between -- to pool their talents to address some of society's biggest challenges. Climate change has been a focus of The Challenge in the past, but in March of this year, the organizers announced that they would be expanding that focus to include both climate change and COVID-19.
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Posted by John K. Waters on April 9, 20200 comments
Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Slack, Pinterest and other tech industry giants have joined forces with the World Health Organization (WHO) to organize a hackathon to promote the development of software solutions that address "challenges related to the coronavirus pandemic."
The Build for COVID19 Global Online Hackathon (#BuildforCOVID19) was announced on Tuesday and began taking project submissions today. Interested developers can register on the DevPost hackathon registry, and also a registration page created by the Hack Club. The deadline for submitting projects is Monday. The hackathon organizers will announce the top projects on April 3.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 26, 20200 comments
Oracle announced the general availability of Java 14 (Oracle JDK 14) this week, and though this is not a long-term support release, it comes with some highly anticipated new features -- plus, it arrives just two months before the 25th anniversary of the Java programming language, which was released by Sun Microsystems on May 23, 1995.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 19, 20200 comments
The Eclipse Foundation this week released the results of its first annual "IoT Commercial Adoption Survey." Based on the responses of 366 individual participants, who responded between Oct. 7 and Dec. 2, 2019, the survey uses direct industry feedback to provide a snapshot of the state of the Internet of Things (IoT) industry landscape.
"The Internet of Things is clearly one of the major technology trends today and a ubiquitous buzzword," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. "This survey, which we hope will be the first of an annual tradition, seeks to provide real insights into what organizations are doing with the IoT right now and their plans for production deployments." More
Posted by John K. Waters on March 12, 20200 comments
The Python programming language has been topping virtually every tech trend list for the past two years, so it was no surprise to see it earn another "most popular" ranking in O'Reilly's annual analysis of the most-used topics and the top search terms from its online learning platform. But the reason for Python's latest blue ribbon is worth noting: according to O'Reilly, it was demand among data scientists and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) engineers.
Python is the go-to language for AI, ML and natural language programming (NLP) development, thanks in no small part to the dozen or so libraries and development tools that support it, from TensorFlow to Pytorch. And simple syntax and readability promote rapid testing of complex algorithms, and make the language accessible to non-programmers.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 20, 20200 comments
The Eclipse Foundation has made some baller moves in the last few years -- its commitment to an annual simultaneous release of multiple open-source projects and taking on the responsibility for the evolution of enterprise Java, to name two. This week it entered into a partnership to support another foundation's open-source technology.
Working with the IOTA Foundation, Eclipse launched the Tangle EE Working Group to provide a governed environment for contributions to IOTA's open source distributed ledger technology (DLT).
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 12, 20200 comments