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Key-takeaways:   Clean code isn’t just a nice thing to have or a luxury in software projects; it's a necessity. If we want our project to successfully deliver features constantly at a steady and predictable pace, then having a good and maintainable code base is a must. The true nature of clean code rely on the fact that other practitioners should be able to read and maintain the code. Read the book Clean Code in Python, Second Edition, to know all about idiomatic Python, see the difference between good and bad code, and identify traits of good code and good architecture. There is no sole or strict definition of clean code. Moreover, there is probably no way of formally measuring clean code, so you cannot run a tool on a repository that will tell you how good, bad, or maintainable that code is. Sure, you can run tools such as checkers, linters, static analyzers, and so on, and those tools are of much help. They are necessary, but not sufficient. Clean code is not something a machine or script can recognize (so far) but rather something that professionals can decide. We interviewed Python expert, and bestselling author, Mariano Anaya on clean coding, importance of efficient code formatting and his recent book, Clean Code in Python, 2nd Edition. The interview in detail: To what extent can the inability to write efficient code harm/affect an organization/software?  In my experience, inefficient code can be so dangerous as to paralyze entire projects. I’ve seen services that needed to be re-written because of how unmaintainable they were. At some point, it became impossible to keep on making changes to that API, and the issues kept piling up, so it needed to be replaced by a brand-new system.  On another occasion, there was an application we knew had problems because of the way it was written, and its instability was causing frustration in customers, which permeated into the company. The buggy nature of the application wasn’t separate from the way it was written, rather it was the consequence. Customers were complaining about quality, and this shows up to which degree technical debt can harm an organization. I’ve seen this pattern several times, when the company must make the hard decision of stopping the release of new features to fix errors in the software.  I’d say that technical debt, if left untreated, can lead to very harmful results for a company.  2. What should developers keep in mind while starting out with legacy systems?  First to identify the degree of technical debt accrued. There are good software projects that have been designed correctly and their technical debt is relatively low (perhaps it’s just about updating some libraries to newer versions or moving parts of the code towards new features that weren’t available at the time it was originally written).  In the event of having a lot of technical debt, it’s important to understand what’s the most critical part that needs to be fixed. There’s certainly a part in the code, a module, or a functionality that’s responsible for most of the complaints from customers, and that’s what needs to be refactored more urgently.  It’s critical in this sense to do a proper analysis and have a plan about the improvements to make in the code, rather than jump straight to the code and start refactoring. This will help give a clearer idea of what needs to be changed, and the degree of the refactor needed. Meaning, if we’ll be fixing the code, or the situation requires a full rewrite. Generally, completely rewritten the application should be a last-resort kind of decision, although there are some obvious cases (for example, if the application was written with Python 2, then it’s clear that all the code will need to be changed).  3. What are the future advancements that you anticipate in Python?  It’s hard to know for sure what will happen with Python in years to come, but it’s interesting to see that in a similar way Python took inspiration and features from other languages, it’s now inspiring modern languages as well, but it also catches up with new features and programming models. Such was the case of all the improvements made for asynchronous programming, incorporated into the standard library.  I believe the asynchronous programming capabilities will continue to be enhanced in future releases.  I have also noticed some improvements towards trying to make Python more efficient, whether this means having a more lightweight interpreter by reducing the number of packages in the standard library, to try to solve the GIL problem. These are the kind of improvements I’m more hopeful to see.  4. What are some of the popular myths around writing clean code?   Perhaps the most common misconception is that clean code is about formatting code, or maybe even about PEP-8. In fact, relating technical debt only to code issues is another popular myth. Technical debt, is also about technology, being caught up with dependencies.  Being able to update your dependencies quickly in case there’s a security issue, it’s also a concern related to technical debt, and therefore to clean code. Things like the speed of iteration, how fast and frequently deployments can be made, the adaptability of the architecture, play an important role in the success of the project.  5. Tell us about your book, Clean Code in Python, Second Edition. What trajectory does your book follow to help its readers develop maintainable and efficient code?  The first chapter starts with an introduction to the importance of having a well-structured code base, presenting a framework for the chapters to come. This is supported by tools, and recommendations on how to setup a project for success, considering automated tools that will help us format the code, and setting up a pipeline to effectively deploy our code with good quality gates (controls, tests, different stages).  Then, the book introduces some Python-specific concepts, making strong emphasis on the particularities of Python’s syntax, and a more succinct way of writing code, taking advantage of the features the language has to offer.  There are some chapters that revisit general design ideas from software engineering, like object-oriented design and design patterns. From that point, the chapter will explore topics of software engineering in terms of how they can be implemented in Python, using the particularities of the language itself.  The idea of the book is to provide readers with the tools and concepts for them to understand what clean code means beyond any definitions given. It’s a pragmatic book; oriented towards a practitioner’s audience, so it makes special focus on how to get things done in an effective way, which often means accepting tradeoffs.  6. Does your book provide hands-on scenarios to practice the techniques it teaches? Absolutely! The book has a very pragmatic, hands-on approach. As each idea is introduced, it’s followed by examples that demonstrate how that implementation would work. Moreover, I’ve put special effort into making the examples as realistic as possible. Considering that the examples need to showcase an idea irrespective of superfluous details (that is, leaving out everything that’s not relevant to the explanation being made, and isolating the problem at hand), they’re still real-world scenarios, pieces of code any reader can relate to their daily job. There’re no made-up examples like Fibonacci-series or things anyone wouldn’t normally find on real code. Extrapolating from the examples, readers can use the code as reference to solve their problems.  To practice more, there’s a Github repository where all the code from the book lies, and it’s constantly updated. There’s also a Docker image for the entire setup of the book, with the environment already configured, that readers can use to test the code, and learn by modifying it.  About Mariano Anaya is a software engineer who spends most of his time creating software with Python and mentoring fellow programmers. Mariano's main areas of interests besides Python are software architecture, functional programming, distributed systems, and speaking at conferences. He was a speaker at Euro Python 2016 and 2017. To know more about him, you can refer to his GitHub account with the username rmariano. His speakerdeck username is rmariano.

Key-takeaways:   Data scientists need a tailored portfolio of projects that they own and manage to have a sense of autonomy.  The top skill or personality trait a successful data scientist can possess (and should possess) is curiosity.  Managing a successful analytics team and individual analytics professionals is different than managing any other type of team.  Data and analytics will be ubiquitous in the very near future. Analytics teams are different than any other team in the organization and analytics professionals are unique variant of creative professionals. Providing challenging, interesting and valuable work in the form of a personal project portfolio of work for a data scientist can be done and needs to be done to ensure productivity, job satisfaction, value delivery, and retention.  We interviewed Analytics Leader, and bestselling author, John K Thompson on data analytics, the future of analytics and his recent book, Building Analytics Teams. The interview in detail:  1. What are the fundamental concepts of building and managing a high-performing analytics team?  It is critically important to remember that data scientists are creative and intelligent people. They cannot be managed well in a command-and-control environment.  Data scientists need a tailored portfolio of projects that they own and manage to have a sense of autonomy. If they have a portfolio of projects and can manage their time and effort, the productivity of the team will be much higher than what is typically seen in teams managed in a traditional manner.  The relationship of the analytics leader with their peers and executives of the company is critically important to the success of the analytics team.  It is very important to realize that most analytics project fail at the point of where analytical models are to be implemented in production systems. 2. Tell us about your book, Building Analytics Teams. How is your book new and/or different from other books on Data Analytics?   Building Analytics Teams is focused on the practical challenges faced by people who are building and managing high performance analytics teams and the staff members who make up those analytics teams.    The book is different from other books in that it examines the process of building and managing a team from a holistic view.  The book considers the organization framework, the required processes, the people, the projects, the problems, and pitfalls.    The content of the book guides the reader through how to navigate these challenges and provides illustrations and examples of how to be successful.  The book is a “how to” guide on how to successfully manage the analytics process in a large corporate environment.  3. What was the motivation behind writing this book?   I have not seen a book like this, and I wish I had a book like this earlier in my career.  I have built a number of analytics teams. While building and growing those teams, I noticed certain recurring patterns. I wanted to address the misconceptions and the misperceptions people hold about analytics teams.    Analytics teams are unique. The team members who are successful have a different mindset and attitude toward project work and team work. I wanted to communicate the differences inherent in a high-performance analytics team when compared to other teams.  Also, I wanted to communicate that managing a successful analytics team and individual analytics professionals is different than managing any other type of team.    I wanted to write a guide for managers and analytics professionals to help them understand how the broader organization views them and how they can interface and interact with their peers in related organizational functions to increase the probability of joint success.  4. What should be the starting point for data analytics enthusiasts aiming to begin their journey in Data Analytics? How do you think your book will help them in their journey?  It depends on where they are starting their journey.    If they are in the process of completing their undergraduate or graduate studies, I would suggest that they take classes in programming, data science or analytics.    If they are professionals, I would suggest that they take classes on Coursera, Udemy or any other on-line educational platform to see if they have a real interest in, and affinity for, analytics.  If they do have an interest, then they should start working on analytics for themselves to test out analytical techniques, apply critical thinking and try to understand what they can see or cannot see in the data.  If that works out and their interest remains, they should volunteer for projects at work that will enable them to work with data and analytics in a work setting.  If they have the education, the affinity and the skill, then apply for a data science position.  Grab some data and make a difference!  5. What are the key skills required for someone to be successful working in Data Analytics? What are the pain points/challenges one should know?  The top skill or personality trait a successful data scientist can possess (and should possess) is curiosity. Without curiosity, you will find it difficult to be successful as a data scientist.  It helps to be talented and well educated, but I have met many stellar data scientists that are neither.  Beyond those traits, it is more important to be diligent and persistent.  The most successful business analysts and data scientists I have ever worked with were all naturally and perpetually curious and had a level of diligence and persistence that was impressive.  As for pain points and challenges; data scientists need to work on improving their listening skills, their written & verbal communication and presentation skills.  All data scientists need improvement in these areas.  6. What is the future of analytics? What will we see next?  I do believe that we are entering an era where data and analytics will be increasing in importance in all human endeavors. Certainly, corporate use of data and analytics will increase in importance, hence the focus of the book.    But beyond corporations, the active and engaged use of data and analytics will increase in importance and daily use in managing multiple aspects of - people’s personal lives, academic pursuits, governmental policy, military operations, humanitarian aid, tailoring of products and services; building of roads, towns and cities, planning of traffic patterns, provisioning of local federal and state services, intergovernmental relationships and more.    There will not be an element of human endeavor that will not be touched and changed by data and analytics. Data is ubiquitous today and data and analytics will be ubiquitous in the very near future.  We will see more discussions on who owns data and who should be able to monetize data.  We will experience increasing levels of AI and analytics across all systems that we interact with, and most of it will be unnoticed and operate in the background for our benefit.  About:  John K. Thompson is an international technology executive with over 30 years of experience in the business intelligence and advanced analytics fields. Currently, John is responsible for the global Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence team and efforts at CSL Behring. 

With the invention of Bitcoin in 2008, the world was introduced to a new concept, Blockchain, which revolutionized the whole of society. It was something that promised to have an impact upon every industry. This new concept is the underlying technology that underpins Bitcoin.  Blockchain technology is the backbone of cryptocurrencies, and it has applications in finance, government, media, and many other industries.   Some describe blockchain as a revolution, whereas another school of thought believes that it is going to be more evolutionary, and it will take many years before any practical benefits of blockchain reach fruition. This thinking is correct to some extent, but, in Imran Bashir’s opinion, the revolution has already begun. It is a technology that has an impact on current technologies too and possesses the ability to change them at a fundamental level.  Let’s hear from Imran on fundamentals of blockchain technology, its myths and his recent book, Mastering Blockchain, Third Edition. What is blockchain technology? How would you describe it to a beginner in the field? Blockchain is a distributed ledger which runs on a decentralized peer to peer network. First introduced with Bitcoin as a mechanism that ensures security of the electronic cash system, blockchain has now become a prime area of research with many applications in a variety of industries and sectors.   What should be the starting point for someone aiming to begin their journey in Blockchain? Focus on the underlying principles and core concepts such as distributed systems, consensus, cryptography, and development using no helper tools in the start. Once you understand the basics and the underlying mechanics, then you can use tools such as truffle or some other framework to make your developer life easier, however it is extremely important to learn the underlying concepts first.   What is the biggest myth about blockchain? Sometimes people believe that blockchain IS cryptocurrency, however that is not the case. Blockchain is the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies that ensures the security, and integrity of the system and prevents double spends. However, cryptocurrency can be considered one application of blockchain technology out of many.      “Blockchain is one of the most disruptive emerging technologies today.” How much do you agree with this? Indeed, it is true.  Blockchain is changing the way we do business. In the next 5 years or so, financial systems, government systems and other major sectors will all have blockchain integrated in one way or another.   What are the factors driving development of the mainstream adoption of Blockchain? The development of standards, interoperability efforts, and consortium blockchain are all contributing towards mainstream adoption of blockchain. Also demand for more security, transparency, and decentralization in some sectors are also key drivers behind more adoption, e.g., a prime solution for decentralized sovereign identity is blockchain.   How do you explain the term bitcoin mining? Mining is a colloquial term used to describe the process of creating new bitcoins where a miner repeatedly tries to find a solution to a math puzzle and whoever finds it first wins the right to create new block and earn bitcoins as a reward.    How can Blockchain protect the Global economy? I think with the trust, transparency and security guarantees provided by blockchain we can perceive a future where financial crime can be limited to a great degree. That can have a good impact on the global economy. Furthermore, the development of CDBCs (central bank digital currencies) are expected to have a major impact on the economy and help to stabilize it. From an inclusion point of view, blockchain can allow unbanked populations to play a role in the global financial system. If cryptocurrencies replace the current monetary system, then because of the decentralized nature of blockchain, major cost savings can be achieved as no intermediaries or banks will be required, and a peer to peer, extremely low cost, global financial system can emerge which can transform the world economy. The entire remittance ecosystem can evolve into an extremely low cost, secure, real-time system which can include people who were porously unbanked. The possibilities are endless.   Tell us a bit about your book, Mastering Blockchain, Third Edition? Mastering Blockchain, Third Edition is a unique combination of theory and practice. Not only does it provides a holistic view of most areas of blockchain technology, it also covers hands on exercises using Ethereum, Bitcoin, Quroum and Hyperledger to equip readers with both theory and practical knowledge of blockchain technology. The third edition includes four new chapters on hot topics such as blockchain consensus, tokenization, Ethereum 2 and Enterprise blockchains.  About the author  Imran Bashir has an M.Sc. in Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London, and has a background in software development, solution architecture, infrastructure management, and IT service management. He is also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the British Computer Society (BCS). Imran has extensive experience in both the public and financial sectors, having worked on large-scale IT projects in the public sector before moving to the financial services industry. Since then, he has worked in various technical roles for different financial companies in Europe's financial capital, London. 

Sidetrade is an organization that is on a mission to transform customer engagement in the world of B2B marketing with the help of artificial intelligence. With its own AI technology - Aimie - it's now in a strong position to carve out a niche for itself in a market that shows no signs of slowing down. What makes the company even more exciting for us at Packt is that they're just a stones throw away from our offices in Birmingham. To get the lowdown on Sidetrade we spoke to CTO Mark Sheldon about the company's evolution and what the future might hold. Read the interview below... Packt: Tell us a bit about your background and what you're up to today. Mark Sheldon: I started my career as a developer and moved into the management of a large technical team, at one of the ‘big six’ utility companies in the UK. Back in 2013, when the AI buzz was in its infancy, I co-founded a predictive analytics software company called BrightTarget. It was clear there was a better way for B2B organisations to gain more value from their data, and cloud computing and machine learning were clear market changers. In 2017 BrightTarget was acquired by Sidetrade and at this point I became part of their technical leadership team, with the goal of making Sidetrade an AI-driven company. More recently I moved into the Group CTO position (as part of the global leadership team), responsible for more than 85 staff. Sidetrade has a total of 250 staff across six offices in Europe, with expansion planned in 2020. The AI boom and its impact on the B2B landscape Packt: Gartner predicts that this year 30% of B2B companies will use AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes. What's your take on this? Mark: Yes, only 30%, so this market is still just emerging. Although machine learning has been around for decades, there's still a lot of confusion around AI in many B2B organisations, mostly caused by all of the market and vendor hype. Very few have successfully deployed machine learning and are able to demonstrate value. However, for those that have, the potential for commercial gain deploying AI is huge. The most common processes impacted in sales & marketing are those which involve interactions with customers or prospects at scale; where the decision making of a human can be augmented or improved. e.g. Identifying customers most at risk of churn, customers with the best opportunity to sell more product or prospects with the highest propensity to become a customer. AI really allows sales & marketing teams to optimize their time and marketing spend. BrightTarget and Sidetrade Packt: You co-founded BrightTarget which was acquired by Sidetrade in 2016. Could you tell us a little bit about BrightTarget?   Mark: BrightTarget was founded in 2014, on the principle of helping B2B organisations deploy AI without the need for expensive and hard to find data scientists. We invested significantly in automating the process of data loading, processing (feature generation), model building and monitoring. We achieved strong traction with some large enterprise accounts and were recognized by Forrester as a “Strong Performer”. Packt: How did the acquisition come about? Mark: At this time [when BrightTarget was founded], Olivier Novasque (the Sidetrade CEO and founder) had a clear vision to transform Sidetrade into an AI-driven business. So the acquisition of BrightTarget in November 2016 was a natural fit with the ambitions of Sidetrade and their goals. This has proven to be a great move with the launch of Aimee (AI engine) which has contributed significantly to the subsequent revenue growth following the acquisition. Aimie: Sidetrade's AI technology Packt: Tell us a bit more about Aimie. How does it work? What's the thinking behind it? Mark: Aimie is Sidetrade’s propriety AI technology that helps our customers augment their daily experience within our products. For example, Aimie helps every cash collector make the very optimum collection decisions, even if they have only joined the company two weeks ago! This AI technology is at the heart of our SaaS platforms – Augmented Revenue (helping B2B organisations to manage their Revenue; including managing revenue at risk and finding opportunities to grow revenue from existing customers) and Augmented Cash (again, helping B2B organsisations improve working capital by better cash collection). We also have an unrivalled data lake built up over 20 years. We now have 230 million B2B payment experiences, totaling sales of over 700 billion Euros [£621 bn] which we train our AI on, and enriches our client’s own data. More good quality data for AI to train upon means for better predictions and outcomes. For example (reported in Fortune and Forbes), one of our enterprise clients is Manpower, one of the biggest recruitment firms in the world. With an annual income of €4 bn per year, Manpower France collects 1.3 million receivables from 80,000 companies. To handle this volume, and increasingly complex payment procedures, Manpower’s finance department started using Sidetrade technology in 2013, and introduced Aimie in 2018-19. Manpower started Aimie off with two customer portfolios for a period of two months. Aimie analyzed what worked before for Manpower, directly executed automatic follow-up actions, and established which past-dues to target first. She considered available resources (staff hours, workloads) in order to take optimal actions. Encouraged by the results, Manpower ramped up their use of Aimie. Within four months, Aimie was managing nearly 60% of their single-site customers, which represents over 5,000 accounts, and nearly 10,000 follow-up actions per month. Manpower has over 700 payer centers to manage, making it impossible for a manager to call all the debtors in their portfolio. Aimie helped them decide which customers to contact first. After nine months of testing, the results were clear: with support from Aimie, effectiveness of recovery actions grew 12%. That’s a good improvement in cash collection which boosts working capital, vital for business. Sidetrade's data science team Packt: Sidetrade has a data science team, what is it and how does it function? How does your team of data engineers, data scientists work in tandem with the product teams to create AI powered B2B solutions for customers? Do they also work on customized solutions? Mark: Dr Clement Chastagnol (PhD in AI and robotics) leads our data science team. We currently have a team focused more on research topics, who really push the boundaries on some of the latest aspects of AI. However, the majority of our sata scientists work directly within product-led squads (with a mixture of different data, application & ops engineers). The reason for this is to ensure we deliver actionable AI/ML into our products on a regular basis, to ensure we are customer (therefore product) focused. As a SaaS company with 1000’s of customers/users, almost all of the work we do is to improve our overall products, and adding features that benefit the majority. This also applies to data science, although we have a very advanced M/L platform which allows us to automatically build and manage 1000’s of M/L models, that are often client-specific. In terms of research, each year we work with the French Government’s business ombudsman, to research and produce an index report of all B2B business payment disputes, including figures by industry, and length of delay. This involves our data scientists analysing over 9,000 French customer companies representing, 91% of large corporations and organizations with 250 to 5,000 employees. The data analyzed covers over 2.8 million invoices totaling €12bn. Also as part of our research work, we have received funding from the French Government, EU Commission agencies, the French national agency for research, and the DataAi Institute on the following projects: Eurofirmo, which is an index of all 26 million businesses in the EU and Britain, including headcount and revenue which has never been done before. Re-search Alps, which is a collaboration with academics from four universities that aims to track all research-active research institutes across seven European countries. It records their research projects, funding, publications, patents, and other academic output. Dirty Data: Two research axis are funded. One revolves around dirty data integration, funded by the ANR (Association National de Recherche). The other strives to develop new techniques to analyze incomplete data. It is funded by the DataAI institute. As part of this project, we’ve worked with Gaël Varoquaux (ML Researcher & creator of Scikit-learn) which has been great. Alongside all these projects, the team has recently worked with Facebook Research on the topic of data drift, as well as publishing research in journal papers, academic conference attendance and presentations, support for PhD students, hackathons and guest lectures at universities. Developing new talent in the AI space Packt: Sidetrade recently launched The Code Academy, what is it? How can developers take part in this initiative and how will it benefit them? What are other key initiatives by Sidetrade? Mark: The Code Academy is designed to develop the next generation of AI talent and is important for Sidetrade to maintain its position as a leading AI powered customer platform. The Code Academy, which was piloted in 2018, is part of Sidetrade’s commitment to providing engineering skills and jobs for young people in the Midlands, to keep the UK at the forefront of the AI industry. It’s a new, rapid approach to training and job creation. We welcome trainees with computing and non-computing backgrounds who can demonstrate ability and passion for technology. It’s rapid, as we design and deliver the academy in-house over four weeks, with a lot of support from senior developers in the team. We train for job roles, rather than just impart coding. And it’s offered without cost to the trainee, so money isn’t a barrier. At the end of four weeks the trainees are given a challenge, and asked to present their work to an audience of senior staff. Academy modules include: • Becoming familiar with Git • Setting up VSCode for .NET & Web development • How to load a relational data set through pgAdmin (CSV) • Learning how to write TSQL to analyse and find trends within a data set • Learning about the concept of & develop a basic RESTFul service • Introduction to angular (using http://angular.io/start) • Learn to connect all layers of the stack • Use Kanban (Trello) to manage projects • How to define an MVP In 2018 we trained 10 people and offered software and data engineer roles to three. In 2019, we revamped the academy, making it much more practical, and selected 12 trainees from 50 applicants. The quality of the talent was so good we offered five trainees data and software engineer roles with our professional services and R&D teams. Expanding the team Packt: You’re about to move into a new, much bigger office in central Birmingham. What are your challenges in terms of expanding the team? Can you elaborate more on the challenges faced by the team in terms of working with AIOps. Mark: That's right, we’re going to open a new Tech Hub that will house a much bigger team of data and software engineers working across the full stack. We’ll also run our 2020 Code Academy from the hub. A special launch event, Together for Tech, will make the opening official on 27th February 2020, with VIP guests, tech and business stakeholders. We’ll also be announcing a major investment in R&D and jobs creation. There is huge potential for Birmingham to become a tech powerhouse within Europe. The challenge for me is hiring enough senior level tech professionals. These people are needed to lead teams, develop staff, and keep pushing the boundary of what we can do. There’s overall a challenge to hire enough qualified professionals for the tech sector, and that is more acute at the senior levels. I think there’s a temptation for experienced tech types to head to London or even America, so it’s a challenge for the region to retain great talent. The team has spent a lot of time on ‘AI ops’, which has emerged in the past three years. So, the other challenge is how do we actually productionise all of the models and data engineering that our team and platform is producing. How do we deploy & run them in production? How do we monitor them? This is all about managing Machine Learning models at scale. For me, the sheer volume the team have to deal with is the biggest thing. We train thousands of different predictive models for different clients, and they are changing all of the time in terms of the data they are trained on. So actually, building workflows and processes to help monitor those in production at that kind of scale without having to scale the team in proportion is probably the biggest challenge. The future of AI and automation for B2B marketing and sales Packt: AI is a really broad term. It often gets used interchangeably with machine learning and deep learning. Do you think this confusion is risky or dangerous? Do you think people should simply stop talking about AI in favour of machine learning and deep learning? Mark: I think we’ve reached a point where AI has become a buzz word and a catch-all phrase. I think we can and should start being more sophisticated about what we mean, it’s a work of education. From a vendor and business point of view, AI is no longer a differentiator as everyone is talking about it, so it makes it harder to stand out. But as decision makers become more educated on the topic, it's clear which vendors have the expertise and depth of data to deliver true AI-powered solutions. Packt: What do you expect to come next in the B2B Sales and Marketing space? And how is automation of this space likely to impact other industries? Mark: My prediction for the next big thing to come in the AI space would be a major breakthrough in Quantum computing by either Google or one of the startups specializing in the field. In the B2B sales and marketing space I think the next step is just wider adoption and trust that AI can augment or even outperform humans. Most businesses will need to go through a cultural and often organisational shift that is required to get the full commercial benefits out of AI. Thanks for taking the time to speak to us Mark! We'll be watching Sidetrade closely over the months and years to come. It's also great to see such an exciting and innovative company growing in Birmingham, right near the Packt office. Learn more about Sidetrade: www.sidetrade.com

Gone are the days when graphic design was solely focused on the obvious graphic elements of a product like its packaging and marketing materials. Today the impact of technology and the digital revolution is huge on how we communicate, the way we work, and even the way we socialize. Graphic design is no exception to this change. Technology plays a major role in the creation of digital work available in many fields. For example, portfolio design, presentations, signage, logos, websites, animations, and even architectural production have all traveled far since the dawn of the digital revolution. This graphic designing evolution has enabled brands with greater exposure online and enabled users with engaging and interesting graphics. Recently, we had a conversation with Iman Ahmed, an Adobe Certified Partner and Instructor and CompTIA Certified Technical Trainer on the current graphic design industry, various design tools, and how is the future. Iman has 19+ years of solid international experience in delivering the skills of various applications, from Architecture, Graphic design, Infographics, Motion Graphics, Photo Editing, Magazine and book design, video production, 3D Modelling. We also discussed her recently published book, Mastering Adobe InDesign 2020, a step-by-step guide to learn InDesign Framework, Workspace, Project setup, Master pages, Pages, Text, among other core features. It also explores new features in InDesign 2020 release and how are they useful to graphic designing professionals. Adobe InDesign, a preferred choice for designing text-heavy documents Adobe’s Creative Suite of tools offers graphic designers all kinds of solutions needed to create professional and engaging graphics. From photo editing to typography tools to sound design Adobe literally has everything covered for any type of design project. So how can one compare Adobe InDesign with other tools, specifically with Illustrator and Photoshop? Iman clarifies, “Adobe applications has no relation to the user's level of experience, it is all about the purpose. Adobe Photoshop is the best application for photo editing, while Adobe Illustrator is the best used for vector design, and Adobe InDesign is created for layout design, as it has tools and options that facilitate the layout design process.” Graphic designers use InDesign when they need to layout a multi-page, text-heavy piece. For example in print or digital, InDesign is used to layout text. It is a one-stop solution for designing a magazine, brochure or a booklet. Out of the three applications, InDesign has the most robust typesetting features available. It also integrates with Adobe Digital Publishing Solution, allowing designers to create fully interactive e-books, magazines, and other digital publications. Key features in Adobe InDesign 2020 version Adobe released InDesign 2020 version in November 4th this year. This release brings significant upgrades and changes as per Adobe InDesign user requests. With this release, InDesign tool now supports SVG file formats. Graphic designers will be able to use infinitely customizable fonts or variable fonts within InDesign. There is a more efficient way to place lines, or “rules,”  between columns of text. Additionally, it includes improvements to InDesign’s core performance and launch times for up to 25% faster. Iman says about the new release, “Adobe InDesign fixed a lot of bugs in this release, and offered an improvement to resolve document corruption. Opening a particular file, saving and closing it has become faster in this release. And text editing is also faster than earlier releases. There are a bunch of Text features which have been added to Adobe InDesign 2020 release, such as variable fonts and column rules, a new feature in spell check, plus five new languages - Thai, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, and Sinhalaare are supported in this release.” She further discussed why InDesign is considered to be a tool of choice for Multi-page projects, and how the Master page feature is one of the key features of InDesign. She says, “Master page is one of the most powerful features of Adobe InDesign, it acts as a template, as master page will host all common features that are needed to repeat in document pages, and any changes made in the master page, will reflect into all document pages that follow this particular master page. Hence, a professional designer has to be smart enough in designing the document, to decide how many master pages to use in one document.” You can read Chapter 6 of this book, Mastering Adobe InDesign 2020, to know more about Master page feature and how to create different Master pages for your document. Iman’s education in architecture designing is foundational to her graphics designing career Iman has studied architecture design, and she mentions that her undergraduate and postgraduate education in architecture has contributed to her success as an Engineering Applications’ Instructor and as a Graphic Design Instructor and designer. Iman talks about her graphic designing journey and shares this quote from Frank Lloyd Wright, “The mother of art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.” Iman takes pride and feels lucky to study the mother of all arts, which guided her strongly in her graphic designer career. She mentions that the steps she took can be common with everyone who feels passionate about learning graphic design. Undoubtedly architecture was the cornerstone in her pathway, but gaining knowledge of tools is important too to accomplish for a good designer. She says, “My graphic design path literally started when I used Adobe Photoshop for the first time in an architecture presentation. Then I felt more interested to learn more about Adobe Photoshop and photo editing. One year later, I started my career as an Adobe Photoshop instructor, and a graphic designer for the same training center, beside my work as an architect.” “I taught myself more about Photoshop, plus a bunch of applications using offline help, as YouTube was not available. For years, I kept searching for design ideas, learn new applications, teach what I learnt and practice a lot. Honestly, this is not enough, to be a professional graphic designer, I still need more.” On her inspiration to write Mastering Adobe InDesign CC 2020 Iman says, “As a trainer, it is the most joyful moment when you help others to learn and improve. For more than 19 years, I am teaching people from the Middle East, Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, Asia and Africa. Their nationalities are different, but their enthusiasm looks the same. My dream is to spread knowledge and help more and more people to learn. So for me writing a book about Adobe InDesign was a great chance to share my knowledge and experience to a broader audience. In my book I have shared 19 years of experience, it is not only about InDesign, but also about the design process. It helps both designers and non-designers to work more efficient with Adobe InDesign tool and makes them aware of the steps before implementing the design. It covers various exercises  and examples to enhance reader's skills, and sharpens the skills of intermediate and expert users.” The growth story of the graphic design industry is far from over According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the graphic design field is expected to grow by 3% from 2018 to 2028, which is slower than average. More graphic designers are jumping to be freelancers as compensation is a major issue in a full time job role. Companies pay lesser salaries at a junior and intermediate level roles in the graphic design department. Hence, designers prefer freelancing as they can sell their creatives and design templates to multiple clients with less effort. Additionally, there are perks to being your own boss. For instance, you get to set your own working hours and choose your own jobs. As freelancers are in millions all over the world, it gets difficult to track their number in the statistics while calculating the industry growth rate. And it becomes an outlier in showing the actual industry growth results thus it shows slower than the average. Iman shared her thoughts which are on similar lines, she says, “Competition is aggressive everywhere, the first reason for this competition is the unemployment phenomenon that we are facing in this decade. Globalization and platforms that offer freelancing designers to hire from everywhere negatively affects the field and market. As some designers are cheap, as per their economy and currency standards.” But on the other hand, working at a firm has its own perks. The company will be responsible for maintaining your work environment, purchasing equipment and software, and building a client base. And graphic designers will be more likely to work regular hours for a predictable paycheck. On this Iman says, “If you work hard on your portfolio, and know how to network well with others, definitely you will be hired by reputed organizations.” If you're not sure of what to start with, it's always a good idea to intern at a small or medium firm and gain experience in the industry. Then get to know your work style, and choose what fits best. Graphic designers ditching corporate culture for freelancing Out of more than 250,000 graphic designers in the U.S., almost 25% are self-employed. This number is expected to rise in the coming years due to millennials ditching the corporate culture for a freelance lifestyle. On this we asked Iman about a typical graphic designer career graph and what some pathways available are. We also asked if professionals require a degree to enter this field. Iman believes that ”graphic designer career path varies, and different routes can be the right pathway to the graphic design career. Your route depends on your target, would you like to be professional in logo design, branding, web design, packaging design, book and magazine design, some of them, all of them or even more!” Further she discussed major steps that a graphic designer needs to take to start their journey. Step 1: Learn graphic designing Iman recommends learning graphic design in a school which is specialized in graphic designing. She says, “learning applications is not enough, applications are only tools that will help you to finish your work in a smart and easy way.  But without design fundamentals and concrete foundations, a good design will not be achieved.” Step 2: Get inspired by others “Don't Reinvent The Wheel, learn from people with experience to save time,” says Iman. She suggests, “to watch others’ work, about the latest styles of design which will inspire and be another source of knowledge to learn from.” Step 3: Practice, practice, practice! Practice makes one perfect! Iman advises to “create more than one idea for a design and find every possible way to create a design that forms the message you need to communicate. You must sketch, re-sketch, refine your sketch, implement it and edit it, for an exclusively perfect design.” Step 4: Read more books Iman adds, “read more and more books about graphic design theory, history, elements of design, color theories and other books about designing. These books have in depth knowledge and a rich experience to develop designing skills.” Step 5: Selecting the right tool for designing Iman emphasises on being smart in selecting the tool for designing. She says, “you need to be aware, which application will help you in what task. For instance, one can create logos using Adobe Illustrator, then edit photos in Adobe Photoshop, and finally collect design elements smartly in Adobe InDesign.” On graphic designing future and what to expect next When it comes to the future of graphic design, the big thing on everyone’s mind is animation and VR. Digital media is rapidly becoming the future of graphic design. For more we asked Iman on what to expect next. She explains, “All the fields such as print media, web designs, animation and VFX are ways to form a message using visual communications’ tools, and send it to the target audience, and it depends on the field to field, there is a proper way to use, based on the purpose. Whereas in the design industry, we cannot predict what will happen tomorrow, but for sure, the competition in using visual communication tools, will always remain a major factor in the improvement of all design fields.” Get Iman’s book, Mastering Adobe InDesign 2020 today to start exploring the InDesign workspace, the different menus, and functions, along with gaining insights into planning and executing a design. You’ll also get hands-on with creating your first project, focusing on aspects such as working with text, images, and shapes. Author Bio Iman Ahmed is an Architect who loves Art and Design, she started practicing Graphic Design in 1999, and during her 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, she created a lot of designs and magazines using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign. Her passion for teaching was genuine and that drives her to work hard to be a special kind of trainers. She started her teaching career in 2004, she is an Adobe user since 1999 and an Adobe Certified Instructor since 2008. Iman is a CompTIA Certified Technical Trainer since 2008, and she had been interviewed by CompTIA in November 2016 as a model of a special kind of trainers, who studied and applied CompTIA ( CTT+) program in a special way that successfully polished her skills and teaching style. Iman is a classroom Instructor and an online trainer who delivers courses in the Middle East and UK. Following Capital One data breach, GitHub gets sued and AWS security questioned by a U.S. Senator British Airways set to face a record-breaking fine of £183m by the ICO over customer data breach US Customs and Border Protection reveal data breach that exposed thousands of traveler photos and license plate images

The definition of DevOps is a hotly disputed topic among amateur practitioners and experienced engineers alike. Ironically, DevOps was actually supposed to bring some order into the messy and chaotic environment of IT software development. In DevOps Paradox, DevOps expert Viktor Farcic talks to fellow industry figures who reveal their perspectives on the trend and what it means to them. In this article, we’ll see what some prominent people in the DevOps community have to say about DevOps. The quotes in this article are taken directly from the book. So, how are we supposed to incorporate DevOps into our organizations if we don't even know what it is? Let’s hear Viktor’s thoughts about what DevOps is and what are it’s trends and future aspects: What is DevOps and why do we need it? What is DevOps and why do we need it? What is the most important thing DevOps helps us achieve? What are the factors that drive the development of DevOps? Viktor Farcic: Almost everyone gives a different answer to the question “What is DevOps?”—there is a huge discrepancy between the idea and the implementation. I believe that the main objective of DevOps is to enable self-sufficient product-oriented teams capable of having a full control of their products. That is in stark contrast with the way many companies operate today. Normally, a lifecycle of an application is split between many teams. Business analysts define requirements, architects work on guidelines that must be followed and frameworks that must be used, developers write code, testers are in charge of validations, operators deploy new releases, and so on and so forth. The problem is that each of those groups belong to different departments and have different and often opposing objectives. Instead of fostering collaboration towards a common goal, different teams (departments) are looking for their own shortsighted interests. DevOps tries to remove organization based on the type of tasks performed and unite all the expertise required for the whole lifecycle of an application into a single team reporting to a single person. It forces us to work together and it builds empathy. Is DevOps a process? Or a set of technologies? What's your perspective on this area of debate? Viktor: DevOps is neither of the two. Unlike some agile frameworks (e.g. Scrum), there is no prescribed process to follow. Similarly, there is no technology we can adapt that will convert us into “DevOps” teams. It is only an idea that developers, operators, and everyone else needs to work together instead of being isolated in different silos. That does not mean that technology is not important; it is, but often for other than obvious reasons. Every new technology is created by a group of people that worked together to create it. As such, it always reflects processes of those involved in creating it. Those processes, on the other hand, are a result of the culture of the people following it. In other words, every tech is a result of certain processes created as a result of the culture of the team that worked on it. So, even though we use an end result, it is a product of a process created in a specific culture. If we adopt a technology that does not match our own processes and culture, it will produce suboptimal results at best. So, we must either adopt technology that matches our processes and culture or use it to change them. One cannot work without the other. All in all, DevOps is an idea, not much more than that. It’s up to us to figure out which processes and technology will help us make it reality. What does a DevOps engineer do? Is it even a real job role? What are the core roles of DevOps Engineers in terms of development and Infrastructure? Viktor: I don't think there is such a thing as a “DevOps Engineer.” The term was invented by people who were not ready to apply the changes DevOps leads to. Most of the time, a “DevOps Engineer” is just a different name for someone working in shared services, operations, infrastructure, or whichever department was first to be renamed into DevOps. Do you think DevOps is experiencing an identity crisis? Viktor: DevOps was never defined as a process. Agile, for example, got quite a few implementations that tell people what to do. Among others, we got Scrum that clearly defines what to do. We could even argue that Scrum, as being a set of practices that must be followed, is against the spirit of Agile, but that’s a conversation for some other time. What matters is that no one defined the process behind DevOps. There is no such thing as a set of steps that must be followed daily or weekly. It is just an idea that we should work together and not throw things over department walls. As such, the way to accomplish that is open to interpretation. So, DevOps never had a clear identity, so it cannot have an identity crisis either. It’s just an idea, and it’s up to each one of us to try to figure out how to make it reality. The biggest challenges in DevOps today What are the biggest challenges in DevOps at the moment? Viktor: Currently, DevOps is mostly misunderstood. More often than not, companies just rename a department. In some companies, shared services become DevOps teams; in others it is infrastructure, operations, or any other department. It’s as if it was a race and the first department to change their name into “DevOps” was a winner. Logically, changing the name means nothing and does not result in any tangible improvement. The key challenges are related to people and culture. DevOps is not easy because it challenges current organizational structure, it restructures power within an organization, and it questions the need for the existence of many departments. As such, middle management is often against it because it is perceived as a risk to their position. At the same time, people who spent many years doing the same thing over and over again feel that their credibility is at risk if the structure that allowed them to climb company ladder is removed. Congratulations on the release of DevOps Paradox. Could you talk a little bit about the idea behind it and what you hope it achieves? Viktor: I go to a lot of conferences and I realized that scheduled talks are not the main takeaway from them. True, I learned things by listening to them, but the primary reason I continue attending are “corridor talks.” Conferences are a great opportunity for me to find interesting people and have amazing discussions. Unlike scheduled talks, those conversations are not structured. I do not prepare a list of questions for the next person I’ll meet in between talks or at a party. Instead, we’d just start talking about a random thing that happens to be interesting. I wanted to bring those types of conversations to people who cannot travel the world and be every moth in a different conference in a different country. So, I did not have any real goals for this book, other than speaking with people about any topic, as long as it is related to DevOps. Since DevOps can be anything related to software development, you can say that the scope of the book is as broad as it can be. My true goal was to enjoy having conversations with people. I did not prepare questions in advance. Instead, I just gathered people I’d like to speak with if I’d meet them in a conference and say, “Let’s have a coffee and see what you were up to since the last time we met”. Some of those I interviewed are my friends, while others I met for the first time. Some work for huge enterprises, while others work in startups. Some worked in software industry for many years, while others are young up-and-coming experts. I wanted to make sure that the book gives as many different opinions as possible. Find Viktor Farcic's DevOps Paradox on the Packt store. Read the first chapter for free on the Packt subscription platform.

API management is a discipline that has evolved to deliver the processes and tools required to discover, design, implement, use, or operate enterprise-grade APIs. The discipline bisects two distinct communities and deserves the attention of both: developers who build APIs and business and IT leaders looking at APIs to drive growth. In Enterprise API Management, Luis Weir shows how to define the right architecture, implement the right patterns, and define the right organization model for business-driven APIs. The book explores architectural decisions, implementation patterns, and management practices for successful enterprise APIs. It also gives clear, actionable advice on choosing and executing the right API strategy in your enterprise. Let’s see what Luis has to say about API management and key principles to improve API design for enterprise organizations. What API management involves What does API management mean and involve? Luis Weir: In simple terms, it’s the discipline that aligns tools with processes and people in order to realize the value from implementing enterprise-grade APIs throughout their full cycle. By enterprise-grade, I mean APIs that comply with a minimum set of quality standards, not just in the actual API itself (e.g. use of normalize semantics, well-documented interfaces, and good user experience), but also in the engineering processes behind their delivery (e.g. CICD pipelines and robust automation at all levels, different levels of testing, and so on). Guiding principles for API design What are the some guiding principles that can improve API design? LW: First and foremost is the identification of APIs themselves. It’s not just about building an API for the sake of it and value will just come. Without adopting a process (e.g. ideation) that can help identify APIs that can truly add value, there is real risk that an API might just end up being a DOA (dead on arrival), as there might not even be a need for it. Assuming such a process has taken place and APIs that have real potential to add value have been identified, the next step is to conceptualize a design. It is at this point that disciplines such as domain-driven design can help produce such a design in a way that both business and IT people can relate to it. This design should capture things such as consuming applications, producing applications (data sources), data entities, and services involved in the concept. It should clearly and simply define the relationship between the components and define boundaries (bounded contexts) as these will be key not just in the actual implementation of the API or APIs (as it may end up being more than just one), but also in the creation of the API specifications themselves thought IDLs (e.g. an OAS file, API blueprint, GraphQL schema, .proto file in gRPC to name a few). The next and very important step for producing a good API is to follow an API design-first process. This process ensures that the API specifications and API mocks (produced from the API specifications themselves) undergo a series of validations by potential consumers of the API themselves as well as other relevant parties. The idea is to obtain as much feedback as possible through multiple iterations (or feedback-loops) to ensure that the API is fit for purpose but that it also delivers a good user experience. For more details, please refer to the API Life cycle section in my book. Testing APIs What are different API testing approaches? LW: At the very minimum, API testing should involve the following testing approaches: Interface testing Functional testing Performance testing Security testing Interface testing is used to validate that an API implementation conforms to the API specification. Functional testing is used to validate that the API delivers the functionality that it is meant to deliver and with the expected behavior. Performance testing ensures that APIs can actually handle the expected volume and scale as required. Security testing ensures that the API is not vulnerable to common threads such as those described in the OWASP top 10 projects. Other more sophisticated testing approaches may include A/B testing and Chaos testing. A/B testing dynamically tests new API features against a subset of the API audience and in a running environment (even production). Chaos testing (e.g. randomly shutting down components of the solution in production to ensure the API is resilient) should be considered as the API initiative matures. Understanding API gateways What are the key features of an API gateway? LW: There are many capabilities expected of an API gateway and these are all well described in the API exposure section in my book. However, in addition to such capabilities, which in my view are all essential, there are some key features that put modern API gateways (3rd generation) apart from more traditional ones (1st and 2nd gen). These are: Lightweight: Requires minimum disk space, CPU, and RAM to run. Hybrid: Can run on-premise, on cloud, and on multiple cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, etc). Kubernetes ready: k8s has become the most popular runtime platform for microservices. Modern APIs should be easily deployed into the K8s runtime and support many of the patterns as described in my book. Common Control Plane: If the management of APIs deployed on gateways isn’t centralized in some way, shape, or form, then allowing enterprise users to discover and (re)use already built (or being built) APIs will be extremely difficult and will lead to a lot of duplication. We’ve already seen this in the SOA days. Modern API Gateways should, therefore, be pluggable to control planes that take care of things like API lifecycle management and gateway infra management. Phone-home: This is a key feature and one that still not many modern gateways support. The ability for an API gateway to stablish the communication to the management tier via the control plane (Phone-home) using standard ports is key in hybrid architectures to avoid networking and other security constraints. Enterprise API Management, I think, provides a pretty comprehensive overview of what modern API platforms look like and how to differentiate them with more traditional ones. Common mistakes in API management What are the common mistakes people make in API management? LW: Throughout my time as an API strategist and practitioner I’ve seen many mistakes and also made some myself. The important thing is being able to recognize what they are and learnt from them. The top 3 that come to my mind: Thinking that API management is just about implementing a product or tools without having business and customer value at the epicentre of the API strategy. (Sometimes there even isn’t an API strategy.) This is perhaps the most common one, and one that happened a lot in the old SOA days…unfortunately still occurs in the modern API-led era. My book, Enterprise API Management, can be used as the guideline on how to avoid making an API management initiative less about tools, and more about business/customer value, people, and processes. Thinking that all APIs are the same and therefore treating them all the same way. In some cases, this just happens accidentally, in other cases this happens to avoid ‘layering’ APIs because ‘microservices architectures and practitioners say so’. The matter of fact is, that an API that is built specifically in support of a given mobile application will be less generic and less suited for its used outside of the ‘context’ on which it was built, as compare to an API that was built without any specific consuming application in mind (and thus is not coupled to any application lifecycle). Adopting the wrong organizational model to provide API capabilities across the enterprise. Foor example, this could be a model that centralizes all API efforts and capabilities thus becoming a bottleneck and eventually becoming slow (aka traditional IT). Modern API initiatives should think about adopting platforms models with self-service at the epicentre. In addition to the above 3, there are many common pitfalls when it comes to API architecture and design. However, to cover these I strongly recommend my talk on the 7 deadly sins of API design... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx2_etbb9JA API management and DevOps What are your thoughts about 3rd generation API management having huge impact on DevOps? LW: Succeeding in modern API management and microservices architectures requires changes beyond technology and also requires diving deep into the organization and its culture. It means moving away from traditional project-based deliveries wherein teams assemble just for the duration of a project and hand over the delivered software (e.g. an API and related services) to different support teams. Instead, move towards a product-based organization wherein teams are assemble around business capabilities and retain accountability and ownership through the entire life cycle of the product. This fundamental change of approach in delivering software means that there is no longer a split between development and operation teams, as a product team has full ownership and accountability over its product. With that said, in order to avoid (re)building these product teams and maintaining core IT capabilities from scratch (e.g. API platforms and service runtimes), a platform operating model can be adopted. This model can offer common IT capabilities, although in a decentralized, on-demand, and self-service way. And for me accomplishing the above is true DevOps. It is at this point that organizations can become more agile and can truly increase their time to markets. What were your goals and objectives in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them? LW: When I started defining and implementing API and microservices strategies in large enterprises (many of them Fortune 500), although there was plentiful of content around to get inspiration from (much of this content referenced in my book), I had to literally go through several articles, books, videos, and others in order to conceive a top-down, business-led approach towards delivering end-to-end API and microservices strategies. When I say end to end, it doesn’t mean just defining PowerPoints and lengthy Word documents explaining how to deliver API/Microservices strategies and then just walking away. Or worst, sitting on the side with an opinion but no accountability (unfortunately, only too common in the consulting world - lots of senior consultants with strong opinions but who have little or no real practical knowledge and experience). Rather it means walking the talk, defining the strategy, and also delivering it with all of its implications. With this book, I, therefore, wanted to share to the community an approach that I created, evolved through the years, and have seen working. It’s not just theory, but a mix of theory with practice. It’s not just ideas, but ideas that I have put into practice. This book is about sharing my real-life experiences and approach in delivering API and microservices strategies. Therefore, I think (or hope) that I have accomplished my goals with this book. I felt that there is great stuff out there focused on specific things of the “end to end” but not the actual “end to end,” which is what I wanted to cover in this book. I didn’t want to be too high level or too detailed. I wanted to give something to multiple audiences, as it requires multiple audiences (technical and non-technical) working together in order to successfully deliver API management. Ultimately, the readers will be the judge, but I think I have accomplished my goals with this book. Find Enterprise API Management on the Packt store. Read the first chapter for free on Packt's subscription platform.

ASP.NET Core, the cross-platform and open-source framework is developed by Microsoft for building modern, cloud-based, and internet-connected applications. Designed to enable runtime components, APIs, compilers, and languages to evolve quickly, it runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows on the .NET Core or .NET Framework. To know more about the development cycle of ASP.NET Core and to gain knowledge of its future design directions, we interviewed Kenneth Y. Fukizi, the author of the book ‘Learn ASP.NET Core 3.0, Second edition’, published by Packt Publishing. He has more than 14 years of professional experience and is working as a software engineering contractor/consultant for client organizations based in South Africa, Australia, U.S.A, and Canada. Kenneth believes that the current performance of ASP.NET Core is a lot more superior than its predecessors and its competitor frameworks. He prefers to use ASP.Net Core to build enterprise web applications due to the flexibility that comes with it. He is also excited that .Net 5 will have more interoperability with other programming languages. When asked about his thoughts on Microsoft supporting the open source platform Pulumi, Kenneth says it will definitely help developers in building modern cloud applications. If you are an ASP.NET Core user, you should definitely read part 1 of our interview with ‘Kenneth Fukizi on the new Blazor framework, gRPC support, and other exciting features in ASP.NET Core 3.0’. In this interview, he shares his impressions on all the new exciting features in the ASP.NET Core 3.0 release and explains why all ASP.Net Core users should be looking forward to the high performance and scalability that comes with gRPC in this new release.   Here is the full interview with Kenneth on ASP.Net Core. On why ASP.NET Core is the best option for web application development What makes .NET Core, one of the best general-purpose development platforms? How does ASP.NET Core enhance the performance of web applications? What do you think are the key benefits of Asp.net Core for enterprise web application development? With .Net Core as a platform, you can develop Web applications, Desktop Applications, Cloud-native applications, mobile applications, gaming applications, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, and you probably can’t ask for more from a development platform. ASP.Net Core has gone a long way in making sure that web application performance is enhanced compared to its predecessors or indeed some of its competitor frameworks, for example, by making full use of asynchronous programming models, in which ASP.Net Core has pretty much eliminated the need to have computer processing unit (cycles) that need to be waiting for database queries, web service calls, and IO Operations, and thereby wasting precious resources.  ASP.Net Core was designed from the ground up, unifying both the MVC and WebAPI frameworks. It has removed the dependency on IIS, removed several other excess baggage, including a preload of third party libraries, and as a result, it is much more lightweight and fast, gaining performance along the way. We can say a lot of things on performance including its improved capability with output caching, and other features, but the truth of the matter is the fact that it is getting more performant by the day. There is actually a tool you can use to track its performance metrics through TechEmpower benchmarks publicly available through the web. ASP.Net Core is my choice to build enterprise web applications on, mainly because of its flexibility that comes from it being cross-platform. It starts all the way from the tooling available to be able to develop ASP.Net Core applications using Visual Studio, or Visual Studio Code on either Windows or Mac operating systems, even on Linux.  Within an enterprise, you will have people with different roles working on an enterprise application, and the wide tooling available just makes it convenient to cater to a diverse group of project members.  ASP.Net Core has such a vibrant community that it is always allowed to give their input. The fact that it is open source actually paves way for faster improvements and applicability across industries. Apart from the development environment, when ASP.Net Core applications are ready to be deployed into production, you can do so internally in your organization, or just about any other worthwhile cloud hosting service provider including Azure and AWS. (Read chapter 3 of my book for more details on creating a continuous integration pipeline with Azure DevOps). It’s easy from ASP.Net Core to interact with other applications developed with other external tech stacks, and typically an enterprise application will need to talk to several other applications and I’m personally excited with the fact that a future version of the .Net Core runtime that ASP.Net Core runs on, that will be called .Net 5, is slated to have more interoperability with other languages like Java, Objective C, and Swift. There are many more advantages of using ASP.Net Core that comes to mind, and we can take the whole day discussing them, but to cut a long story short, ASP.Net Core will not disappoint you, and it’s moving fast in terms of improvements on where it is lacking. Recently, Microsoft announced that .NET Core will support the open source platform Pulumi for building modern cloud applications. This aims to help developers to declare cloud infrastructure including all of Azure such as Kubernetes and CosmosDB using any  .NET languages like C#, VB.NET, and F#. To what extent and how do you think Pulumi with .NET will help developers?  There are those that are not so familiar or not so comfortable navigating the cloud infrastructure, or just can’t be bothered to learn something new, and instead of getting out of their comfort zone that is within the code base, they can declare everything through code, for example, resource groups and everything else that makes up the cloud infrastructure. Pulumi just makes everything a bit easier, abstracts away everything and replaces the need to use different tools to create our cloud infrastructure. For example, to come up with JSON, YAML files or coming up with a cloud Domain Specific Language (DSL). Instead of all that we can just declare it using the language that we are already known as developers. It will definitely be handy.  On ASP.NET Core’s longevity and future design directions   At the NDC conference held recently, Ryan Nowak, a Microsoft developer and architect on ASP.NET Core shared the details of many future projects like BedRock, Houdini and SMALL FAST.NET Server. The common goal of these projects is to simplify cross-platform compatibility among different environments. How do you think these projects will help in shaping the future design directions of .NET 5 and ensure the longevity of ASP.NET Core?  .Net 5 is already in the process of being put together, with the full knowledge of what is happening around project Bedrock, project Houdini and SMALL FAST.NET server. What I can personally see from project Bedrock is the fact that starting at the lowest layer there is going to be more prominence of .Net Sockets in dealing with Network I/O at the expense of Libuv borrowed from NodeJS for its cross-platform capabilities. Obviously .Net Sockets will learn a thing or two from how Libuv has been operating and implement the lessons learned so that it works seamlessly with .Net technologies, and .Net 5 will stand to benefit a lot from the improvements.  I personally see .Net 5 being influenced to cater for more protocols like MQTT, AMQP, HTTP3, and QUIC, and I wouldn’t be surprised to even see a bit more interoperability with other programming languages on .Net 5. ASP.Net Core is there to stay as it is designed to work exclusively on the .Net Core runtime, which is transitioning into .Net 5 soon. I can see a lot of improvements on ASP.Net Core 3.0 especially from the point of view of taking a bit more responsibility off the MVC framework onto ASP.Net Core as a platform. This will allow reuse of functionality across different frameworks like SignalR, gRPC services, Blazor, Controllers, and Pages. This is already happening as is evident in the use of endpoint routing, which is catering for all of what I call the big 5 frameworks on project Houdini, mentioned above. Taking away responsibility from MVC to a lower layer actually makes it more lightweight and developer-friendly, and does not actually kill MVC as you can see it is pretty much still alive, and all this restructuring, in general, makes it more flexible to deal with change in the future, that is characteristic of different platforms, and actually makes it more ready in becoming truly cross-platform. About the Book  Get your hands on the book ‘Learn ASP.NET Core 3.0, Second edition’ by Packt Publishing to become highly efficient in developing and maintaining powerful web applications. It will also guide you on how to deploy and monitor your applications using Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Docker. This book will take you through realistically practical ASP.Net Core MVC application helping to give you a feel of how they would work in a real-life scenario. About the Author Kenneth Y. Fukizi is a solutions architect, consultant, software developer and engineer with more than 14 years of professional experience. He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer®, Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer®, Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate®, Microsoft Certified Professional®, among other professional and technical certifications.  Kenneth also lectures and mentors computer science degree students in programming. He has spent most of his professional life working as a software engineering contractor/consultant on various projects for client organizations based in South Africa, Australia, U.S.A, and Canada. .NET Core 3.0 is now available with C# 8, F# 4.7, ASP.NET Core 3.0 and general availability of EF Core 3.0 and EF 6.3 Inspecting APIs in ASP.NET Core [Tutorial] How to call an Azure function from an ASP.NET Core MVC application

The open-source framework ASP.NET Core is one of the most popular web frameworks, developed by Microsoft and its community. The modular framework runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core. One of the most captivating features of this framework is its performance. It is not only faster than other web frameworks but is also perfectly suited for Docker containers. In November, Microsoft released the new version of ASP.NET Core with many exciting features. To understand the advances in ASP.NET Core, more closely, we interviewed Kenneth Y. Fukizi, the author of the book ‘Learn ASP.NET Core 3.0, Second edition’.  Along with ASP.NET Core, Kenneth has also shared his thoughts on the latest version of .NET Core, and the now available Entity Framework Core 3.0 and Entity Framework 6.3. He says that he is personally most excited about the new Blazor framework as it allows him to avoid JavaScript. He also opines that Blazor will give developers a chance to specialize in Microsoft technologies. Kenneth also adds that ASP.Net Core users should be looking forward to the high performance and scalability that comes with gRPC in this new release. Kenneth’s take on the features in ASP.NET Core 3.0 In your book, ‘Learning ASP.NET Core 3.0, Second edition’, you say that ‘Model View Controller’ and ‘Entity Framework Core 3’ are the most widely used frameworks in ASP.NET Core. Can you elaborate on this? How do these frameworks enhance web application performance? Pretty much every worthwhile application out there will need to have some interface for user interaction and persist some form of data.  The Model View Controller is almost a default choice for may web application developers, mainly for its tried and tested versatility and its ability to separate concerns, allowing front-end developers to work on the views while back end developers are busy with their part. This allows for fast application development.  When persisting some data, Entity Framework core 3.0 is often the choice for most application developers on ASP.Net Core, because it is a safer option from a horde of other OR/M engines, since it is developed and maintained by Microsoft itself. Even though some time back it was found wanting in some areas compared to versatile OR/Ms like Nhibernate, Entity Framework Core has addressed its gaps quickly and effectively continues to grow in areas it was behind on. Its seamless integration with the rest of the framework makes it an easy choice for many application developers. ASP.Net Core MVC supports asynchronous calls, thereby releasing unnecessarily held resources and in turn increasing application performance. Since everything is logically separated into groups, in other words, high cohesion and low coupling, it increases the application performance on the whole.  If we talk about the advantages it gives to the application developer, there are many, and most of these allow for a developer to have code that does not repeat itself unnecessarily, code that has low coupling, allowing for everything to be tested individually. In general, it allows for an application to have efficient code more easily and in turn, makes the application more performant. (Read chapter 4 and 5 of my book for understanding all the basic concepts of ASP.NET Core 3.0). ASP.NET Core 3.0 has introduced a new framework called Blazor for building interactive client-side web UI with .NET. What are your thoughts on it? This is definitely a game-changer. I’m personally excited that I have an option to use Blazor instead of JavaScript. It gives a chance for a developer to specialize in Microsoft technologies and be truly full-stack, all within the MS tech stack.  For a typical back end C# developer, when they get familiar with C# syntax, type safety, and the environment in general, it becomes easier to just work with one language across the stack, whether it is backend, or frontend. Client-side Blazor with its Ahead Of Time (AOT) Compilation directly to WebAssembly will make client applications super fast, and it’s something to definitely look out for. (Chapter 6 of my book gives a detailed explanation on Blazor). The latest release of ASP.NET Core also supports gRPC and ships with templates and tools for building gRPC services. What are the advantages and disadvantages that gRPC will offer to ASP.NET Core 3 users? Also, what are your thoughts on the gRPC built-in security features? ASP.Net Core users should be looking forward to the high performance and scalability that comes with gRPC. With gRPCs, a contract-first approach to API development is possible, documentation for projects will become easier, making it easier for different teams on the same project to be able to communicate better, with consistent API models as well. Reusability will be enhanced and encouraged by the gRPC templates. For applications using Microservices, it will be advantageous in terms of security and performance to use gRPC mainly for communication. Since gRPC uses protocol buffers, as opposed to REST services, they need to be exposed to users in JSON or XML via HTTP.  The HTTP/2 protocol that gRPC uses is more efficient than its counterpart HTTP 1.1. With gRPC templates, we are able to have messages that flow in a bi-directional way, increasing efficiency, and in case of an event, we can do cancellations of sent requests. There are indeed some disadvantages to using gRPC templates including the fact that it now becomes a duty to maintain specification files, which are an integral part of the template. If you have different teams you will have to agree first on specifications before you even start to implement anything, and that can make things slow in terms of getting the application development done. It is great to see that gRPC has visibly built-in considerations for TLS/ SSL and that it makes sure that all its communications are first authenticated and encrypted. This goes a long way in not only preventing but acts as a deterrent to intended attacks on application services. Have you had a chance to explore .NET Core 3.0, and the now available Entity Framework Core 3.0 and Entity Framework 6.3? What are you most excited about this new release? Yes, I have managed to explore .Net Core 3.0, and admittedly with great pleasure to do so. Some of the most exciting features I have seen the introduction of support for Cosmos DB and C# 8, and that in itself makes a whole lot of development easier for global applications. LINQ has always been quite handy to me and am sure many developers, but there have been scenarios where some queries have not been as efficient I’d want them, and to hear and see that it has been re-architected in many ways to produce more efficient queries, it is absolutely exciting, and I would love to uncover more of its query capabilities aimed to be improved upon in the future.  Nullable reference types introduced for both C#8 and Entity Framework Core 3.0, will make my life simpler as a developer. I’m also excited that Entity Framework 6.3 is the first version of Entity Framework 6 that will be able to run on .Net Core, and this will make it simpler for migrating older applications that were using Entity Framework 6, onto the .Net Core platform. (Chapter 9 of the book gives details about accessing data using Entity Framework Core 3). We also asked Kenneth about his preferred way of improving the speed and rendering performance of any web application. Bundling which combines multiple files into a single file reduces the size of the JavaScript or CSS file by removing white space and commented code without altering any functionality. On the other hand, minification can perform multiple varieties of different code optimizations to scripts and CSS, thus resulting in smaller payloads.  When combined together, they both can improve the load time performance of an application by reducing the number of requests to the server and reducing the size of the requested assets.  My personal way of doing things, when I need to use some functionality from a package, is first to look internally within the development framework. Only when an implementation of that functionality cannot be found, or when it is evident of its deficiencies with regards to the task at hand, do I go outside of the primary provider Microsoft. Therefore, it is only natural that I prefer to use the out of the box solution provided by both the MVC and Razor pages that makes use of bundleconfig.json I have at times gone for the sophistication that is in Grunt, and in Webpack, but there being relatively a bit more complex naturally makes the inbuilt functionality as the first option, as long as it doesn’t horribly fail. About the Book  ‘Learn ASP.NET Core 3.0, Second edition’ will help you become highly efficient in developing and maintaining powerful web applications. It will also guide you to deploy and monitor the applications using Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Docker. About the Author Kenneth Y. Fukizi is a solutions architect, consultant, software developer and engineer with more than 14 years of professional experience. He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer®, Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer®, Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate®, Microsoft Certified Professional®, among other professional and technical certifications.  Kenneth also lectures and mentors computer science degree students in programming. He has spent most of his professional life working as a software engineering contractor/consultant on various projects for client organizations based in South Africa, Australia, U.S.A, and Canada. .NET Core 3.0 is now available with C# 8, F# 4.7, ASP.NET Core 3.0 and general availability of EF Core 3.0 and EF 6.3 Inspecting APIs in ASP.NET Core [Tutorial] An introduction to TypeScript types for ASP.NET core [Tutorial]

Quickbooks, the accounting software package developed and marketed by Intuit is targeted towards small and medium-sized businesses. It offers on-premises accounting applications and cloud-based versions that can undertake remote access capabilities like remote payroll assistance and outsourcing, electronic payment functions, online banking, and reconciliation, mapping features, and more. To know more about Quickbooks’ latest features and its learning curve for beginners, we did a quick interview with Crystalynn Shelton, a certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and author of the book ‘Mastering QuickBooks 2020’. With more than 10 years of experience in Quickbooks, Shelton says Quickbooks is not only user-friendly but also cost-effective. Further, when asked about her views on QuickBooks online, Shelton points out that its live unlimited technical support is one of its main features  On Quickbooks, its benefits and use cases What are some of the advantages of Quickbooks that sets it apart from its competitors?  QuickBooks has a number of advantages that set them apart from its competitors. First, it is affordable for most small businesses. Whether you purchase an Online subscription (starting at $20/month) or a desktop product (starting at a one-time fee of $199), there is something for every budget. Another benefit of using QuickBooks is the program is very user-friendly. Most small business owners purchase the software and are able to set it up without having an IT person on staff.  In addition, there are a number of training videos, an extensive help menu within the program not to mention live tech support if you need it. Because QuickBooks is the most widely used accounting software program used by small businesses, most accountants and CPAs are familiar with the program. Some of these folks are certified ProAdvisors (like myself). They can offer consulting, training, and even bookkeeping services to small business owners who use QuickBooks. Can you elaborate on how small businesses can take benefit from Quickbooks? Also, how does Quickbooks simplifies tasks for them?  While there are numerous reasons why small businesses decide to use QuickBooks, there are five that tend to be the most common reasons: small businesses who can’t afford to hire a bookkeeper, small businesses who have outgrown the use of Excel spreadsheets and need a more sophisticated way to track income and expenses, small businesses who need financial statements in order to apply for a line of credit or business loan, small businesses whose tax professional will no longer accept a shoebox of receipts to file taxes. QuickBooks simplifies bookkeeping by allowing you to track all aspects of the business in one place: accounts payable, accounts receivable, income, and expenses. It uses simple language such as “people who owe you” (aka accounts receivable) or “what you owe to others” (aka accounts payable) to help business owners without prior bookkeeping knowledge comprehend the program. QuickBooks allows you to accept credit card payments from customers so you can get paid faster and easily reconcile payments to open invoices. Not to mention you can reduce (if not eliminate) manual data entry by connecting all of your business bank and credit card accounts to QBO.  Can you elaborate on how your book ‘Mastering QuickBooks 2020’ will prepare bookkeepers and accounting students in learning the ropes of QuickBooks? Also, how does the learning curve look like for users who have no bookkeeping knowledge and no experience with QuickBooks? This book was written with the assumption that the reader has no experience or knowledge of bookkeeping. We use simple language to explain how QuickBooks works and we have also provided screenshots to support the concepts being taught.  Chapter 1 includes a section that covers bookkeeping basics which will help non-accountants gain a better understanding of the terminology used in the field of accounting as well as QuickBooks. This information will help aspiring accountants build on their existing bookkeeping knowledge.  In addition, we have included the behind the scenes debits and credits for certain transactions to help accounting students prepare for the CPA exam or other academic tests. Shelton’s views on QuickBooks Online and Desktop What are your thoughts on QuickBooks Online and Quickbooks Desktop? What are the benefits of cloud accounting over Desktop? Do factors such as the size of an organization, or its maturity matter in choosing between the online and the desktop version? There are several benefits of using cloud accounting software over the desktop. Cloud accounting software allows you to manage your business from any device with an internet connection; whereas desktop limits you to a desktop computer. With cloud accounting software like QuickBooks Online, you can give anyone access to your QuickBooks data without them having to travel to your office. Cloud accounting software includes automatic real-time updates of your data. Unlike desktop software, you don’t have to worry about backing up your data with Online; its automatically done for you. Finally, QuickBooks Online includes unlimited live technical support. This is an invaluable feature for small business owners who are managing their own books and need the ability to get help when they need it. The size of an organization, structure, and length of time in business can definitely impact whether a business should choose QuickBooks Online or desktop. As a QuickBooks ProAdvisor, one of the first things I do is conduct an assessment to determine what the needs of my clients are. This involves documenting the details of their current processes (i.e. invoicing customers, paying bills, managing inventory, etc.)  Once I have this information, I am able to determine whether QuickBooks desktop is right or if QuickBooks Online is the best fit. If both products are ideal, I provide my clients with the downsides (if any) of going with one product over the other. This gives my clients all of the information they need to make an informed decision. On how Quickbook secures online data How does Quickbooks help in securing payments? How does QuickBooks keep online data safe? To secure payments, intuit transmits, support, protect, and access all cardholder information in compliance with the Payment Card Industry’s (PCI) data security standards. Additional security precautions Intuit has implemented are as follows: All data between Intuit servers and their customers is encrypted with at least 128-bit TLS, and all copies of daily backup data are encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption. Data is kept secure with multiple servers housed in Tier-3 data centers that have strict access controls and real-time video monitoring of the data center. All servers are hardened Linux installations, which are monitored in real-time and kept up-to-date with security patches. Can you suggest some best practices (at least five) that will help Quickbook aspirants in saving time and becoming a Quickbook pro? There are several ways you can save time and become proficient in QuickBooks Online. First, I recommend that you use QuickBooks on a daily basis. The more hands-on experience with QuickBooks, the more proficient you will become. Second, take the time to properly set up your QuickBooks account before you start entering transactions.  In Chapter 2, we provide you with a detailed checklist which includes what information you need to setup QuickBooks. By taking the time to set up customers, vendors, the chart of accounts, and your products and services upfront, the less time you will spend having to do it later on when you are trying to enter data. Third, all aspiring bookkeepers and accountants should get certified in QuickBooks Online. Certification is offered through Intuit and it is free.  As a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor, you get access to product discounts, marketing materials to promote bookkeeping services to prospective clients, a certification badge and designation you can put on business cards, websites and email signature lines.  Fourth, utilize keyboard shortcuts. They will save you time as you navigate the program. We have included a list of QBO keyboard shortcuts in the appendix of this book. Finally, connect as many bank and credit card accounts as you can to QBO. By doing so, you will reduce the amount of manual data entry required which will help you to keep your books up-to-date. If you want to learn how to build the perfect budget, simplify tax return preparation, manage inventory, track job costs, generate income statements and financial reports, check out Crystalynn’s book ‘Mastering QuickBooks 2020’. This book will work for a small business owner, bookkeeper, or accounting student who wants to learn how to make the most of QuickBooks Online. About the author Crystalynn Shelton is a licensed Certified Public Accountant, a certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and has been certified in QuickBooks for more than 10 years. Crystalynn is currently a staff writer for Fit Small Business and an Adjunct Instructor at UCLA Extension where she teaches accounting, bookkeeping and QuickBooks to hundreds of small business owners and accounting students each year. Her previous experience includes working at Intuit (QuickBooks) as a Sr. Learning Specialist.  MongoDB’s CTO Eliot Horowitz on what’s new in MongoDB 4.2, Ops Manager, Atlas, and more New QGIS 3D capabilities and future plans presented by Martin Dobias, a core QGIS developer Greg Walters on PyTorch and real-world implementations and future potential of GANs Elastic marks its entry in security analytics market with Elastic SIEM and Endgame acquisition “The challenge in Deep Learning is to sustain the current pace of innovation”, explains Ivan Vasilev, machine learning engineer

Cloud-native applications are an assembly of independent services used to build new applications, optimize existing ones, and connect them in such a way that the applications can skillfully deliver the desired result. More specifically, they are employed to build scalable and fault-tolerant applications in public, private, or hybrid clouds.  Launched in March this year, Quarkus, a new Kubernetes-native framework launched its first stable version, Quarkus 1.0 last month. Quarkus allows Java developers to combine the power of containers, microservices, and cloud-native to build reliable applications. To get a more clear understanding of Cloud-Native Applications with Java and Quarkus, we interviewed Francesco Marchioni, a Red Hat Certified JBoss Administrator (RHCJA) and Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (SCEA) working at Red Hat. Francesco is the author of the book ‘Hands-On Cloud-Native Applications with Java and Quarkus’.  Francesco on Quarkus 1.0 and how Quarkus is bringing Java into the modern microservices and serverless modes of developing Quarkus is coming up with its first stable version Quarkus 1.0 at the end of this month. It is expected to have features like a new reactive core based on Vert.x, a non-blocking security layer, and a new Quarkus ecosystem called ‘universe’. What are you most excited about in Quarkus 1.0? What are your favorite features in Quarkus? One of my favorite features of Quarkus is the reactive core ecosystem which supports both reactive and imperative programming models, letting Quarkus handle the execution model switch for you. This is one of the biggest gains you will enjoy when moving from a monolithic core, which is inherently based on synchronous executions, to a reactive environment that follows events and not just a loop of instructions. I also consider of immense value that the foundation of Quarkus API is a well-known set of APIs that I was already skilled with, therefore I could ramp up and write a book about it in less than one year! How does the Quarkus Java framework compare with Spring? How do you think the Spring API compatibility in Quarkus 1.0 will help developers? Both Quarkus and Spring boot offer a powerful stack of technologies and tools to build Java applications. In general terms, Quarkus inherits its core features from the Java EE, with CDI and JAX-RS being the most evident example. On the other hand, Spring boot follows an alternative modular architecture based on the Spring core. In terms of Microservices, they also differ as Quarkus leverages the Microprofile API while Spring Boot relies on Spring Boot Actuator and Netflix Hystrix. Besides the different stacks, Quarkus has some unique features available out of the box such as Build time class initialization, Kubernetes resources generation and GraalVM native images support. Although there are no official benchmarks, in the typical case of a REST Service built with Quarkus, you can observe an RSS memory reduction to half and a 5x increase in boot speed. In terms of compatibility, it's worth mentioning that, while users are encouraged to use CDI annotations for your applications, Quarkus provides a compatibility layer for Spring dependency injection (e.g. @Autowired) in the form of the spring-di extension. Quarkus is tailored for GraalVM and crafted by best-of-breed Java libraries and standards. How do you think Quarkus brings Java into the modern microservices and serverless modes of developing? Also, why do you think Java continues to be a top programming language for back-end enterprise developers? Although native code execution, in combination with GraalVM, Quarkus is an amazing opportunity for Java. I mean I wouldn't say Quarkus is just native centric as it immediately buys to Java developers an RSS memory reduction to about half, an increase in boot speed, top Garbage Collector performance, plus a set of libraries that are tailored for the JDK. This makes Java a first-class citizen in the microservices ecosystem and I bet it will continue to be one of the top programming languages still for many years. On how his book will benefit Java developers and architects In your book “Hands-On Cloud-Native Applications with Java and Quarkus” you have demonstrated advanced application development techniques such as Reactive Programming, Message Streaming, Advanced configuration hacks. Apart from these, what are the other techniques that can be used for managing advanced application development in Quarkus? Also, apart from the use cases in your book, what other areas/domains can you use Quarkus? In terms of configuration, a whole chapter of the book explores the advanced configuration options which are derived from the MicroProfile config API and the Applications’ profile management, which is a convenient way to shift the configuration options from one environment to another- think for example how easy can be with Quarkus to switch from a Production DB to a Development or Test Database. Besides the use cases discussed in the book, I’d say Quarkus is rather polyvalent, based on the number of extensions that are already available. For example, you can easily extend the example provided in the last chapter, which is about Streaming Data, with advanced transformation patterns and routes provided by the camel extension, thus leveraging the most common integration scenarios. What does your book aim to share with readers? Who will benefit the most from your book? How will your book help Java developers and architects in understanding the microservice architecture? This book is a log of my journey through the Quarkus Land which started exactly one year ago, at its very first internal preview by our engineers. Therefore my first aim is to ignite the same passion to the readers, whatever is their "maturity level" in the IT. I believe developers and architects from the Java Enterprise trenches will enjoy the fastest path to learning Quarkus as many extensions are pretty much the same they have been using for years. Nevertheless, I believe any young developer with a passion for learning can quickly get on board and become proficient with Quarkus by the end of this book. One advantage of younger developers over seasoned ones, like me, is that it will be easier for them to start thinking in terms of services instead of building up monolithic giant applications like we used to do for years. Although microservices patterns are not the main focus of this book, a lot of work has been done to demonstrate how to connect services and not just how to build them up. On how Red Hat uses Quarkus in its products and service Red Hat is already using Quarkus in their products and services. How is it helping Red Hat in increasing the efficiency of your Cloud-Native applications? To be precise, Quarkus is not yet a Red Hat supported Product, but it has already reached an important milestone with the release Quarkus 1.0 final, so it will definitely be included in the list of our supported products, according to our internal productization road-map. That being said, Red Hat is working in increasing the efficiency of your Cloud-Native applications in several ways through a combination of practices, technologies, processes that can be summarized in the following steps that will eventually lead to cloud-native application success: Evolve a DevOps culture and practices to embrace new technology through tighter collaboration. Speed up existing, monolithic applications with simple migration processes that will eventually lead to microservices or mini services. Use ready-to-use developer tools such as application services, to speed up the development of business logic. Openshift tools (web and CLI) is an example of it. Choose the right tool for the right application by using a container-based application platform that supports a large mix of frameworks, languages, and architectures. Provide self-service, on-demand infrastructure for developers using containers and container orchestration technology to simplify access to the underlying infrastructure, give control and visibility to IT operations, and provide application lifecycle management across environments. Automate IT to accelerate application delivery using clear service requirements definition, self-service catalogs that empower users (such as the Container catalog) and metering, monitoring of runtime processes. Implement continuous delivery and advanced deployment techniques to accelerate the delivery of your cloud-native applications. Evolve your applications into a modular architecture by choosing a design that fits your specific needs, such as microservices, a monolith-first approach, or mini services. On Quarkus’ cloud-native security and its competitors Cloud-native applications provide customers with a better time-to-market strategy and also allows them to build, more robust, resilient, scalable, and cost-effective applications. However, they also come with a big risk of potential security breaches. What is your take on cloud-native security for cloud-native applications? Also, what are your thoughts on future-proofing cloud applications? Traditionally, IT security was focused on hardening and the datacenter perimeter—but today, with Cloud applications, that perimeter is fading out. Public and hybrid clouds are shifting responsibility for security and regulatory compliance across the vendors. The adoption of containers at scale requires the adoption of new methods of analyzing, securing, and updating the delivery of applications. As a result, static security policies don’t scale well for containers in the enterprise but need to move to a new concept of security called "continuous container security". This includes some key aspects such as securing the container pipeline and the application, securing the container deployment environment(s) and infrastructure, integrating with enterprise security tools and meeting or enhancing existing security policies. About future-proofing of cloud applications, I believe proper planning and diligence can ensure that a company’s cloud investments withstand future change or become future-proof. It needs to be understood that new generation applications (such as apps for social, gaming and generally mobile apps) have different requirements and generate different workloads. This new generation of applications requires a substantial amount of dynamic scaling and elasticity that would be quite expensive or impossible to achieve with traditional architectures based on old data centers and bare-metal machines. Micronaut and Helidon, the other two frameworks that support GraalVM native images and target cloud-native microservices are often compared to Quarkus. In what aspects are they similar? And in what ways is Quarkus better than and/or different from the other two?   Although it is challenging to compare a set of cutting edge frameworks as some factors might vary in a middle/long term perspective, in general terms I'd say that Quarkus provides the highest level of flexibility especially if you want to combine reactive programming model with the imperative programming model. Also, Quarkus builds on the top of well-known APIs such as CDI, JAX-RS, and Microprofile API, and uses the standard "javax" namespaces to access them. Hence, the transition from the former Enterprise application is quite smooth compared with competitive products. Micronaut too has some interesting features such as support for multiple programming languages (Java, Kotlin, and Groovy the latter being exclusive of Micronaut) and a powerful Command Line Interface (CLI) to generate projects. (A CLI is not yet available in Quarkus, although there are plans to include it in the upcoming versions of it). On the other hand, Helidon is the less polyglot alternative (supports only Java right now) yet, it features a clean and simple approach to Container by providing a self-contained Dockerfile that can be built by simply calling docker build, not requiring anything locally (except the Docker tool of course). Also, the fact that Helidon plays well with GraalVM should be acknowledged as they are both official Oracle products. So, although for new projects the decision is often a matter of personal preferences and individual skills in your team, I'd say that Quarkus leverages existing Java Enterprise experience for faster results. If you want to become an expert in building Cloud-Native applications with Java and Quarkus, learn the end-to-end development guide presented in the book “Hands-On Cloud-Native Applications with Java and Quarkus”. This book will also help you in understanding a wider range of distributed application architectures to use a full-stack framework and give you a headsup on the new features in Quarkus 1.0. About the author Francesco Marchioni is a Red Hat Certified JBoss Administrator (RHCJA) and Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (SCEA) working at Red Hat in Rome, Italy. He started learning Java in 1997, and since then he has followed all the newest application program interfaces released by Sun. In 2000, he joined the JBoss community, when the application server was running the 2.X release. He has spent years as a software consultant, where he has enabled many successful software migrations from vendor platforms to open source products, such as JBoss AS, fulfilling the tight budget requirements necessitated by the current economy. Francesco also manages a blog on 'WildFly Application Server, Openshift, JBoss Projects and Enterprise Applications' focused on Java and JBoss technologies. You can reach him on Twitter and LinkedIn. RedHat’s Quarkus announces plans for Quarkus 1.0, releases its rc1  How Quarkus brings Java into the modern world of enterprise tech Introducing ‘Quarkus’, a Kubernetes native Java framework for GraalVM & OpenJDK HotSpot OpenJDK Project Valhalla’s head shares how they plan to enhance the Java language and JVM with value types, and more Snyk’s JavaScript frameworks security report 2019 shares the state of security for React, Angular, and other frontend projects

Introduced in 2014, GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) was first presented by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal. It comprises of two deep networks, the generator which generates data instances, and the discriminator which evaluates the data for authenticity. GANs works not only as a form of generative model for unsupervised learning, but also has proved useful for semi-supervised learning, fully supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. In this article, we are in conversation with Greg Walters, one of the authors of the book 'Hands-On Generative Adversarial Networks with PyTorch 1.x', where we discuss some of the real-world applications of GANs. According to Greg, facial recognition and age progression will one of the areas where GANs will shine in the future. He believes that with time GANs will soon be visible in more real-world applications, as with GANs the possibilities are unlimited. On why PyTorch for building GANs Why choose PyTorch for GANs? Is PyTorch better than other popular frameworks like Tensorflow? Both PyTorch and Tensorflow are good products. Tensorflow is based on code from Google and PyTorch is based on code from Facebook. I think that PyTorch is more pythonic and (in my opinion) is easier to learn. Tensorflow is two years older than PyTorch, which gives it a bit of an edge, and does have a few advantages over PyTorch like visualization and deploying trained models to the web. However, one of the biggest advantages that PyTorch has is the ability to handle distributed training. It’s much easier when using PyTorch. I’m sure that both groups are looking at trying to lessen the gaps that exist and that we will see big changes in both. Refer to Chapter 4 of my book to learn how to use PyTorch to train a GAN model. Have you had a chance to explore the recently released PyTorch 1.3 version? What are your thoughts on the experimental feature - named tensors? How do you think it will help developers in getting a more readable and maintainable code? What are your thoughts on other features like PyTorch Mobile and 8-bit model quantization for mobile-optimized AI? The book was originally written to introduce PyTorch 1.0 but quickly evolved to work with PyTorch 1.3.x. Things are moving very quickly for PyTorch, so it presents an evermoving target.  Named tensors are very exciting to me. I haven’t had a chance to spend a tremendous amount of time on them yet, but I plan to continue working with them and explore them deeply. I believe that they will help make some of the concepts of manipulating tensors much easier for beginners to understand and read and understand the code created by others. This will help create more novel and useful GANs for the future. The same can be said for PyTorch Mobile. Expanding capabilities to more (and less expensive) processor types like ARM creates more opportunities for programmers and companies that don’t have the high-end capabilities. Consider the possibilities of running a heavy-duty AI on a $35 Raspberry Pi. The possibilities are endless. With PyTorch Mobile, both Android and iOS devices can benefit from the new advances in image recognition and other AI programs. The 8-bit model quantization allows tensor operations to be done using integers rather than floating-point values, allowing models to be more compact. I can’t begin to speculate on what this will bring us in the way of applications in the future. You can read Chapter 2 of my book to know more about the new features in PyTorch 1.3. On challenges and real-world applications of GANs GANs have found some very interesting implementations in the past year like a deepfake that can animate your face with just your voice, a neural GAN to fight fake news, a CycleGAN to visualize the effects of climate change, and more. Most of the GAN implementations are built for experimentation or research purposes. Do you think GANs can soon translate to solve real-world problems? What do you think are the current challenge that restrict GANs from being implemented in real-world scenarios? Yes. I do believe that we will see GANs starting to move to more real-world applications. Remember that in the grand scheme of things, GANs are still fairly new. 2014 wasn’t that long ago. We will see things start to pop in 2020 and move forward from there. As to the current challenges, I think that it’s simply a matter of getting the word out. Many people who are conversant with Machine Learning still haven’t heard of GANs, mainly due to the fact that they are so busy with what they know and are comfortable with, so they haven’t had the time and/or energy to explore GANs yet. That will change. Of course, things change on almost a daily basis, so who can guess where we will be in another two years? Some of the existing and future applications that GANs can help implement include new photo-realistic scenes for video games, movies, and television, taking sketches from designers and making realistic photographs in both the fashion industry and architecture, taking a partial facial image and making a rotated view for better facial recognition, age progression and regression and so much more. Pretty much anything with a pattern, be it image or text can be manipulated using GANs. There are a variety of GANs available out there. How should one approach them in terms of problem solving? What are the other possible ways to group GANs? That’s a very hard question to answer. You are correct, there are a large number of GANs in “the wild” and some work better for some things than others. That was one of the big challenges of writing the book.  Add to that, new GANs are coming out all the time that continue to get better and better and extend the possibility matrix. The best suggestion that I could make here is to use the resources of the Internet and read, read and read. Try one or two to see what works best for your application. Also, create your own category list that you create based on your research. Continue to refine the categories as you go. Then share your findings so others can benefit from what you’ve learned. New GANs implementations and future potential In your book, 'Hands-On Generative Adversarial Networks with PyTorch 1.x', you have demonstrated how GANs can be used in image restoration problems, such as super-resolution image reconstruction and image inpainting. How do SRGAN help in improving the resolution of images and performing image inpainting? What other deep learning models can be used to address image restoration problems? What are other keep image related problems where GANs are useful and relevant? Well, that is sort of like asking “how long is a piece of string”. Picture a painting in a museum that has been damaged from fire or over time. Right now, we have to rely on very highly trained experts who spend hundreds of hours to bring the painting back to its original glory. However, it’s still an approximation of what the expert THINKS the original was to be. With things like SRGAN, we can see old photos “restored” to what they were originally. We already can see colorized versions of some black and white classic films and television shows. The possibilities are endless. Image restoration is not limited to GANs, but at the moment seems to be one of the most widely used methods. Fairly new methods like ARGAN (Artifact Reduction GAN) and FD-GAN (Face De-Morphing GAN or Feature Distilling GAN) are showing a lot of promise. By the time I’m finished with this interview, there could be three or more others that will surpass these.  ARGAN is similar and can work with SRGAN to aid in image reconstruction. FD-GAN can be used to work with human position images, creating different poses from a totally different pose. This has any number of possibilities from simple fashion shots too, again, photo-realistic images for games, movies and television shows. Find more about image restoration from Chapter 7 of my book. GANs are labeled as innovative due to its ability to generate fake data that looks real. The latest developments in GANs allows it to generate high-dimensional fake data or image video that can easily go undetected. What is your take on the ethical issues surrounding GANs? Don’t you think developers should target creating GANs that will be good for humanity rather than developing scary AI capabilities? Good question. However, the same question has been asked about almost every advance in technology since rainbows were in black and white. Take, for example, the discussion in Chapter 6 where we use CycleGAN to create van Gogh like images. As I was running the code we present, I was constantly amazed by how well the Generator kept coming up with better fakes that looked more and more like they were done by the Master. Yes, there is always the potential for using the technology for “wrong” purposes. That has always been the case. We already have AI that can create images that can fool talent scouts and fake news stories. J. Hector Fezandie said back in 1894, "with great power comes great responsibility" and was repeated by Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben thanks to Stan Lee. It was very true then and is still just as true. How do you think GANs will be contributing to AI innovations in the future? Are you expecting/excited to see an implementation of GANs in a particular area/domain in the coming years? 5 years ago, GANs were pretty much unknown and were only in the very early stages of reality.  At that point, no one knew the multitude of directions that GANs would head towards. I can’t begin to imagine where GANs will take us in the next two years, much let the far future. I can’t imagine any area that wouldn’t benefit from the use of GANs. One of the subjects we wanted to cover was facial recognition and age progression, but we couldn’t get permission to use the dataset. It’s a shame, but that will be one of the areas that GANs will shine in for the future. Things like biomedical research could be one area that might really be helped by GANs. I hate to keep using this phrase, but the possibilities are unlimited. If you want to learn how to build, train, and optimize next-generation GAN models and use them to solve a variety of real-world problems, read Greg’s book ‘Hands-On Generative Adversarial Networks with PyTorch 1.x’. This book highlights all the key improvements in GANs over generative models and will help guide you to make the GANs with the help of hands-on examples. What are generative adversarial networks (GANs) and how do they work? [Video] Generative Adversarial Networks: Generate images using Keras GAN [Tutorial] What you need to know about Generative Adversarial Networks ICLR 2019 Highlights: Algorithmic fairness, AI for social good, climate change, protein structures, GAN magic, adversarial ML and much more Interpretation of Functional APIs in Deep Neural Networks by Rowel Atienza

A software architecture refers to the fundamental structure of a software system that serves as a blueprint to manage the system complexity. It is also used to maintain a coordination mechanism among the various components of the software. One of the popular combinations of tools that are used for building sustainable software architecture solutions are the general-purpose C# programming language and the open-source .NET Core computer software framework. This year, C# and .Net Core brought in some exciting features to help developers design a high-performance software system. To understand how C# and .Net Core aid in building software architecture systems, we interviewed Gabriel Baptista, one of the authors of the book ‘Hands-On Software Architecture with C# 8 and .NET Core 3’. Gabriel is a Software Architect, a specialist in Azure PaaS solutions and also the co-founder of a startup for developing mobile applications. According to Gabriel, the new features in C# 8 like async streams and nullable reference types are good to detect errors quickly and maintain the high quality of code programming respectively. When asked about the comparison between Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio for C# development, Gabriel insists that the productivity offered by Visual Studio is the best choice for C#. He is also of the opinion that Microsoft developed C# has a better roadmap than Java. On the applications of a microservice architecture and how .Net and C# enable code reusability In your book, ‘Hands-On Software Architecture with C# 8 and .NET Core 3’, you have demonstrated how microservice architecture can be applied to an enterprise application like microservice logging. Apart from the use cases in your book, what other applications can microservice architecture be used for? Microservices are being applied in a bunch of scenarios, due to the facilities they bring, like enabling different programming languages in different teams for the same enterprise App. Transversal aspects of software, like the Logging that we have as an example of the book, and Security, are quite simple to think about as microservices. However, the complexity increases when you think about functional requirements, like Customer Management, Logistics, or Inventory, this is a bit confusing. There is where Domain-Driven Design will help you with, since DDD is about the construction of a unique domain model, keeping the views as separate models. This is helpful because you will be able to create a domain characterized by the language spoken by the experts, that is what we call the Bounded Context Principle of DDD. Now, think about each of these domains as a microservice. This will surely facilitate your understanding of how to organize them. You can read Chapter 5 of my book to know how to apply a microservice architecture to your enterprise application. You also say in your book that code reusability is one of the most important features in Software Architecture. How does the .NET standard help in managing and maintaining a reusable library? Also, how does C# enable code reuse? Code reuse is for sure what differs the velocity of development between two great companies. The one that reuses more certainly is faster and more profit. .NET enables you to reuse code from many platforms by defining the .NET standard as the core of a class library. With .NET Standard, you can write a class library that runs in Windows, Linux and Android, for a Desktop App, a Mobile App, and Azure Function and a Web App! This is amazing! Besides, .NET itself has many opportunities for code reuse by giving us a dozen of already done classes due to its framework. To finish is good to remember that C# is an Object-Oriented Programming Language, which enables the principles of Abstraction, Polymorphism, Inheritance, and, Encapsulation, that are really useful for code reuse. Check out Chapter 11 of my book to learn how to create reusable libraries. One of the main tasks for a developer is to choose a suitable architecture that will provide the desired functionality to the software. With the many varieties of software architectural patterns available today, how should a user approach them and choose the best one? What aspects should they look at when comparing software architectures? When you need to choose a suitable architecture for a system, my first recommendation is to start the process with a specific goal – keep it simple. The more complex your architecture, the worse the path you are going to. If you stop and think a bit about the most complex solutions we have nowadays, you will find something in common and interesting in all of them. They are made by many small simpler parts. Thanks to the cloud and the bunch of APIs we have nowadays, you can design really simple solutions focused on your business. Gabriel’s views on the latest advancements in C# 8 In its latest release, C# 8 brings features like async streams, nullable reference types, and new indices/ranges. What were you most excited about in this release and why? How do you think C# 8 will help in improving the overall quality of the delivered software? I am almost sure that NullReferenceException is one of the main reasons why C# Apps crash. Then, when it comes to improving quality, for sure nullable reference types will help a lot since null reference exceptions are not detected in compilation time. With this feature, you will be able to get the errors at this point and the theory of software development says that the earlier you get a bug solved, the better and cheaper. Next, I believe that async programming is amazing to make your apps work more seamlessly since it mimics the behavior of classical synchronous code while keeping most of the performance advantages of general parallel programming. For this reason, async streams will be a good opportunity delivered, since we will be able to get the advantages of async programming in foreach loops, enabling a push-programming in this kind of loop. For instance, we will be able to program an asynchronous data pull that will not block the client. Entity Framework Core 3.0 and Entity Framework 6.3 are now generally available with C# 8. How do you think EF Core 3.0 and EF 6.3 can take advantage of the new features in C# 8? Well, the two features that I mostly enjoyed are the ones that EF Core and EF 6.3 have implemented too: nullable reference types and async streams. Reducing bugs for not having null type reference is always good! The possibilities given by async streams together with EF Core are great. So, with them, EF will be even more powerful. Another feature that it is good to know is that now they support the connection to Cosmos DB.  Read Chapter 6 of my book to understand the interactions of data in C# using Entity Framework Core. In your opinion, is C# a better programming language than Java? Which language do you think has a better future, C# or Java? As a software architect, you need to understand that the programming languages evolve. In other words, the programming language itself is not the most important part, whereas the fundamentals are the essence of the process of building systems. Considering this approach, I cannot say that one language is better than the other. The best programming language is the one that will give you the best result in the fastest time with the team you are working with. What I could say about C# and Java is that both were, are, and are going to be incredibly important to the evolution of humanity. Right now, I consider that the C# has a better roadmap than Java. The reason why I believe it is that Microsoft is always ahead of other companies when it comes to productivity. On why Visual Studio is the best option for C# development Why do most C# developers prefer Visual Studio? Can you elaborate on how VSCode differs from the other source code editors? How difficult is it to develop C# applications using Visual Studio Code? To me, Visual Studio is the most powerful development environment we have for programming nowadays. You can write code on so many platforms and for so many different solutions with incredible debugging environment, connectivity to the cloud and facility to manage your code whatever Version Control System you decide to use. With Visual Studio you have the opportunity to start any project related to C# and even more, it gives you the possibility to debug your different projects in many ways. For instance, debugging Threads or Windows Services is not easy, but with VS we find different ways to do so, which at the end causes an acceleration of development. The best answer that I always give to someone who asks me why Visual Studio is productivity. I really don’t think C# developers prefer Visual Studio Code. VS Code is really useful if you are running a different OS than Windows or if your writing code in other programming languages like NodeJS. However, when it comes to C# development, for sure Visual Studio is more powerful. Gabriel on learning curves and best practices for beginners You are a Software Architect with experience working in diverse projects for retail and industry. How much does the role differ between industries and sectors? How does the learning curve look like for beginners to become an expert in building enterprise applications with the .NET Stack? The role itself does not change due to the different sectors. Time-to-market, performance, security, reliability, and quality are requirements that will be asked for any customer you have, no matter the size they are, no matter the sector they work for. The learning curve starts by understanding the principles of .NET and C#, that means, the Object-Oriented Principles. Any developer needs to understand the process of creating software and software engineering will give them this background. To finish, I am totally sure that a person who wants to be in the development world of the 21st century needs to understand Cloud Computing, especially PaaS – Platform as a Service. And in this world, Azure is the best one for giving the results the sectors need. Can you suggest some best practices that every developer should follow for a safe and maintainable code in C#? Yes, developers should be vigilant about the following: Never leave a catch statement blank. Do not write big methods. Methods need to have a single responsibility. Every time you are not sure if there is an already done class for the code you are working to, first try to find it. Chances are that you already have this done. No matter the number of developers you have in your team, even if your team is only you, do write code the simpler you can. Threads are great if you really know what you’re doing. So before implementing them, study the topic a lot. If you want to develop highly scalable enterprise-ready apps that meet customers’ business needs, read Gabriel’s book ‘Hands-On Software Architecture with C# 8 and .NET Core 3’. This software architecture book will give you a hands-on approach to learn various architectural methods that will help you deliver high-quality products. About the Author Gabriel Baptista is a Software Architect in the R&D department of Toledo do Brasil. He leads a team who delivers weighting solutions software to retail and industry customers. Gabriel is a specialist in Azure PaaS solutions. He is also a Professor at Salvador Arena Foundation Educational Center in their Computing Engineering College Course, where he is responsible for the disciplines of Programming Language and Software Architecture. You can find him on Linkedin. You can now use WebAssembly from .NET with Wasmtime! Exploring .Net Core 3.0 components with Mark J. Price, a Microsoft specialist Microsoft announces .NET Jupyter Notebooks .NET Core 3.0 is now available with C# 8, F# 4.7, ASP.NET Core 3.0 and general availability of EF Core 3.0 and EF 6.3 Introducing ‘ixy’, a simple user-space network driver written in high-level languages like Rust, Go, and C#, among others

Security is an important aspect for organizations and securing the devices that contain confidential data--personal or professional, is absolutely essential. Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security, an intelligent mobility management and security platform, offers a suite of services that helps in securing employee devices; thus, protecting and securing the organization. Our recent chat with Nate Chamberlain, a Business Analyst at DH Pace, Kansas, helped us understand more about the Microsoft 365 Enterprise Mobility + Security suite. Nate is also a Microsoft MVP in Office apps and services. His recently published book Microsoft 365 Mobility and Security – Exam Guide MS-101, helps users to plan, deploy, and manage Microsoft Office 365 services and gain the skills required to pass the MS-101 exam. In this interview, Nate also shares his favorite services from the suite, the importance of using Shadow IT in a controlled manner while ensuring security Cloud Apps, how the M365 Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert certification has helped him give a career boost, and much more. On the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility and Security suite Microsoft Enterprise Mobility and Security suite help professionals secure devices used within the enterprise and also helps in identifying breaches before they cause any major damage. The suite provides two offerings, Enterprise Mobility + Security E3 and E5. Talking about the popular Microsoft solutions in the suite, Nate said, “Azure Active Directory, Intune, and the Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance Center are big players in the overall EM+S suite. Taking the time to get to know each of them has the potential to significantly enhance your organization’s security.” Nate said one of his favorite features from the Microsoft 365 Enterprise Mobility + Security suite is, “the ability to be extremely granular in building conditional access policies. That, paired with the ability to utilize AI and zero-day security information in policies and practices, continually impresses me. It’ll be interesting to see where Endpoint Manager takes us.” On the topic of what features he would like to add in the suite in the future, he said, “the biggest improvement I would hope for currently is licensing simplification, and making sure admins are able to secure their organization and its users without breaking the budget.” On the new Microsoft Endpoint Manager and using ‘Shadow IT’ for Cloud App security Last month, Microsoft announced its new Endpoint Manager, a convergence of two of its popular tools, System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) and Microsoft Intune. Both ConfigMgr and Intune offer integrated cloud-powered management tools, and unique co-management options to provision, deploy, manage, and secure endpoints and applications across an organization. The Endpoint Manager offers end-to-end management solutions without the need for worrying too much about the complexity involved during migration, thus helping customers in a smooth cloud transition. According to Nate, “Microsoft Endpoint Manager takes a lot of the licensing guesswork out of building a secure solution for your organization.”  In addition to Intune and ConfigMgr, Microsoft Endpoint Manager includes the Device Management Admin Center (DMAC) and Desktop Analytics. Nate further adds that Microsoft Endpoint Manager includes nearly everything discussed in his exam prep book, Microsoft 365 Mobility and Security – Exam Guide MS-101--including Intune and ConfigMgr. Shadow IT and cloud app security In his book, Nate has written about controlling the use of ‘Shadow IT’ for Cloud App security. Shadow IT, also known as Stealth IT, is built and used without the knowledge of the IT or security group within the organization. We asked Nate for what processes is Shadow IT built-in the organizations. We also asked why Shadow IT is a threat and how organizations can minimize its usage. Clearing the clouds on Shadow IT, Nate explains, “Shadow IT is often a consequence of being too restrictive without providing alternative means of productivity and collaboration solutions. And sometimes, even if you provide alternatives or company-licensed tools, it’s the lack of ongoing education that failed to spread awareness and competency that led users to more familiar, comfortable means of accomplishing goals. When users need to accomplish something, they’ll find a way with or without the organization’s assistance.” He further adds, “It’s IT administrators’ responsibility to make sure productivity and collaboration solutions are provisioned and configured for secure, appropriate usage, and that education is provided to get users on board.” A few key takeaways from Nate’s book, an MS-101 exam guide, and his recommendations for further Microsoft 365 certifications According to Microsoft’s official website, the “Exam MS-101: Microsoft 365 Mobility and Security”, the skills measured in the exam includes, implementing modern device services, implementing Microsoft 365 security and threat management, and managing Microsoft 365 governance and compliance. These skills would help companies sieve through all the candidates among others who don’t know much about the suite. Talking about the key takeaways from his book, Nate says, “I hope readers find the content to be challenging, but accessible. The best takeaway I could hope for is that readers retain information that not only helps them in the exam but in their jobs. The whole point of taking exams and obtaining certifications is to demonstrate proficiency, knowledge, and skill. Ultimately, it’s practising those skills in the real world that matter - not the score on the exam. But the exam is absolutely a first step toward building confidence and career growth.” We also asked him what other certifications he would recommend next, to which Nate said, “Once readers pass MS-101, they should aim for passing MS-100 if they haven’t already. After that, they’re just one prerequisite certification away from becoming a Microsoft 365 Enterprise Administrator Expert.” On Nate’s journey as a Microsoft SharePoint Systems Engineer and beyond Nate worked as a SharePoint Systems Engineer at LMH Health, Kansas, and is currently a Business Analyst at DH Pace in Olathe, KS. He is also an M365 Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert. He shared why certifications are important for career growth. He says, “My certification certainly looks great on my resume to potential employers and I like to think it’s part of what made me competitive in pursuing my current role. Certifications are verified proof of skill and competency. It alleviates some risk a company would otherwise assume in hiring someone for highly technical work like we find in our industry.” He also shared about his journey and how learning SharePoint transformed his role. “My journey has been one of self-teaching, fueled by inspiring tech solutions coming out of Microsoft. I was once tasked to learn what I can about SharePoint, at the University of Kansas, and it turned into a SharePoint-specific role there. That opened doors for me which brought me to LMH Health and ultimately DH Pace.” He continues, “Somewhere along the way, I started sharing what I was learning via my blog, NateChamberlain.com, and by speaking at conferences around the country regularly. I also started a SharePoint user group, LSPUG, in Lawrence, KS. For these reasons and perhaps others, I was awarded the Microsoft MVP for Office Apps and Services.” Certifications are indeed verified proof of skill and competency. So go ahead and check out Nate’s book, Microsoft 365 Mobility and Security – Exam Guide MS-101, to get up to speed with planning, deploying, and managing Microsoft Office 365 services and gain the skills you need to pass the MS-101 exam. With this book, you’ll explore everything from mobile device management and compliance, through to data governance and auditing. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned to work with Microsoft 365 services and covered the concepts and techniques you need to know to pass the MS-101 exam. Written in a succinct way, you’ll explore chapter-wise self-assessment questions, exam tips and mock exams with answers. Microsoft technology evangelist Matthew Weston on how Microsoft PowerApps is democratizing app development [Interview] How PyTorch is bridging the gap between research and production at Facebook: PyTorch team at F8 conference SOLIDWORKS specialist Tayseer Almattar takes us into the world of 3D modeling using SOLIDWORKS 2020 [Interview]

Serverless computing is a growing trend that lets software developers focus more on code than the back-end processes. While there are a lot of serverless computing platforms, in this article we will focus on Microsoft’s Azure serverless computing platform, which provides its users with  fully managed, end-to-end Azure serverless solutions to boost developer productivity, optimise resources and expedite the development processes. To understand the nitty-gritties of Azure Serverless, we got in touch with Lorenzo Barbieri, a cloud-native application specialist who works at Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner Technical Organization and, Massimo Bonanni, an Azure Technical trainer at Microsoft. In their recently published book, Mastering Azure Serverless Computing, they explain how developers with Microsoft’s Azure Serverless platform can build scalable systems and also deploy serverless applications with Azure Functions. Sharing their thoughts about Azure serverless and its security the authors said that although security is one of the most important topics while designing a complex solution, security depends both on the cloud infrastructure as well as the code. They further shared how Powershell in Azure Functions allows you to combine the best language for automation with one of the best services. Sharing their experiences working at Microsoft, they also talked about how their recently published book will help developers master various processes in Azure serverless. On how Microsoft ensures complete security within the Serverless Computing process Every architecture should guarantee a secure environment for the user. Also, the security of any Serverless functions depends on the cloud provider's infrastructure, which may or may not be secure. What are the certain security checks that Microsoft ensures for complete security within the Serverless Computing processes? Lorenzo: Security of Serverless functions depends both on the cloud provider’s infrastructure and the application code. For example,  SQL Injections depends on how the application code is written; you should check all the inputs (depending on the trigger) to avoid these types of attacks. Many other types of attacks depend on application code and third party dependencies. On its side, Microsoft is responsible for managing and patching servers and application frameworks, and keeps them updated when security updates are released. .” Massimo: Security is one of the most important topics when you design a complex solution, and in particular, when it will run on a cloud provider. You must think about it from the beginning of your design. Azure provides a series of ot-of-the-box services to ensure the security of the solutions that you deploy on it. For example, Azure DDoS Protection Service is an Azure service you have for free on every solution you deploy, and especially if you are developing Azure Functions triggered by HTTP trigger. On the other hand, you must guarantee that your code is safe and that your third party dependencies are secure too. If one of the actors of your solution chain is unsafe, all your solution becomes potentially not secure. On general availability of PowerShell in Azure Functions V2 The Microsoft team recently announced the general availability of PowerShell in Azure Functions V2. Azure Functions is known for its speed and PowerShell for its automation; how will this feature enhance serverless computing on Azure Cloud? What benefits can users or organizations expect with this feature? What does this mean for Azure developers? Lorenzo: GA of PowerShell in Azure Functions is a great news for cloud administrators and developers that can use them connected for example with Azure Monitor alerts, to create custom auto-scale rules or to implement mitigation for problems that could arise. Massimo: Serverless architecture gives its best for event-driven solutions. Automation in Azure is, generally, driven by events generated by the platform. For example, you have to do something when someone creates a storage, or you have to execute a task every hour. Using Powershell in an azure function allows you to combine the best language for automation with one of the best services to react to events. On why developers should prefer Azure Serverless computing Can you tell us some of the pre-requisites expected before reading your book? How does your book prepare its readers to master Azure Serverless Computing and to be industry ready? Lorenzo: A working knowledge of .NET or other programming languages is expected, together with basic understanding of Cloud architectures. For Chapter 7 [Serverless and Containers], basic knowledge of containers and Kubernetes is expected. The book covers all the advanced features of Azure Serverless Computing, not only Azure Functions. After reading the book, one can decide which technology to use. Massimo: The book supposes that you have a basic knowledge of programming language (e.g. C# or Node.js) and a basic knowledge of Cloud topics and architecture. Moreover, for some chapters (e.g., Chapter 7), you need some other knowledge like containers and Kubernetes. In your book, ‘Mastering Azure Serverless Computing’, you have said that Containers and Orchestrators are the main competitors of Serverless in terms of Architecture. What makes Serverless architecture better than the other two? How does one decide while migrating from a monolith, which architecture to adopt? What are some real-world success stories of serverless migration? Lorenzo: In Chapter 7 we’ve seen that it’s possible to create Containers and run them inside Azure Functions, and that’s also possible to run Azure Functions inside Kubernetes, AKS or OpenShift together with KEDA. The two worlds are not mutually exclusive, but most of the times you choose one route or another. Which one you should use? Serverless is more productive, it’s really easy to scale and it’s better suited for event-driven architectures. With Orchestrators like Kubernetes you can customize every aspect of your infrastructure, you can create complex service connections and dependencies, and you can deploy them everywhere. Stylelabs, a leading Belgium/US-based marketing software company, successfully integrated Azure Functions into its cloud architecture to benefit from serverless in addition to traditional solutions like VMs and App Services. Massimo: I think that there isn't a better tool to implement something. As I always say during my technical sessions (even if I seem repetitive and boring), when you choose an architecture (e.g. microservices or serverless), you choose it because that architecture meets the requirements of the solution you are designing. If you choose an architecture because it is popular or "fashionable", you are making a serious mistake that you will pay when your solution will be deployed. In particular, Microservice architecture (that you can implement using Container and Orchestrator) and Serverless architecture meet different requirements (e.g. Serverless is the best solution when you need an event-driven architecture while one of the most important characteristics of the microservices architecture is high availability and orchestration), so I think they can be used together. A few highlights of Microsoft Azure Functions What are the top 5 highlights of Azure Functions that make it a go-to serverless platform for newbies and professionals? Massimo: For the Azure Functions, the five best features are, in my opinion: Support for a number of programming languages and also has the possibility to support any other programming languages, which are not currently available; Extensibility of triggers and bindings to support your custom data sources; Availability of a number of tools available to implement Azure Functions (Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Azure Functions Tools, etc., etc.); Use of the open-source approach for runtime and tools; Capability to easily use Azure Functions with other Azure services such as Event Grid or Azure Key Vault. Lorenzo and Massimo on their personal experiences working with Microsoft Azure services Lorenzo, you have a specialization in Cloud Native Applications and Application Modernization. Can you share your experience and the challenges you faced with the Cloud-native learning curve? You have also been using Azure Functions since the first previews. How has it grown from the first preview? In the beginning it was difficult. Azure includes many services and it’s growing even faster. In the beginning, I simply tried to understand the big picture of the services and their relationship. Then I started going deeper in the services that I needed to use. I’m thankful to many highly skilled colleagues, who started this journey before me. I can say that two years of working with Azure and the experience you gain is the minimum time to master the parts that you need. Speaking of Azure Functions, the first preview was interesting, but limited. Azure Functions v2 and the upcoming v3 are great platforms, both in terms of features and in terms of scalability, and configuration. Massimo, you are an Azure Technical Trainer at Microsoft, can you share with us your journey with Microsoft. What were the projects you enjoyed being involved in? Where do you see microservice and serverless architecture in the next five years? During my career, I have always worked with Microsoft technologies and have always wanted to be a Microsoft employee. For several years I was a Microsoft MVP, and, finally, three years ago, I was hired. Initially, I worked for the business unit that provides consulting to customers and partners for implementing solutions (not only Cloud oriented). In almost three years of consulting, I worked on various projects for different customers and partners with different Azure technologies, specially Microservice architecture, and during the last year, serverless. I think that these two architectures will be the most important in the next years specially for enterprise solutions. When you are a consultant, you are involved in a lot of projects, and every project has its peculiarity and its problems to solve, and it isn't simple to remember all of them. The most important thing that I learned during these years, is that those who design solutions for the Cloud must be like a Chef: you can use different ingredients (the various services offered by the Cloud) but must mix them in the right way to get the right recipe. Since three months, I am an Azure Technical Trainer, and I help our customers to better understand Azure services and use the right one in their solutions. About the Authors Lorenzo Barbieri Lorenzo Barbieri works for Microsoft, in the One Commercial Partner Technical Organization, helping partners, developers, communities, and customers across Western Europe, supporting software development on Microsoft and OSS technologies. He specializes in cloud-native applications and application modernization on Azure and Office 365, Windows and cross-platform applications, Visual Studio, and DevOps, and likes to talk with people and communities about technology, food, and funny things. He is also a speaker, trainer, and a public speaking coach and has helped many students, developers, and other professionals, as well as many of his colleagues, to improve their stage presence with a view to delivering exceptional presentations. Massimo Bonanni Massimo Bonanni is an Azure technical trainer in Microsoft and his goal is to help customers utilize their Azure skills to achieve more and leverage the power of Azure in their solutions. He specializes in cloud application development and, in particular, in Azure compute technologies. Over the last 3 years, he has worked with important Italian and European customers to implement distributed applications using Service Fabric and microservices architecture. Massimo is also a technical speaker at national and international conferences, a Microsoft Certified Trainer, a former MVP (for 6 years in Visual Studio and Development Technologies and Windows Development), an Intel Software Innovator, and an Intel Black Belt. About the book Mastering Azure Serverless Computing will guide you through using Microsoft's Azure Functions to process data, integrate systems, and build simple APIs and microservices. You will also discover how to apply serverless computing to speed up deployment and reduce downtime. You'll also explore Azure Functions, including its core functionalities and essential tools, along with understanding how to debug and even customize Azure Functions. “Microservices require a high-level vision to shape the direction of the system in the long term,” says Jaime Buelta Glen Singh on why Kali Linux is an arsenal for any cybersecurity professional [Interview] Why become an advanced Salesforce administrator: Enrico Murru, Salesforce MVP, Solution and Technical Architect [Interview]