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It’s well known that there’s a toxic element to tech culture. And although it isn’t new, it has nevertheless surfaced and become more visible thanks to the increasing maturity of the platforms that are today shaping public discourse. As those platforms empower new voices to speak and allow new communities to organize, the very fabric of the culture on which many of them were built - hyper-masculine, competitive, and with scant disregard for the wider implications of their decisions on users - becomes the target of critique. But while everything from sexual harassment cover-ups to content moderation crises signal deep rooted issues inside the tech industry, substantially transforming tech’s cultural problems is a problem that’s more difficult to solve. It’s also one that many leading organizations and individuals seem to be unwilling to properly engage with. This is where April Wensel comes in. She’s made it her mission to help tackle issues of toxicity and ultimately transform tech culture with her organization, Compassionate Coding. What is Compassionate Coding? Compassionate Coding was launched in 2016 as a “response to a lot of the problems I saw in the tech industry with culture,” Wensel tells me when we spoke recently over Skype. “The common thread,” she explains, “was a lack of concern for human beings that are involved in technology or affected by technology.” This is particularly significant for Wensel. While it might be tempting to see the Google Walkout, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the controversy around Rekognition as nothing more than a collection of troubling but ultimately unrelated issues, it’s vital that we understand them together. [caption id="attachment_28750" align="alignright" width="300"] via compassionatecoding.com[/caption] “For things to really change - we can’t approach each issue as one problem,” Wensel says. “They really have the same root problem, which is this lack of compassion.” Compassion is an important and very deliberate word. It wasn’t chosen purely for its alliterative impact. “I chose compassion because I see compassion as a really rational thing; not just an intangible thing.” Compassion is, Wensel continues, “a more active form of empathy. Empathy allows you to feel what others are feeling, compassion allows you to see suffering, and - the important piece - to want to alleviate suffering.” Compassion as an antidote to toxic tech culture To talk about compassion in the tech industry is provocative. She tells me she recalls someone on Reddit describing the idea of compassionate coding as ‘girly '. But she tries to “tune out” online resistance, adopting a measured attitude: “whenever you have new, challenging ideas people get defensive.” Even if people aren’t aggressively opposed to her ideas, initially there was a distinct unwillingness to really engage with the ideas she was putting forward. “I… saw that it wasn’t cool to talk about these things. If you started talking about humans or whatnot, people are like oh, you must be a designer or you must be in product… No, I’m a developer. I just care about the people we’re impacting.” Crucial to this attitude is Wensel’s point that compassionate coding is something that can have real effects at every level. She describes it as “a new way of weighing decisions on a daily basis… it goes from high level things like what are we building? to low level things - what should I name this variable to make it easier for somebody in the future to understand?” Distributing power through diversity The context into which Compassionate Coding has entered the world is complex. High profile scandals need attention and action, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. They are symptomatic of low-lying problems that often pass unnoticed. Diversity is a good example of this. Although it’s often framed in the somewhat prosaic context of equal opportunities, it’s actually a powerful way of breaking apart privilege and the concentration of power that allows harmful products to be released and discrimination to find its way into organizational practices. By bringing people from a diverse range of backgrounds with different experiences into positions of authority and influence, the decisions that are made at all levels are supported by a greater awareness of context. In effect, decision making becomes more rigorous. Similarly, organizations themselves become safer and more welcoming places for employees from minority backgrounds because networks of support can form, making challenging malpractice or even abuse less of a risk professionally. This is something Wensel is well aware of. She takes umbrage with the concept of ‘diversity of thought’ which she sees as a way to mask a lack of genuine diversity. “A lot of companies claim they have diversity of thought…” she says, “that are all white men.” “You can’t really have true diversity of thought if everybody has come from the same background and hasn’t had any of the challenges that people from minority backgrounds might face.” The barriers to diversity are largely structural problems that can be felt far beyond tech. But according to Wensel, there are nevertheless cultural issues unique to the industry that are compounding the problem: “If you say you value diversity but really one of your values is the efficiency or perceived efficiency that comes when everyone thinks the same way then you have to realise that you’re gonna have to make some concessions in terms of creating a bit of discomfort when people are debating issues… because there is going to be some conflict when you create these diverse spaces.” Put another way, in an industry where you’re expected to move quickly and adapt, where you’re constantly looking for efficiency, diversity is always going to be an issue. It brings friction. For Wensel, the role Compassionate Coding can play in supporting diversity and inclusion is one where it helps to shift the industry mindset away from one that is scared of friction, to one where friction is vital if we’re to build better, safer, and more secure software. She points out that diversity isn’t just an initiative, it must be something that is constantly practiced: “Inclusion has to be a daily practice and so you need somebody who is in a position of power who can help establish inclusive practices,” she says. But it also needs to be something organizations need to invest in: “companies need to be paying people to do this because a lot of times the burden falls on underrepresented groups in the company and that’s not right.” Read next: Github Sponsors: Could corporate strategy eat FOSS culture for dinner? The problem with meritocracy If diversity can help unlock a better way of working in the tech industry, there are still other industry shibboleths that need to be slayed. According to Wensel, one of these is meritocracy. It is, she argues, often used as cover by those that are resistant to genuine diversity. “A lot of time in tech people want to talk about a meritocracy… [Recode co-founder] Kara Swisher says tech is more like a mirrortocracy because the people who succeed look like the ones who are already in the industry.” https://youtu.be/ng4sbQHCGLQ But what makes this problem worse is the fact that tech’s meritocracy is haunted by stereotypes and assumptions about what it means to be a developer. She points to a study done by IBM in the sixties that aimed to find out “what makes a good, strong programmer.” “They found among other things that programmers like puzzles, and they don’t like people… So it created a stereotype of what it means to be a good developer, and part of that was not liking people. And the reason that was so important - even though it was back in the sixties - is that IBM was a very influential company in terms of establishing tech culture,” Wensel says. Stack Overflow’s negative impact on tech culture What has further exacerbated this issue is how influential figures have helped to reinforce these stereotypes, effectively buying into the image of a programmer put forward in IBM’s research. In particular, Wensel calls out Stack Overflow and its founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. “If you read through some of their old blogs from the early 2000s,” she says, “you can see a lot of the elements of the toxic culture that I talk about in so much of my work. Things like... hyper-competition… an over focus on aggressive competition… things like zero sum thinking. There’s an elitism - there’s not enough for everybody and some people are better than others.” Wensel suggests the attitudes of Atwood and Spolsky have been instrumental in forming the worst elements of the website “where the focus is not on helping people, but on accumulating points in the game of stack overflow.” Wensel detailed her experiences of Stack Overflow and offered an incisive critique of the website in a post on Medium in 2018. She reveals that although she has used Stack Overflow since its launch in 2008 (the year she graduated from her Computer Science class) “the condescending and blatantly rude responses on the site” have dissuaded her from ever actually creating an account. Although the Compassionate Code founder can see that the site is trying to change things, she believes it can still do a lot more (in her post she adds this response from Stack overflow employee Joe Friend). The problem, however, is that this would be a risk for the company. “They really have to be willing to alienate their audience - the ones who are contributing to the toxic culture.” Ultimately this highlights the problem facing many companies and communities in the tech industry - inclusivity and diversity aren’t things that can simply be integrated into established patterns and beliefs. Those beliefs and values need to change too. Which can, of course be painful. Dismantling the hierarchy of tech skills Again, it’s important to note that Wensel’s criticisms aren’t just on the grounds of civility or accessibility. It’s ultimately bad for the industry as a whole and bad for users. It helps to cultivate an engineering culture where certain skills are overvalued while others are excluded. This has consequences for how we view ourselves in the industry (we're never good enough, and we constantly have to compete), but it also means the sort of work and thought that should go into building and delivering software is viewed as less important. “None of this is productive and none of this is creating value. We need people doing all of these roles, and so which one of these has more prestige shouldn’t be an issue” Wensel argues. “That’s why one of very clear indications that there’s a problem in the culture is the fact that we are obsessed with the need to rank skills... software projects are failing for people reasons. And yet people who are good with people and technology are seen as too soft… they’re put in a box of not being technical.” Wensel argues that we need to stop worrying about who is and who isn’t a developer. “There’s no such thing as a real developer. If you write code you’re a developer... that’s enough… Developers are no better than designers, or product managers, or salespeople… that hierarchy is even more entrenched because it’s often reflected in salaries - so developers get paid disproportionately more than all these other roles.” The myth of scarcity and the tech skills gap What’s more, Wensel believes this hierarchy of programming skills is actually helping to perpetuate the notion of a tech skills gap. She believes the idea that there is a scarcity of “tech talent” is a “myth.” “I think there’s tons of talent in tech that’s being overlooked for reasons of unconscious bias, stereotypes…” she explains. “Once we start to bring in these people to the table who are out there already - very talented, very skilled - it will start to melt away this whole putting developers on a pedestal… developers don’t belong on a pedestal, they’re just doing a job like anybody else.” Wensel believes we will - and need to - move towards a world where programming skills lose their “prestige”. Having Python or React on your CV, for example, should really be no different to saying you know how to use Excel. “As these skills become seen for what they are, which is just something that anybody can learn if they put in the time, then I think that the prestige around them will be reduced.” How Agile is changing what it means to be a developer We’re moving towards a world where the solipsism of the valorization of technical skill becomes outdated thanks to broader industry trends. With DevOps forcing developers to become accountable for the full lifecycle of their code, and distributed systems engineering requiring a holistic awareness of a complex network of dependencies, it’s clear that more sensitivity about how your code is interacting with and impacting users in the real world is more important in software engineering than it ever has. “Over and over again I see both in formal studies and anecdotally… what’s causing software projects to fail or to be delayed... are people problems. Coordination problems, planning problems resourcing, all of that - not purely technical problems,” says Wensel. That said, Wensel nevertheless views Agile as a trend that’s positive for the industry. “A lot of the ideas behind agile software development are really positive in a lot of ways I see it as the first step in bringing emotional intelligence to the software team because you’re asked to consider the end user…” Read next: DevOps Engineering and Full-Stack Development – 2 Sides of the Same Agile Coin However, she also says that software engineering practices and philosophies like Agile only go so far. “The problem is that they [proponents of Agile] didn’t bring in the ethics there. So you can still create a lot of value very efficiently with agile development without considering the long term impact.” Agile is a good context for Wensel to drive her mission forward - but it can’t improve things on it own. Read next: Honeycomb CEO Charity Majors discusses observability and dealing with “the coming armageddon of complexity” [Interview] Putting Compassionate Coding into practice It’s clear that Compassionate Coding is needed in today’s software industry. Yes, tech culture’s toxicity is damaging and dangerous for everyone, but it’s also not fit for purpose. It’s stopping us from evolving and building the software people actually need. Think of it this way: it’s stopping us from putting users first at a time when the very idea of the individual feels vulnerable, thanks to a whirlwind of reactionary politics and rampant, unsustainable capitalism. However, it’s important that we actually see Compassionate Coding as something that can be practiced, both by individuals and organizations. The 4 levels of compassionate coding Wensel explained compassionate coding as involving 4 key ‘levels’. These levels turn the concept into something practical, that every individual and team can actually go and do themselves. “It’s how you treat yourself with compassion, how you treat your coworkers, your collaborators with compassion, how you treat your direct users of the software you’re creating… and how you treat the community at large who may or may not be people who use your product,” she says. Wensel is not only continuing to deliver training sessions and keynotes for her clients, but is also writing a book which will make her ideas more accessible. I asked her what advice she would offer individuals and businesses that want to follow her lead now. “The biggest thing people can do,” she says, “is to analyze their own thinking… Do a bit of meta-cognition to understand how do I think? Where do I have biases? At an organizational level, businesses should be “prioritizing talking about these issues, making it safe to talk about these issues, hiring people who understand these issues and can improve your company in these ways” she says. The importance of the individual in tackling tech's toxicity But Wensel still believes in the importance of individuals in enacting change. “It’s humans all the way down and all the way up… Leadership in a company and [the issue of] who makes decisions is just... another set of humans, and so I think changing individuals is really powerful.” Her approach is ultimately one that espouses the values of Compassionate Coding. “You can’t control the outcome but you can control the actions you take. So I have a lot of faith in the change that motivated individuals can make.” If everyone in the industry could adopt that attitude we’d surely be some way towards not better professional lives and better experiences and products for users. Follow April on Twitter: @aprilwensel  Other projects that are making the tech industry better April cited a number of organizations that she believes are doing great and important work across the tech industry: Project Include, an organization that wants to accelerate diversity in the industry. Black Girls Code, which aims to improve the number of women of color in the digital sector. Elephant in the Valley, which is tackling gender disparity in Silicon Valley. Kapor Center, removing barriers for underrepresented groups in tech. Learn more about the issues they're helping to solve, and support them if you can.

Machine learning has shown immense promise across domains and industries over the recent years. From helping with the diagnosis of serious ailments to powering autonomous vehicles, machine learning is finding useful applications across a spectrum of industries. However, the actual process of delivering business outcomes using machine learning currently takes too long and is too expensive, forcing some businesses to look for other less burdensome alternatives. MissingLink.ai is a recently-launched platform to fix just this problem. It enables data scientists to spend less time on the grunt work by automating and streamlining the entire machine learning cycle, giving them more time to apply actionable insights gleaned from the data. Key Takeaways Processing and managing the sheer volume of data is one of the key challenges that today’s AI tools face Yosi thinks the idea of companies creating their own machine learning infrastructure doesn’t make a lot of sense. Data professionals should be focusing on more important problems within their organizations by letting the platform take care of the grunt work. MissingLink.ai is an innovative AI platform born out of the need to simplify AI development, by taking away the common, menial data processing tasks from data scientists and allowing them to focus on the bigger data-related issues; through experiment management, data management and resource management. MissingLink is a part of the Samsung NEXT product development team that aims to help businesses automate and accelerate their projects using machine learning We had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Yosi Taguri, the founder and CEO of MissingLink, to know more about the platform and how it enables more effective deep learning. What are the biggest challenges that companies come across when trying to implement a robust Machine Learning/Deep Learning pipeline in their organization? How does it affect their business? The biggest challenge, simply put, is that today’s AI tools can’t keep up with the amount of data being produced. And it’s only going to get more challenging from here! As datasets continue to grow, they will require more and more compute power, which means we risk falling farther behind unless we change the tools we’re using. While everyone is talking about the promise of machine learning, the truth is that today, assessing data is still too time-consuming and too expensive. Engineers are spending all their time managing the sheer volume of data, rather than actually learning from it and being empowered to make changes. Let’s talk about MissingLink.ai, the platform you and your team have launched for accelerating deep learning across businesses. Why the name MissingLink? What was the motivation to launch this platform? The name is actually a funny story, and it ties pretty neatly into why we created the platform. When we were starting out three years ago, deep learning was still a relatively new concept and my team and I were working hard to master the intricacies of it. As engineers, we primarily worked with code, so to be able to solve problems with data was a fascinating new challenge for us. We quickly realized that deep learning is really hard and moves very, very slow. So we set out to solve that problem of how to build really smart machines really fast. By comparison, we thought of it through the lens of software development. Our goal was to accelerate from a glacial pace to building machine learning algorithms faster -- because we felt that there was something missing, a missing link if you will. MissingLink is a part of the growing Samsung NEXT product development team. How does it feel? What role do you think MissingLink will play in Samsung NEXT’s plans and vision going forward? Samsung NEXT’s broader mission is to help startups reach their full potential and achieve their goals. More specifically, Samsung NEXT discovers and backs the engineers, innovators, builders, and entrepreneurs who will help Samsung define the future of software and services. The Samsung NEXT product development team is focused on building software and services that take advantage of and accelerate opportunities related to some of the biggest shifts in technology including automation, supply and demand, and interfaces. This will require hardware and software to seamlessly come together. Over the past few years, nearly all startups are leveraging AI for some component of their business, yet practical progress has been slower than promised. MissingLink is a foundational tool to enable the progress of these big changes, helping entrepreneurs with great use cases for machine learning to accelerate their projects. Could you give us the key features of Missinglink.ai that make it stand out from the other AI platforms available out there? How will it help data scientists and ML engineers build robust, efficient machine learning models? First off, MissingLink.ai is the most comprehensive AI platform out there. It handles the entire deep learning lifecycle and all its elements, including code, data, experiments, and resources. I’d say that our top features include: Experiment Management: See and compare the entire history of experiments. MissingLink.ai auto-documents every aspect Data Management: A unique data store tracks data versions used in every experiment, streams data, caches it locally and only syncs changes Resources Management: Manages your resources with no extra infrastructure costs using your AWS or other cloud credentials. It grows and shrinks your cloud resources as needed. These features, together with our intuitive interface, really put data scientists and engineers in the driver's seat when creating AI models. Now they can have more control and spend less energy repeating experiments, giving them more time to focus on what is important. Your press release on the release of MissingLink states “the actual process of delivering business outcomes currently takes too long and it is too expensive. MissingLink.ai was born out of a desire to fix that.” Could you please elaborate on how MissingLink makes deep learning less expensive and more accessible? Companies are currently spending too much time and devoting too many resources to the menial tasks that are necessary for building machine learning models. The more time data scientists spend on tasks like spinning machines, copying files and DevOps, the more money that a company is wasting. MissingLink changes that through the introduction of something we’re calling DeepOps or deep learning operations, which allows data scientists to focus on data science and let the machine take care of the rest. It’s like DevOps where the role is about how to make the process of software development more efficient and productionalized, but the difference is no one has been filling this role and it’s different enough that its very specific to the task of deep learning. Today, instead of data scientists working on their models and advancing AI, they are spending their time doing this DeepOps work. MissingLink reduces load time and facilitates easy data exploration by eliminating the need to copy files through data-management in a version-aware data store. Most of the businesses are moving their operations on to the cloud these days, with AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. being their preferred cloud solutions. These platforms have sophisticated AI offerings of their own. Do you see AI platforms such as MissingLink.ai as a competition to these vendors, or can the two work collaboratively? I wouldn’t call cloud companies our competitors; we don’t provide the cloud services they do, and they don’t provide the DeepOps service that we do. Yes, we all are trying to simplify AI, but we’re going about it in very different ways. We can actually use a customer’s public cloud provider as the infrastructure to run the MissingLink.ai platform. If customers provide us with their cloud credentials, we can even manage this for them directly. Concepts such as Reinforcement Learning and Deep Learning for Mobile are getting a lot of traction these days, and have moved out of the research phase into the application/implementation phase. Soon, they might start finding extensive business applications as well. Are there plans to incorporate these tools and techniques in the platform in the near future? We support all forms of Deep Learning, including Reinforcement Learning. On the Deep Learning for Mobile side, we think the Edge is going to be a big thing as more and more developers around the world are exposed to Deep Learning. We plan to support it early next year. Currently, data privacy and AI ethics have become a focal point of every company’s AI strategy. We see tech conglomerates increasingly coming under the scanner for ignoring these key aspects in their products and services. This is giving rise to an alternate movement in AI, with privacy and ethics-centric projects like Deon, Vivaldi, and Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid. How does MissingLink approach the topics of privacy, user consent, and AI ethics? Are there processes/tools or principles in place in the MissingLink ecosystem or development teams that balance these concerns? When we started MissingLink we understood that data is the most sensitive part of Deep Learning. It is the new IP. Companies spend 80% of their time attending to data, refining it, tagging it and storing it, and therefore are reluctant to upload it to a 3rd party vendor. We have built MissingLink with that in mind - our solution allows customers to simply point us in the direction of where their data is stored internally, and without moving it or having to access it as a SaaS solution we are able to help them manage it by enabling version management as they do with code. Then we can stream it directly to the machines that need the data for processing and document which data was used for reproducibility. Finally, where do you see machine learning and deep learning heading in the near future? Do you foresee a change in the way data professionals work today? How will platforms like MissingLink.ai change the current trend of working? Right now, companies are creating their own machine learning infrastructure - and that doesn’t make sense. Data professionals can and should be focusing on more important problems within their organizations. Platforms like MissingLink.ai free data scientists from the grunt work it takes to upkeep the infrastructure, so they can focus on bigger picture issues. This is the work that is not only more rewarding for engineers to work on, but also creates the unique value that companies need to compete.  We’re excited to help empower more data professionals to focus on the work that actually matters. It was wonderful talking to you, and this was a very insightful discussion. Thanks a lot for your time, and all the best with MissingLink.ai! Read more Michelangelo PyML: Introducing Uber’s platform for rapid machine learning development Tesseract version 4.0 releases with new LSTM based engine, and an updated build system Baidu releases a new AI translation system, STACL, that can do simultaneous interpretation

This year's Skill Up survey produced some interesting results when it came to the best front end frameworks. Angular remains the most established tool with 40% of web developers reporting that they used it regularly. React is actually a little further behind, with 25% using it regularly. Similarly, Vue.js is growing but used by 20% of respondents. However, opinion was a little different when we asked what front end frameworks should win the battle of the 3 big front end tools. Respondents were split on Angular and React, with both JavaScript tools winning 34% of the vote. Vue wasn't far behind, at just over 30%. With the web development world apparently split over what framework is going to define the future of the field, how are we to pick them apart? Or do we even really need to worry? Read the report in full. Sign up to our weekly newsletter and download the PDF for free. The fact that we have three great front end tools jostling for developer attention is surely a good thing, right? To help us make sense of these trends, we caught up with Angular expert Minko Gechev to find out what he makes of web development in 2018, and what front end developers should be learning. Minko Gechev is the author of Switching Angular. You can find the latest edition here on the Packt Store. Which front end framework should you learn: Angular, React, or Vue? Respondents to the Skill Up survey were evenly split between Angular, React, and Vue in the 'battle of the frameworks'. Which do you think developers should learn, and why? In all of them, there are unique and interesting ideas which are worth exploring. I truly believe that learning all the major frameworks can help developers go to the next level! This doesn’t necessary mean to be proficient in all of them. Having a high-level understanding of how the frameworks work and how to use them is completely enough and will allow you to adapt according to the projects’ requirements. This is similar to learning programming languages from different paradigms – it helps you discover how problems are being solved in different ways. For the past a couple of years, the redux pattern became the de facto standard for state management in the modern front-end development. The good thing about redux is that it’s view agnostic so you can use it with any framework – Vue, React, Angular, etc. Angular has its own redux alternative called ngrx which empowers a declarative approach with RxJS but in general, it follows the same underlying pattern. My recommendation would be to understand how to manage the state of our applications because that’s probably the most complex problem that we’re solving in our day to day development process. Once we have a solid understanding of this, we can easily switch between different frameworks depending on the problems we’re solving, what the rest of the team is using, and the project’s requirements. A very interesting characteristic of learning Angular is that if we get comfortable with the framework we’d be also familiar with TypeScript, RxJS, and techniques such as dependency injection. This may look like an initial overhead but it’s a great long-term investment which pays off really well in large projects. How important is TypeScript to front end development? How important is TypeScript to modern web development? Why? Over the past a couple of years I see a strong increase in the excitement around the language, not only in the Angular world but also in React and Vue. I’m personally using TypeScript for a few projects – a platform that we built with React and an educational application written in Angular. I see a lot of value in using TypeScript. Recently I haven’t started any project with JavaScript – for everything new I’m using TypeScript and I’m trying to migrate, as many of my existing projects as possible.There are a few reasons for this: TypeScript provides great development experience! Especially, combined with VSCode, you can instantly notice when you’ve misspelled a property, method, you’re trying to access a property of a nullable value, etc. It gives you a sense of security that your program is correct to given extent. Of course, TypeScript cannot save us from logical mistakes but if we use its type system wisely, we can get great benefits. You might be curious what benefits? Well, TypeScript can help us reduce the number of bugs in our programs. In the study “To Type or Not to Type: Quantifying Detectable Bugs in JavaScript” the authors shown that the average JavaScript program can benefit with 15% bug reduction if it uses the type system of TypeScript. The study was using TypeScript version 2.0; with the latest features of the language the number of detectable bugs is growing dramatically. Since recently webpack is leveraging TypeScript as well because it helps discover already existing issues in the codebase. Web developers and JavaScript fatigue Do you think we're past web developers experiencing 'JavaScript fatigue'? JavaScript is very dynamic and it moves very quickly. There are a lot of potential issues which could be caused by a variety of reasons. With semantic versioning and powerful type systems (such as the type system of TypeScript), we’re walking in the right direction but we definitely have a long way to go until the ecosystem matures. Web development over the next 12 months: WebAssembly and machine learning What do you think will be the most important thing for developers to learn in the next 12 months? There are a lot of exciting things happening nowadays! Web browsers are getting more and more powerful, exposing hundreds of APIs and opportunities. WebAssembly is moving very quickly and I believe that together with Rust it has a lot of potential in future. On the other hand, Google recently announced TensorFlow.js. This is a library which allows us to use machine learning (ML) in the browser. In the next years, ML is going to take a larger portion of our development process (directly or indirectly) for: Implementing features in our applications Improving development process I’m specifically interested in the second point – improving our development process by using ML. Together with Addy Osmani, Kyle Mathews, and Katie Hempenius, we’ve been working on a toolkit called Guess.js. It aims to provide predictive bundling and pre-fetching based on ML techniques in order to let us develop faster Angular/React/Vue/etc. applications. I’m really excited about what’s coming up in near future! So are we! Thanks for taking the time to speak to us, Minko!

This is Part 2 of the interview with our two Kali Linux experts, Wolf Halton, and Bo Weaver, on using Kali Linux for pentesting. In their section, we talk about the role of pentesting in cybersecurity. Previously, the authors talked about why Kali Linux is the premier platform for testing and maintaining Windows security. They talked about the advantages and disadvantages for using Kali Linux for pentesting. There also talked about their love for the Kali platform. Wolf says, “Kali is a stable platform, based upon a major distribution with which I am very familiar.  There are over 400 security tools in the Kali repos, and it can also draw directly from the Debian Testing repos for even more tools.” Here are a few more questions, we asked them about what they think about pentesting in cybersecurity, in general. Can you tell us about the role of pentesting in cybersecurity? According to you, how has pentesting improved over the years? Bo Weaver: For one thing, pentesting has become an accepted and required practice in network security.  I do remember the day when the attitude was “It can’t happen here. so why should you break into my network?  Nobody else is going to.” Network security, in general, wasn’t even thought by most companies and spending money on network security was seen as a waste. The availability of tools has also grown in leaps and bounds.  Also, the availability of documentation on vulnerabilities and exploits has grown, and the awareness in the industry of the importance of network security has grown. Wolf Halton: The tools have gotten much more powerful and easier to use.  A pentester will still be more effective if they can craft their own exploits, but they can now craft it in an environment of shared libraries such as Metasploit, and there are stable pentesting platforms like Kali Linux Rolling (2018) that reduces the learning curve to being an effective pentester. Pentesting is rising as a profession along with many other computer-security roles.  There are compliance requirements to do penetration tests at least annually or when a network is changed appreciably. What aspects of pentesting do you feel are tricky to get past? What are the main challenges that anyone would face? Bo Weaver: Staying out of jail.  Laws can be tricky. You need to know and fully understand all laws pertaining to network intrusion for both, the State you are working in and the Federal laws.  In pen testing, you are walking right up to the line of right and wrong and hanging your toes over that line a little bit. You can hang your toes over the line but DON’T CROSS IT!  Not only will you go to jail but you will never work in the security field again unless it is in some dark corner of the NSA. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Never work without a WRITTEN waiver that fully contains the “Rules of Engagement” and is signed by the owner or “C” level person of the company being tested.[/box] Don’t decide to test your bank’s website even if your intent is for good.  If you do find a flaw and report it, you will not get a pat on the back but will most likely be charged for hacking.  Especially banks get real upset when people poke at their networks. Yes, some companies offer Bug Bounty programs. These companies have Rules of Engagement posted on their site along with a waiver to take part in the program.  Print this and follow the rules laid out. Wolf Halton: Staying on the right side of the law.  Know the laws that govern your profession, and always know your customer.  Have a hard copy of an agreement that gives you permission to test a network.  Attacking a network without written permission is a felony and might reduce your available career paths. Author Bio Wolf Halton is an Authority on Computer and Internet Security, a best selling author on Computer Security, and the CEO of Atlanta Cloud Technology. He specializes in—business continuity, security engineering, open source consulting, marketing automation, virtualization and data center restructuring, network architecture, and Linux administration. Bo Weaver is an old school ponytailed geek. His first involvement with networks was in 1972 while in the US Navy working on a R&D project called ARPA NET. Bo has been working with and using Linux daily since the 1990's and a promoter of Open Source. (Yes, Bo runs on Linux.) He now works as the senior penetration tester and security researcher for CompliancePoint a Atlanta based security consulting company. Pentest tool in focus: Metasploit Kali Linux 2018.2 released How artificial intelligence can improve pentesting

Python is currently one of the most popular and desired programming languages. Primarily for its simplicity, agility and ability to be used across a variety of software development projects. Although an Object Oriented language, Python supports an array of programming paradigms, including Functional Programming. Functional Programming is a paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of math functions. It’s quite advantageous as it allows for efficient parallel programming and error-free code. We recently interviewed Steven Lott, a true Python professional and best-selling author of a number of Python books. Steven talks a bit about modern Python and how the language adapts well to the Functional paradigm, offering developers a range of solutions to build modern, cloud based applications. He also talks about his most recent book, the second edition of his best seller, Functional Python Programming, and how it will benefit developers looking to enter the world of functional programming with Python. About Steven Steven F. Lott has been programming since the 70s, when computers were large, expensive, and rare. As a contract software developer and architect, he has worked on hundreds of projects, from very small to very large. He's been using Python to solve business problems for over 10 years. Steven is a technomad who lives in various places on the east coast of the U.S. Follow his technology blog to stay updated on the latest trends in tech. You may also connect with him on LinkedIn. Key Takeaways Why learn Python? One of the major reasons developers appreciate Python, is because it’s simple, and has the ability to create succinct and expressive programs. For example, data scientists prefer Python because they can build sophisticated analytical tools using simple functions and produce useful results. Why Functional programming? The functional programming paradigm forms the perfect foundation for developers and architects to build and design modern architectures like Serverless. But Python isn’t inherently functional. Although an object oriented language at heart, Python can create higher order functions and other functional features. Python 3 has made this easier. Steven’s Python 4 wish list: In future versions of Python, Steven hopes to see a wider use of Unicode operator characters like × in addition, * for multiplication, and ÷ in addition to / for division. Also, he expects PyPy and RPython projects to be more widely used; future Pythons versions will benefit from optimizations and restructuring the interpreter. One of the most helpful features of Python 3 are type hints, which allow one to write clear and implicitly documented code while preventing the invoking of methods with wrong data types. Steven’s latest edition of Functional programming with Python, explores type hints in depth along with core language features such as lambdas, generator expressions, functions, and callable objects. Full Interview Python is one of the top programming languages. List down top 3 features of Python that make programmers love it.. It seems like programmers love Python primarily because it allows them to create succinct, expressive programs. Before long, they learn the vast library of code - is another reason for Python's immense popularity. Many people adopt Python because of the low barrier to entry: it really is as simple as download and start working. You've been working with Python for over a decade. How has your experience been with Python as a primary development language? Over my 40-year career, I've used a variety of languages. And I've found Python to be extremely productive. A team can build and deploy microservices-based applications at a tremendous pace. Data scientists can build sophisticated analytical tools using simple functions to produce useful results without the overheads of complex compile and build environments. Back when Python 3 just came into existence, we saw certain resistance to the notion of Python being apt for functional programming. How would you say Python has progressed since then? At its core, Python is an object-oriented language. Consequently some functional features aren't central. One of the essential functional design tools -- creating higher-order functions -- has always been part of Python. The wider use of generator functions in Python 3 has made functional Python programming much more common. Many Python applications are hybrids, mixing object-oriented and functional features of the language. Now that type hints are available, it becomes practical to use mypy to confirm that the code is very likely to work properly. For a developer who's picking up the Functional Programming paradigm for the first time, what do you think are the prerequisites? Functional programming is closely aligned to the core mathematical ideas of functions and functional composition. As a consequence, a minimal background in programming could be advantageous to help leverage essential function definitions and avoid needless state change. For programmers already heavily invested in procedural programming, it may be helpful to set the idea of stateful objects aside. In the above context, how does your book, Functional Python Programming, Second Edition, prepare its readers to be industry ready? What are the key takeaways for readers from your title and how does it help with the learning curve? The examples in the book are related to exploratory data analysis, an important skill in the broader area of data science. They also focus on the standard library, allowing someone to apply the functional design approach to other libraries and tools. I think a focus on the core language features (e.g., lambdas, generator expressions, functions, callable objects) provide a foundation that allows a programmer to apply the core ideas more widely to different kinds of problems and other software packages. What new and updated content is available in this edition, for developers who've purchased your previous book? Almost all of the examples have been rewritten to include type hints. This can be an important quality check helping to ensure the Python code works. When used with doctest examples, it becomes relatively easy to provide reliable, correct code. In a few cases, external packages (i.e., the pymonad library) don't have type hints and the examples reflect this gap. Can you throw some light on Functional Reactive Programming and how FRP with Python is boosting the implementation of modern architectures like Cloud Native and Serverless? The central idea of serverless programming -- a collection of isolated functions -- fits the functional programming paradigm very elegantly. The processing is generally stateless, with stand-alone functions waiting for their inputs. Ideas like "choreography" of web services work with this idea of stateless functions that respond to an input by producing an output. This leads to careful separation of persistence and state change from the other transformational processing. This helps create software with easy-to-understand behavior and implementation code that's very expressive of the algorithm. As Python inches towards a 4.0, what do you think should/can be changed/rectified in the language, for the better? At some point, I expect the PyPy and RPython projects to create some optimizations leading to a fundamental restructuring of the interpreter. Perhaps these changes could remove the need for the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) by exposing a minimal kernel of code that requires exclusive access to internal data structures. Of more general interest, I'd hope to see wider use of Unicode operator characters like × in addition to * for multiplication, and ÷ in addition to / for division. Perhaps ∻ could be adopted for truncated division. This could also lead to use of ℝ instead of float and ℤ instead of int providing a more mathematical look to type hints. It would be nice to expand the use of the Unicode character set to create more readable programs. List down 3 reasons for developers to choose your book as the book of choice for Functional programming in Python. Programmers who want to create succinct and expressive code often find functional design to help them fulfill this. The Functional Python Programming book provides extensive examples that show multiple ways to achieve this goal. In many cases, generator functions and lazy processing can be a large performance improvement. A generator function can use less memory than a large data collection, and this change can be helpful. This book will provide number of examples of lazy processing to avoid creating large, in-memory collections. It can be difficult to get started with type hints. The use case in this book show type hints in somewhat more complex real-world situations. If you enjoyed this interview, head over to check out Steven’s latest edition of Functional Python Programming, He is leveraging Python to implement microservices and ETL pipelines. His other titles with Packt Publishing include Python Essentials, Mastering Object-Oriented Python, Functional Python Programming, and Python for Secret Agents. What is the difference between functional and object oriented programming? Building functional programs with F# Seven wrongs don’t make the one right: Solving a problem with Functional Javascript

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

Vue occupies an interesting position in the triumvirate of frontend JavaScript frameworks. Not hyped to the extent that React is, and not as established as Angular, it’s spent the last couple of years quietly minding its business and building an engaged and enthusiastic community of developers. One of these developers is Marina Mosti: her book Building Forms with Vue.js is just the latest step in her career journey from a backend developer getting frustrated with Java to Vue.js evangelist and educator. She’s a great person to explain the attraction of Vue.js, and to provide an insight into how she first entered the community - luckily, I was able to chat with her. Buy Building Forms with Vue.js on the Packt store. Her background is interesting: “I actually started out as a PHP developer and found myself in a position where I forced myself into learning front end. It’s not until very recently that I started doing front end in terms of it being my main focus” she says. Rather than moving deeper down into the stack, she has gone the other way, gravitating towards the front end. That might not be completely conventional, but it’s also indicative of the evolution of both JavaScript and frontend development in general. Read the first chapter of the book for free on the Packt platform. Rethinking JavaScript Things today, Marina suggests, are quite different. She’s quick to tell me, for example, that “the current state of JavaScript is just so much better than what it used to be,” and recalls a general antipathy towards JavaScript in the early years of her career that she “dragged… around for many years.” “I went to this very small school where they taught us the basics of front end development” she explains. “And for good or for bad the teachers were always very adamant about saying ‘oh don’t bother learning vanilla JavaScript because we have jQuery and vanilla JavaScript is so bad that you’re not gonna use it.’” However, the framework boom changed this. “I got to a point where all these cool frameworks were coming out and you just realise ‘hey I don’t know javascript; I know jquery so how do I make this jump?’” This ‘jump’ wasn’t without challenges. “Just having to go back and learn the basics - that has been the most ‘challenging’ part of going onto front end - because the front end that I knew [at the time] was php side-generated HTML code with maybe a little bit of javascript, maybe some CSS.” Read next: Vue maintainers proposed, listened, and revised the RFC for hooks in Vue API Laravel and Vue.js Marina explains that she first encountered Vue while using Laravel. “We... wanted to take advantage of this built-in connection that Vue had with Laravel. Obviously this didn’t involve any fancy set up, there was no vue CLI, nothing of this good pre-compiling or anything, it was just injecting vue into the html and creating the components there on the fly” However, discovering Vue in this way proved to be revelatory: it actually underlined what makes it, in Marina’s view, a great front end framework. “You don’t really have to commit to the whole framework,” she says; “it just got the job done for what I needed at that moment.” What problems can Vue.js solve? Marina has a pretty clear perspective on the challenges in front end development. “The problems we’re currently facing in front end development... is that people don’t want the old browsing experience where you’re clicking around and having to wait for reloads” she says. “We want to make applications… that are very performant, they have a great user experience, you are not waiting for page refreshes - it flows. What we are looking for is having your applications flow in a way that makes sense, like if you were using a desktop application.” Vue is particularly good for this, Marina explains, because of its “reusable component structure.” To a certain extent, this way of working is just another example of the wider trend across engineering towards breaking things apart. “You are trying to make these small units of code, that do this specific thing… a very common way to describe it is like this lego system where you’re just putting pieces on top of each other and it just starts making sense.” I’ve heard that analogy before in relation to containers - there’s clearly a recurring theme that’s evolving out of core principles of design. If Vue is well-suited to building lightweight but highly performant front ends, another important element is that it makes development relatively easy. Again, Marina contrasts working with Vue today with what JavaScript development looked like in the past. “You used to have... these massive massive amounts of code, and code separation of concerns was just very complicated to manage. You had to [do] a lot of overhead and work... trying to figure out how are we going to structure these files so that it makes sense.” The Vue CLI Tooling was also more complicated; something that the Vue CLI has helped to solve.“You had to deal with - at a very intricate level - how tools like Grunt worked, for example. And now you have like these pre-build tools like the Vue CLI which allow you to not have to really think about things," she says. “You don’t have to think like ‘hey, how is this going to get compiled? How is webpack going to figure things out?’ At least not at an entry level because you have it all neatly packed in this box for you with the Vue CLI.” Comparing Vue.js to React and Angular Although it’s clear that Marina is incredibly passionate and enthusiastic about Vue, she’s also circumspect about ranking JavaScript frameworks against each other. “All 3 frameworks are fantastic. All 3 get the job done. This is like asking someone why is this your favorite flavor of ice cream?!” Vue.js v. React She notes that React and Vue have a lot in common. “They share a lot of similarities - both of them use a virtual DOM… they both have this reactive component structure.” However, the key difference, from Marina’s perspective, is JSX. “If you’re talking about React, you’re talking about JSX, this approach where everything is javascript. You’re writing HTML inside the JavaScript, you’re writing CSS inside the JavaScript.” It’s JSX that puts Marina off React, saying that the way it requires you to work “doesn’t really click. I know how to do it, but just in the way I like to code things I prefer just having the separation where HTML is HTML, and where CSS is CSS.” Want to learn React.js? Search the latest React eBooks and videos. Read next: Ionic React released; Ionic Framework pivots from Angular to a native React version Vue.js v. Angular Angular, meanwhile, is “great for enterprise projects where you need this huge huge framework” says Marina. “But that also comes at a cost of having to know all the framework. All the libraries, everything that Angular brings to the table, you have to know TypeScript - it's just very opinionated at what it does and sometimes the shoe is going to be very big for the project.” So, for Marina, Vue has a degree of flexibility. It’s not as opinionated as Angular, and it doesn’t require you to write using JSX. “It can grow up until the point you need it to… From the smallest component in your application to powering full enterprise solutions.” And related to this, it means Vue is accessible - the learning curve isn’t that steep. “Vue is just very gentle in that you can start using it; you can start building things right away.” “There's a very good pay off in making yourself an expert in it... once you start getting into the core of Vue, and understanding all the little tools that are at your disposal… you can start building upon this knowledge... the framework can grow and adjust to what you’re needing.” Search the latest Angular eBooks and videos. The Vue.js community There are undoubtedly many technical reasons to consider using Vue. However, another aspect that Marina emphasises throughout our conversation is how welcoming and supportive the Vue community is. “The Vue community is one of the biggest selling points of why you should pick Vue and why Vue is so amazing.” The Vue community was, Marina says, integral in getting her to where she is now. “I was, at one point, not very into vue… and I just found a very welcoming community and a very inclusive community... People in the community care about other developers that are getting into Vue. We try our best to make this feel like a very safe, inclusive community to just get people in here and get them developing vue and help them out with the problems they’re having.” Marina deserves credit for playing a part in fostering a welcoming and supportive culture. Not only has she created a wealth of learning materials (such as a great free introductory tutorial series), she also works closely with Vue Vixens, and provides mentoring and support for other women finding their way in the industry. “This focus on education just basically became my goal… Hey, let’s do things to teach people, to get more people involved with vue,” she says. In an industry that’s sometimes defined by hyper-competitiveness, and marred by toxicity, it’s certainly a worthwhile and important goal. It’s something we can all work at. Follow Marina Mosti on Twitter: @MarinaMosti Follow Vue Vixens on Twitter: @VueVixens

Bo Weaver, a Kali Linux expert shares his thoughts on the security landscape in the cloud. He also talks about the skills gap in the current industry and why hiring is a tedious process. He explains the pitfalls in software development and where the tech is heading currently. Bo, along with another Kali Linux expert Wolf Halton were also interviewed on why Kali Linux is the premier platform for testing and maintaining Windows security. They talked about advantages and disadvantages for using Kali Linux for pentesting. We also asked them about what they think about pentesting in cybersecurity, in general. They have also talked about their stance about the role of pentesting in cybersecurity in their interview titled, “Security experts, Wolf Halton and Bo Weaver, discuss pentesting and cybersecurity” First is “The Cloud”.   I laugh and cry at this term.  I have a sticker on my laptop that says “There is no Cloud….  Only other people’s computers.”  Your data is sitting on someone else’s system along with other people’s data.  These other people also have access to this system. Sure security controls are in place but the security of “physical access” has been bypassed. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]You’re “in the box”.  One layer of security is now gone.  [/box] Also, your vendor has “FULL ACCESS” to your data in some cases.  How can you be sure what is going on with your data when it is in an unknown box in an unknown data center?  The first rule of security is “Trust No One”. Do you really trust Microsoft, Amazon, or Google? I sure don’t!!!  Having your data physically out of your company’s control is not a good idea. Yes, it is cheaper but what are your company and its digital property worth? The ‘real’ skills and hiring gap in tech For the knowledge and skills gap, I see the hiring process in this industry as the biggest gap.  The knowledge is out there. We now have schools that teach this field. When I started, there were no school courses.  You learned on your own. Since there is training, there are a lot of skilled people out there. But go looking for a job, and it is a nightmare.  IT doesn’t do the actual hiring these days. Either HR or a headhunting agency does the hiring. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]The people you talk to have no clue of what you really do.  They have a list of acronyms to look for that they have no clue about to match to your resume.  If you don’t have the complete list, you’re booted.[/box] If you don’t have a certain certification, you’re booted even if you’ve worked with the technology for 10 years.  Once, with my skill level, it took sending out over a thousand resumes and took over a year for me to find a job in the security field. The people you talk to have no clue of what you really do.  They have a list of acronyms to look for that they have no clue about to match to your resume.  If you don’t have the complete list, you’re booted. Also, when working in security, you can’t really talk about what you exactly did in your last job due to the NDA agreements with HR or a headhunter.  Writing these books is the first time I have been able to talk about what I do in detail since the network being breached is a lab network owned by myself.  XYZ bank would be really mad if I published their vulnerabilities and rightly so. In the US, most major networks are not managed by actual engineers but are managed by people with an MBA degree.  The manager has no clue of what they are actually managing. These managers are more worried about their department’s P&L statement than the security of the network.  In Europe, you find that the IT managers are older engineers that WORKED for years in IT and then moved to management. They fully understand the needs of a network and security. The trouble with software development In software development, I see a dumbing down of user interfaces.  This may be good for my 6-year-old grandson, but someone like me may want more access to the system.  I see developers change things just for the reason of “change”. Take Microsoft’s Ribbon in Office. Even after all these years, I find the ribbon confusing and hard to use.  At least, with Libre Office, they give you a choice between a ribbon and an old school menu bar. The changes in Gnome 3 from Gnome 2. This dumbing down and attempting to make a desktop usable for a tablet and a mouse totally destroyed the usability of their desktop.  What used to take 1 click now takes 4 clicks to do. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""] A lot of developers these days have an “I am God and you are an idiot” complex.  Developers should remember that without an engineer, there would be no system for their code to run on.  Listen and work with engineers.[/box] Where do I see tech going?   Well, it is in everything these days and I don’t see this changing.  I never thought I would see a Linux box running a refrigerator or controlling my car, yet we do have them today.   Today, we can buy a system the size of a pack of cigarettes for less than $30.00 (Raspberry Pi) that can do more than a full-size server could do 10 years ago.  This is amazing. However, this is a two-edged sword when it comes to small, “cheap” devices. When you build a cheap device, you have to keep the costs down. For most companies building these devices, security is either non-existent or is an afterthought.  Yes, your whole network can be owned by first accessing that $30.00 IP camera with no security and moving on from there to eventually your Domain Controller. I know this works; I’ve done it several times. If you wish to further learn about tools which can improve your average in password acquisition, from hash cracking, online attacks, offline attacks, and rainbow tables to social engineering, the book Kali Linux 2018: Windows Penetration Testing - Second Edition is the go-to option for you. Author Bio Bo Weaver is an old school, ponytailed geek. His first involvement with networks was in 1972 while in the US Navy working on an R&D project called ARPA NET. Bo has been working with and using Linux daily since the 1990s and a promoter of Open Source. (Yes, Bo runs on Linux.) He now works as the senior penetration tester and security researcher for CompliancePoint an Atlanta based security consulting company. Cloud Security Tips: Locking Your Account Down with AWS Identity Access Manager (IAM) Cloud computing trends in 2019 Jeff Weiner talks about technology implications on society, unconscious bias, and skill gaps: Wired 25

“The service control platform is the next-gen of traditional API management,” Kong CTO and co-founder Marco Palladino tells me. “It’s not about APIs any more, it’s about services.” This shift in the industry is what makes Kong so interesting. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to speak to Palladino. Its success is an index of businesses’ technological priorities today, and useful as an indicator of the way the world is going - one, it’s safe to say, that’s increasingly cloud-native and highly distributed. As part of a broad and growing cloud-native ecosystem, Kong is playing an important role in the digital transformation of thousands of companies around the world. Furthermore, the fact that it follows an open core model, with an open source version of Kong made available in 2015, underlines the way in which the platform occupies a valuable position in the valley between developer enablement and managerial control. This isn’t always an easy place to be. 'Digital transformation' is a well-worn phrase, but behind it is the messy truth about the reality of how companies use technology: at their own pace and often shaped by necessity rather than best practice. So, with Kong a useful proxy for the state of the software industry, I wanted to dive deeper into Kong’s challenges, as well as the opportunities the platform can potentially unlock for its users. What is Kong? Before going any further it’s probably worth explaining what Kong actually is. Essentially, Kong is an API management platform - it allows teams to manage how services interact and move within their architecture. [caption id="attachment_29326" align="alignright" width="248"] via konghq.com[/caption] “APIs allow information to be in flight within our systems,” Palladino explains. Information can, he continues, either be “at rest in a database” or “in use by a monolith or microservice.” Naturally then, it follows that “the more we decouple - the more we distribute our applications - the more information will be… in flight.” This is why Palladino believes Kong is so valuable today. The “flight” of information (he never uses the word “data”) necessarily implies a network and, as anyone familiar with L. Peter Deutsch’s 7 Fallacies of Distributed Computing will know, “the network is unreliable.” “So how do we protect that communication? How do we secure it? How do we connect it? How do we route that transmission?” Palladino says. “The more we decouple, the more we distribute, the more those problems become critical, if not essential, for a successful microservice organization… what Kong provides is a platform that allows us to intelligently broker the flow of information across the organization.” Why does the world need Kong? Do we really need another API management solution? The short answer to this is relatively straightforward: the world is moving toward (micro)services and Kong provides you with a way of managing them. This control is crucial, moreover, because “in microservices, being slow is the new down - if you’re slow, you’re down.” But that’s only half of the picture. This “new world” is still in development and transition with each organization following its own technological path. Kong is necessary because it supports and facilitates these unique transitions, all of them happening in different ways around the world. “Kong is a platform agnostic system that can run across different architectures, but most importantly it can run across different platforms,” Palladino says. “While we do work very well with Kubernetes, we also support… traditional legacy virtual machines or bare metal infrastructures. And the reason we do support both the modern and the old is that we’re working with enterprise organizations… [who] might be deploying new greenfield applications in Kubernetes or OpenShift but… still have a significant part of their software running in traditional virtual machines.” One of Kong’s strengths, Palladino suggests, is its pragmatism and the way in which the company is alive to their customer’s respective levels of technological maturity. “I’m very proud to say we’re a very pragmatic company. While we do work with developers to make sure that Kong is a leader in what we do in microservices and traditional API management, we’re also very pragmatic - we understand that’s the end goal, it's not necessarily the current state of affairs in our enterprise organizations.” Read next: It’s Black Friday: But what’s the business (and developer) cost of downtime? “We’re not just a vendor. We don’t give you the platform and then let you figure it out. We want to be a strategic technology partner with our customers.” Kong sees itself as a 'strategic technology partner' However, while every organization has its own timeline when it comes to technology, its CTO describes Kong as a platform that is paving a way for the future rather than simply catering to the needs of its customers. “We’re not an industry follower, we’re an industry leader,” says Palladino. “We’re looking at these large scale systems that organizations are creating and we’re thinking how can we make that better from a security standpoint, from a discoverability standpoint, from a documentation standpoint?” This isn’t just Silicon Valley posturing. As the software world moves toward cloud and microservices, the landscape shifts at a much faster rate. That makes it essential for organizations like Kong to pave the way for the future rather than react to the needs and demands of their customers. In turn, this means the scope of Kong’s work is growing. “We’re not just a vendor. We don’t give you the platform and then let you figure it out. We want to be a strategic technology partner with our customers,” says Palladino. “We engage with them, not just from a low-level standpoint with the teams, but we also engage... from a higher level executive standpoint, because we want to enable not just the technology but the business itself to be successful.” This is something Palladino is well aware of. Kong’s customers aren’t, after all, needlessly indulging in “an exercise in adopting new technologies,” but are rather doing so in response to business requirements. Having a more extensive relationship - or partnership, as Palladino puts it - ensures that digital transformation is both impactful and relatively risk free. "You simply can’t afford to have a black box at the center of your infrastructure. You need to know what’s happening and how services are interacting with one another - the way of achieving this is through open source software." Open source and the rise of bottom-up software adoption However, although Kong positions itself as a company attuned to the business needs of their customers, it’s also clear that it understands the developer’s power in today’s technology ecosystem. Palladino sees open source as playing a big part in this. And as an open core platform, Kong is able to build a community of creative and innovative developers around the wider product ecosystem. But Palladino is also keen to point out that you can’t really separate open source and the API and microservices revolutions. “10 years ago APIs used to be a nice-to-have” Palladino says. The approach was, he explains, little more than a kind of curiosity or a desire for a small community around a platform: “let’s open up some APIs, let’s open up this monolithic black box and see what happens.” However, “it’s not like that any more." If “APIs are the core business of every organization,” as Palladino puts it to me, “then you simply can’t afford to have a black box at the center of your infrastructure. You need to know what’s happening and how services are interacting with one another - the way of achieving this is through open source software.” “When we look at the microservices transition, we look at Docker, we look at Kubernetes, we look at Elastic, we look at Zipkin… Kafka… Kong, what’s the baseline? Open source. Each one of these products is open source at their core. Open source is driving this new transformation within the enterprise,” says Palladino. Palladino continues on this, offering a compelling narrative of why open source has become the dominant form of software. He begins with the problems posed by traditional central IT, “an ivory tower far from the business, far from real usage” which consequently “were not able to iterate fast enough to be able to answer those business requirements.” “The teams building the apps were closer to the business, closer to the customer, and they had to pick the right solution in order to be successful. And so what these… teams did was to go into self-service ecosystems - like... CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] - and pick and choose open source technologies they could adopt without having to go through an enterprise process… that’s why open source became more important - because it allowed them to be in production and get business value without having to deal with the bureaucracy of central IT - so it’s a bottom-up adoption from the teams all the way up as opposed from central IT to all the teams.” Developer freedom and organizational control Palladino refers to ‘bottom-up’ adoption a number of times throughout our conversation. He argues that it’s an industry shift that has been initiated by microservices. “With the emergence of microservices something happened in the industry - software, is not being sold top down anymore as much as it used to be - it’s more bottom-up adoption.” He also explains that having an open source element to the Kong offering is actually helping the company to grow. It’s a useful onboarding route. “Sometimes - often actually - Kong is being adopted just because the organization happens to already be running Kong in production, and you need enterprise features and enterprise support,” says Palladino. But while developer power seems to be part of this new post-central IT world, it also makes Kong even more valuable for those in leadership positions. Taking the example of multi-cloud, Palladino explains saying that “it’s very rare to see a CIO saying we would like to be multi cloud. Sometimes it happens, [but] most likely the organization is already multi-cloud because it naturally evolved to be multi-cloud. Different teams, different products using different clouds, different services.” With the wealth of tools, platforms and environments being used by forward-thinking developers trying to solve the problems in their immediate vicinity, it makes sense that the “C-Level Executives” who express an interest in Kong are looking for “a way to consolidate and standardize how their APIs and microservices are being managed and secured across multiple clouds, across multiple platforms.” A big concern for the leadership of the top Global 5000 organizations we’re working with… [is] making sure they can consolidate how security is being done, how monitoring is being done, how observability and enablement is being done across multiple clouds,” Palladino says. Read next: Honeycomb CEO Charity Majors discusses observability and dealing with “the coming armageddon of complexity” [Interview] The future of Kong and API management The future for Kong looks bright. The two new features released by the platform - Kong Brain and Kong Immunity - launched earlier this year, signal what the broader trends might be in the software infrastructure and systems engineering space. Both are backed by artificial intelligence, and provide incredibly cutting edge ways to manage the reliability and security of the services inside your infrastructure. Kong Brain, Palladino explains, lets you “listen to… runtime traffic to auto generate documentation for APIs… services, and monoliths” that organizations have no visibility on “after 20 years of running them in production.” Essentially then, it’s a tool that will prove incredibly useful in working with legacy software; it will certainly encourage the ‘lift and shift’ mentality that we’re starting to see emerge. Kong Immunity, meanwhile, is a security tool that uses machine learning to detect anomalies in traffic - allowing users to identify security threats and breaches within their system. “Traditional web application firewalls… don’t work within east-west traffic [server to server],” Palladino says. “They work perhaps in north-south traffic [client to server], but they’re slow, they’re very heavy weight.” Kong, then “tries to take away that security concern by providing a machine learning platform that can asynchronously, with no performance loss, learn from existing traffic across every version of every microservice.” With releases like these, it’s hard to dispute Palladino’s assertion that Kong is indeed an ‘industry leader.’ However, as Palladino also appears to be aware of, to be truly successful, it’s not enough to just lead the industry - you have to make sure you can bring people with you. Learn more about Kong here, and follow Marco Palladino on Twitter.

SAP, the market-leading enterprise software, recently became the first European technology company to create an AI ethics advisory panel where they announced seven guiding principles for AI development. These guidelines revolve around recognizing AI’s significant impact on people and society. Also, last week, at the Microsoft Ignite conference, SAP, in collaboration with Microsoft and Adobe announced the Open Data Initiative. This initiative aims to help companies to better govern their data and support privacy and security initiatives. For SAP, this initiative will further bring advancements to its SAP C/4HANA and S/4HANA platforms. All of these actions emphasize SAP’s focus on transforming itself into a responsible data use company. We recently interviewed Rehan Zaidi, a senior SAP ABAP consultant. Rehan became one of the youngest authors on SAP worldwide when he was published in the prestigious SAP Professional Journal in the year 2001. He has written a number of books, and over 20 articles and professional papers for the SAP Professional Journal USA and HR Expert USA, part of the prestigious sapexperts.com library. Following are some of his views on the SAP community and products and how the SAP suite can benefit people including budding professionals, developers, and business professionals. Key takeaways SAP HANA was introduced to accelerate jobs 200 times faster while maintaining the efficiency. The introduction of SAP Leonardo brought in the next wave of AI, machine learning, and blockchain services via the SAP cloud platform and other standalone projects. Experienced ABAP developers should look forward to getting certified in one of the newest technologies such as HANA, and Fiori. SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) is the on-premises version of SAP, and it is usually implemented in medium and large-sized companies. For smaller companies, SAP offers its Business One ERP platform. SAP Fiori is a line of SAP apps meant to address criticisms of SAP's user experience and UI complexity. Q.1. SAP is one of the most widely used ERP tools. How has it evolved over the past few years from the traditional on-premise model to keep up with the cloud-based trends? Yes. Let me cover the main points. SAP started in 1973 as a company and the first product SAP R/98 was launched. In 1979, SAP launched the R/2 design. It had most of the typical processes such as accounting, manufacturing processes, supply chain logistics, and human resources. Then came R/3  that brought the more efficient three-tier (Application server -  Database and the presentation (GUI)) architecture, with more new modules and functionalities added. It was a smart system fully configurable by functional consultants. This was further enhanced with Netweaver capability that brought the integration of the internet and SOA capability.  SAP introduced the ECC 5 and subsequently the ECC 6 Release. Mobility was later added that lets mobile applications running on devices to access the business processes in SAP and execute them. Both display and updation of SAP data was possible. HANA system was then introduced. It is very fast and efficient - allows you to do 200 times faster jobs than before Cloud systems then became available that let customers connect to SAP Cloud Platform via their on-premise systems and then get access to services such as Mobile Service for app protection, Mobile Service for SAP Fiori, among others. SAP Leonardo was finally introduced, as a way of bringing in next-gen AI, machine learning and blockchain services via standalone projects and the SAP cloud platform. Q.2. Being a Senior ABAP Programming Analyst, how does your typical day look like? Ahh. Well, a typical day! No two days are the same for us. Each morning we find ourselves confronting a problem whose solution is to be devised. A different problem every day- followed by a unique solution. We spend hours and hours finding issues in custom developed programs. We learn about making custom programs run faster. We get requirements of a wide variety of users. They may be in the Human Resource, Materials Management, Sales and Distribution or Finance, and so on. This requirement may be pertaining to an entirely new report or a dialog program having a set of screens. We even do Fiori ( using Javascript based library) applications that may be accessible from the PC or a mobile device. I even get requirements of teaching junior or trainee SAP developers on a wide variety of technologies. Q.3. Can you tell us about the learning curve for SAP? There are different job profiles related to SAP which range from executives to consultants and managers. How do each of them learn or update themselves on SAP? Yes, this is a very important question. A simple answer to this question is that “there is no end to learning and at any stage, learning is never enough,” no matter to which field within SAP you belong to. Things are constantly changing. The more you read and the more you work, you feel that there is a lot to be done. You need to constantly update yourself and learn about new technologies. There is plenty of material available on the internet. I usually refer to the Official SAP website for newer courses available. They even tell you for which background (managers, developers) the courses are relevant to. I also go to open.sap.com for new courses. Whether they are consultants (functional and technical), or managers, all of them need to keep themselves up-to-date. They must take new courses and learn about innovation in their technology. For example, HR must now study and try to learn about Successfactors. Even integration of SAP HANA with other software might be an interesting topic of today. There are Fiori and HANA related courses for Basis consultants and the corresponding tracks for developers. Some knowhow of newer technologies is also important for managers and executives, since your decisions may need to be adapted based on the underlying technologies running in your systems. You should know the pros and cons of all technologies in order to make the correct move for your business. Q.4. Many believe an SAP certification improves their chances of getting jobs at competitive salaries. How important are certifications? Which SAP certifications should a buddying developer look forward to obtain? When I did my Certification in October 2000, I used to think that Certifications are not important. But now I have realized, yes, it makes a difference.  Well, certifications are definitely a plus point. They enhance your CV and allow you to have an edge over those who are not certified.  I found some jobs adverts that specifically mention that certification will be required or will be advantageous. However, they are only useful when you have at least 4 years of experience. For a fresh graduate, a certification might not be very useful. A useful SAP consultant/developer is a combination of solid base/foundation of knowledge along with a touch of experience. I suggest all my juniors to go for Certifications in order to strengthen concepts, which include: C_C4C30_1711 - SAP Certified Development Associate – SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer C_CP_11 - SAP Certified Development Associate - SAP Cloud Platform C_FIORDEV_20 - SAP Certified Development Associate - SAP Fiori Application Developer C_HANADEV_13 - SAP Certified Development Associate - SAP HANA C_SMPNHB_30 - SAP Certified Development Associate - SAP Mobile Platform Application Development (SMP 3.0) C_TAW12_750 - SAP Certified Development Associate - ABAP with SAP NetWeaver 7.50 E_HANAAW_12 - SAP Certified Development Specialist - ABAP for SAP HANA For experienced ABAP developers, I suggest getting certified on the newest technologies such as HANA, and Fiori. They may help you get a project quicker and/or at a better rate than others. Q.5. The present buzz is around AI, machine learning, IoT, Big data, and many other emerging technologies. SAP Leonardo works on making it easy to create frameworks for harnessing the latest tech. What are your thoughts on SAP Leonardo? Leonardo is SAP’s response to an AI platform. It should be an important part of SAP’s offerings, mostly built on the SAP cloud platform. SAP has relaunched Leonardo as a digital innovation system. As I understand it, Leonardo allows customers to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, advanced analytics and blockchain on their company’s data. SAP gives customers an efficient way of using these technologies to solve business issues. It allows you to build a system which, in conjunction with machine learning, searches for results that can be combined with SAP transactions. The benefit with SAP Leonardo is that all the company’s data is available right in the SAP system. Using Leonardo, you have access to all human resources data and any other module data residing in the ERP system. Any company from any industry can make use of Leonardo; it works equally well for retailers, food and beverage companies and medical industries, for organizations working in retail, manufacturing and automotive. An approach that works for one company in a given industry can be applied to other companies in that industry. Suppose a company operates sensors. They can link the sensor data with the data in their SAP systems and even link that with other data, and they can then use the Leonardo capabilities to solve problems or optimize performance. When a problem for one company in an industry is solved, a similar solution may be applied to the entire industry. Yes, in my opinion, Leonardo has a bright future and should be successful. For more information about Leonardo success stories, I encourage readers to check out SAP Leonardo Internet of Things Portfolio & Success Stories. Q. 6. You are currently writing a book on ABAP Objects and Design Patterns expected to be published by the end of 2018. What was your motivation behind writing it? Can you tell us more about ABAP objects? What should readers expect from this book? ABAP and ABAP Objects has gone tremendous changes since some time both on the features (and capability) as well as the syntax. It is the most unsung topic of today. It has been there for quite long but most developers are not aware of it or are not comfortable enough to use them in their day to day work. ABAP is a vast community with developers working in a variety of functional areas. The concepts covered in the book will be generic, allowing the learner to apply them to his or her particular area. This book will cover ABAP objects (the object-oriented extension of the SAP language ABAP) in the latest release of SAP NetWeaver 7.5 and explain the newest advancements. It will start with the programming of objects in general and the basics of ABAP language the developer needs to know to get started. The book will cover the most important topics needed on everyday support jobs and for succeeding in projects. The book will be goal-directed, not a collection of theoretical topics. It won’t just touch on the surface of ABAP objects, but will go in depth from building the basic foundation (e.g., classes and objects created locally and globally) to the intermediary areas (e.g., ALV programming, method chaining, polymorphism, simple and nested interfaces), and then finally into the advanced topics (e.g., shared memory, persistent Objects). The best practices for making better programs via ABAP objects will be shown at the end. No long stories, no boring theory, only pure technical concepts followed by simple examples using coding pertaining to football players. Everything will be presented in a clear, interesting manner, and readers will learn tips and tricks they can apply immediately. Learners, students, new SAP programmers and SAP developers with some experience can use this as an alternative to expensive training books. The book will also save reader’s time searching the internet for help writing new programs. Knowing ABAP objects is key for ABAP developers these days to move forward. Starting from simple ALV reporting requirements, or defining and catching exceptional situations that may occur in a program or even the enhancement technology of BAdIs that lets you enhance standard SAP applications require sound ABAP Objects understanding. In addition, Web Dynpro application development, the Business Object Processing Framework, and even OData service creation to expose data that can be used by Fiori apps all demand solid knowledge of ABAP objects. How to perform predictive forecasting in SAP Analytics Cloud Popular Data sources and models in SAP Analytics Cloud Understanding Text Search and Hierarchies in SAP HANA  

As per a recent IDC study, the forecast for new jobs demanding Salesforce skills shows a huge surge from last year. The numbers reveal that the demand is set to create 3.3 million jobs in the Salesforce ecosystem by 2022.  Additionally, among Indeed’s top 10 best jobs include Salesforce-specific, Salesforce Administrator ranking 4th and Salesforce Developer ranking at 6th place. Though Salesforce admins are not developers, but they create easy-to-use dashboards, intelligent workflows and applications for any project. They keep the Salesforce users happy and business processes smart, hence they are high in demand. Companies, especially in the US, know the potential and value Salesforce admins bring and are making serious human capital investments. We recently interviewed, Enrico Murru, a Solution and Technical Architect, a platinum Salesforce partner and Salesforce MVP to discuss the Salesforce ecosystem, his Salesforce expert journey, various certifications for Salesforce admins, and how they enhance their careers. Enrico is the author of the latest edition of our book, Salesforce Advanced Administrator Guide. This guide extends beyond being an administrator certification and covers advanced platform features and functions such as configuration, automation, security, and customization. It is packed with exam-oriented questions and mock tests to help you earn advanced administrator credentials. On the Salesforce ecosystem and Enrico’s journey to becoming a Salesforce MVP As per a recent 10K Advisors research, the Salesforce ecosystem is innovating faster than the talent can keep pace. This has resulted in great career opportunities but also introduced challenges for Salesforce end-users. How is Salesforce dealing with the challenges? How can administrators and developers leverage growth opportunities in Salesforce? When I started working with Salesforce about 10 years ago, I had never heard about the Salesforce ecosystem in my life: honestly Italy was not a hot market at that time, that’s why my (small at the time) company had a chance to work with big customers...we were among the few Salesforce system integrators in our whole country, after all. About 4 to 5 years ago things changed dramatically and Italy finally aligned with the rest of the world: Salesforce was in high demand among all kinds of companies (small or huge, no difference). The Italian market is one of the fastest growing; we started growing more and more due to increasing number of customers joining us but we started suffering from lack of professionals. We built an internal academy but it wasn’t enough, we still needed (and currently need) more developers, administrators and business analysts, the demand has exceeded the supply! The amount of “free to access documentation” is huge, the Salesforce Ohana has produced tons of content with blogs, webinars and tens of books. When Salesforce delivered Trailhead to the world we all had a boost in training: learning Salesforce became ever easier! No surprise the number of people getting certified has increased drastically, and it’s not uncommon now to see people with 5, 10 or 20 certifications on their career backpack: you don’t need to stay hours and hours with your head in a book, now you can learn 15 minutes a time when you are free between your working tasks. This is a HUGE revolution: learn a bit often and you keep yourself always on the trail, for free! From now on, anyone can become a Salesforce trailblazer and start building their trail: a lot of people have decided to change jobs and dipped into the Salesforce world with few to no experience in computer science. However when it’s time to get a certification, especially when it is your first certification, Trailhead is not enough: you need some real-world experience (no Trailhead can prepare you enough, experience is an amazing fuel for increasing your overall knowledge). A book can be a good compromise to boost your knowledge while giving you the right amount of experience that the author melt on each topic, and that’s why I chose to start this amazing trail with Packt: I wanted to do something I’ve never done before (writing a book) while delivering then Ohana more chances to pass a certification...I guess this is a win-win situation! How did you start your journey of becoming a Salesforce expert? Did being a Java developer, help you in some way? What motivated you to make the choice? Good question and the answer is that I have to thank the randomness that we can encounter daily on our lives (we can call it destiny, if you prefer). I started working as a Java developer (I came from an Electronic Engineering MSc) for a small company in my local town (Cagliari, Italy). After a while I got bored of what I was doing (boredom is a fuel for me) then I decided to move to Ireland. I got immediately the day after I landed in Cork a new job with a great income (compared to what I was earning in Italy)...but I was not 100% sure if I wanted to move abroad and that’s why I rejected that position and got back to Italy (some say it was an act of cowardice, I partially agree but I was not ready to change my life so much at that time). After just 2 months from my return home, my boss told me about a new opportunity: moving to northern Italy to join WebResults, a small company (we were just 15 people, including the CEO and CTO) that worked with something called “Salesforce”. I accepted the challenge and moved for 6 months with my spouse-to-be to WebResults headquarters: I discovered the world of Salesforce and I immediately fell in love with it. In a few weeks I learnt all that I needed to start my journey as a Salesforce developer. Years to come, I’m still working with WebResults (that in the meanwhile has been acquired by Engineering Spa, the greatest Italian consultant company) as a Salesforce Solution and Technical Architect (the amount of time I spend on coding at work has dramatically dropped unfortunately) and with the honorable Salesforce MVP title I try to evangelize my company and all the Salesforce Ohana buddies anyway I can! So if you ask me if my Java dev position helped me to arrive where I am, the answer is “definitely yes” but there is a lot more in the story! On various Salesforce certifications and why he wrote a book There are many certifications available for beginners as well as for experienced CRM developers. How should one go about choosing them? How do different Salesforce certification programs enhance a developer’s career? If you want to start your journey with Salesforce you have to choose primarily among the following paths (more details at https://trailhead.salesforce.com/credentials/administratoroverview, but you can build your own trail!): Administrator Developer Marketer Consultant Architect In my experience any aspiring Salesforce consultant should start from bases, even though she is a skilled business analysts with 20 years of experience: you need to know how the Salesforce Lightning Platform works and the best way is to get your hands dirty. Whether you wanna start as an administrator or a developer, I always recommend you face administrator skills at the beginning: a good developer should be a good administrator as well! As far as Marketer and Consultant paths are concerned, they are more related to your knowledge of specific products of the platform such as Marketing Cloud, Pardot, Field Service, Community Cloud, Einstein Analytics and many others. The Architect path brings you to the Mount Olympus of all certifications - the Technical Architect certification, which any Salesforce trailblazer aspire to get one day (and I’m one of them). Some think that owning a Salesforce certification doesn’t necessarily indicate your proficiency in the technologies involved but I do not agree with them. When I tried to get the Salesforce Advanced Administrator exam I really thought I had the required skills to pass but I failed...why? Because I didn’t study some of the topics and I wasn’t that skilled on such topics either (you’ll read this story in the book as well). That’s why I needed hours of study to pass the exam, and thanks to that deep study I learnt new Salesforce stuff and increased my proficiency in features I hadn’t actually ever used, making me the “most skilled” guy in my company regarding Omni-Channel or Salesforce Knowledge. This is an absolute win for both you and your company: certifications are meant to make you a trailblazer. Needless to say headhunters really love Salesforce certifications (my owning 20 certifications  attracts tens of contact requests on my social channels). Your book, Salesforce Advanced Administrator Certification Guide promises to give administrators a deeper knowledge of advanced Salesforce features for administrators. Why should one read this book? How is it different from other available Salesforce certification guides in the market? At first I want to say that the Salesforce Advanced Administrator Certification is a bit mistreated by administrators (as far as I’ve seen in my career): it is usually considered too hard or too complex for the skills you earn…”after all I’m already an administrator why should I become an advanced administrator”? You should my friend, the amount of things you learn is really huge, you’ll keep playing with features such as Lightning Knowledge, Omni-Channel, Live Chat, Lightning Content, features that maybe you’ve never used before, or exploring in depth the world of Salesforce automation with Process Builder, Lightning Flows, Entitlements and Approvals or knowing everything related to security and sharing of records (and many many more). Why should you choose this book? It covers extensively all required topics for the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification keeping in mind the requirements for the exam as well. While the number of topics is too large for us to cover anything and everything for each topic, you’ll get a good amount of knowledge, suggestions and external references to ensure you reach the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification goal. On the challenges faced by Salesforce administrators What are some of the challenges faced by Salesforce administrators today? How is Salesforce as a platform helping overcome these challenges? Can Salesforce administrators become developers too and vice versa? What is next for Salesforce? The biggest challenge that Salesforce admins face day after day is keeping pace with the extraordinarily growing Salesforce ecosystems: new companies join the Lightning Platform and new features are delivered release after release. It is more than mandatory that consultant companies and, in general, IT divisions reserve a percentage of their employees time for continuous learning, to allow Salesforce admins and devs to stay on track with the changing environment. Learning is a cost for sure, when you study you are not productive, but the benefits of a skilled and always on top employee overtakes its cost. And I see no obstacles for administrators to start their developer path as well: all they need is passion, curiosity and patience, Rome wasn’t built in a day and your developer skills won’t for sure. Trailhead is the starting point for any career path and I guess in the coming years we’ll see artificial intelligence absolutely stealing the show in Salesforce world and so admins should be prepared for the revolution that is taking place year after year. On making an impact in the Salesforce community You have created highly popular Salesforce browser extensions like ORGanizer. Tell us about how this came about? What does it take to build such successful products? Are you working on or planning to work on similar projects now? I said that boredom is my fuel: when I get bored I usually start a new project or a new hobby, and ORGanizer for Salesforce Chrome & Firefox extension (available at https://organizer.enree.co) is no different. It started as a personal project to ease my daily work with Salesforce projects, by adding little features that could speed up my administrative and coding tasks, while increasing my overall productivity. Then I thought, why not deliver this cool thing to my Salesforce Ohana? That’s where I believe the community took notice of me and it has remained one of the main reasons for my Salesforce MVP nomination. After the cool experience of writing a book, which is something that has been on my check list since I was a child, I have a few side projects related to Salesforce with some trailblazer friends, that I believe will have a great impact on the Ohana. And, why not, perhaps another book in 2020? Author Bio Enrico Murru is a Solution and Technical Architect at WebResults (an engineering company), an Italian platinum Salesforce partner, and an Independent Software Vendor (ISV). He has completed his MSc in Electronic Engineering at the University of Cagliari in 2007. In 2013, he launched a blog named Nerd @ Work. In 2016, he was nominated as the first Italian Salesforce MVP for his commitment to the Salesforce community. Then over the course of 3 years, Murru gained 20 Salesforce certifications, including the Salesforce Technical Architect certification. In 2016, he started one of the most popular projects, the ORGanizer for Salesforce Chrome and Firefox extension. You can follow him on Twitter @Enreeco, LinkedIn, GitHub, Trailblazer Community as well as on his personal blog page. Are you planning to embark on the journey of being a Salesforce Advanced Administrator? Confused about the various Salesforce certification programs and don’t know what to choose? Grab this book right now! The Salesforce Advanced Administrator Certification Guide will help you master data access security, monitoring and auditing, and understanding best practices for handling change management and data across organizations. What makes Salesforce Lightning Platform a powerful, fast and intuitive user interface What are the challenges of adopting AI-powered tools in Sales? How Salesforce can help Salesforce is buying Tableau in a $15.7 billion all-stock deal Salesforce’s open sourcing Centrifuge: A library for accelerating JVM restarts Build a custom Admin Home page in Salesforce CRM Lightning Experience

Augmented and Virtual Reality is taking on the world, one AR app at a time. Almost all tech giants have their own AR platforms, whether it be Google’s ARCore, to Apple’s ARKit, to Snapchat’s Lens Studio. Not just that, there are now various AR galleries and exhibits focused solely on AR, where designers and artists showcase their artistic talents combined with rich augmented reality experiences. While searching for designers and artists working the augmented reality space, we stumbled upon Marc-O-Matic aka Marco Ryan. We were fascinated by his artwork and wanted to interview him right away.   [embed]https://vimeo.com/219045989[/embed] As his website bio says, “Marco is a multidisciplinary Artist, Animator, Director, Storyteller and Technologist working across Augmented and Virtual Reality technologies.” He shared with us his experiences working with Augmented Reality and told us about his creation process, his current projects, tips and tricks for a budding artist venturing into the AR space and his views on merging technology and art. Key Takeaways A well-rounded creative is someone who could do everything from creating the art, the associated stories as well as execute the technical aspects of the work to make it come to life. The future belongs to these creative types who love to learn and experiment every day. An artist must consider three aspects before taking on a project. First, how to tell their story in a more engaging and interesting manner. Second, how to combine different skill sets together and third the message their work conveys. Augmented Reality has added a new level of depth to the art experience not just for artists but also for viewers. Everyone has a smartphone these days and with AR you can add many added elements to an art piece. You can add sound, motion and 3D elements to the experience, which affect more of your senses. It is easy for a beginner artist to get started with creating Augmented reality art. You need to start with learning a basic language (mostly C# or Javascript) and then you can learn more as you explore. Tools and platforms such as Adobe After Effects, Maya and Blend, are good for building shaders, materials or effects. Unity 3D is a popular choice for implementing the AR functionality, and over 91% of HoloLens experiences are made with Unity. It supports a large number of devices and also has a large community base. Unity offers highly optimized rendering pipeline and rapid iteration capabilities to create realist AR VR experiences. AI and Machine Learning are at the forefront of innovating AR/VR. Machine learning algorithms can be used in character modeling. They can map your facial movements directly to a 3D character’s face. AI can make a character emotionally react based on the tone of the audio and also automate tasks allowing an artist to focus solely on the creative aspects. Full Interview How did you get started in AR. How did you journey from being an artist to an AR artist began? I started experimenting with Immersive AR/VR tech about 2-3 years ago? At the time buzzwords like virtual and augmented reality started trending and it had me curious to see how I could implement my own existing skills into this area at the time. Prior to getting into AR and VR I came from a largely self-taught background in Art & Illustration which then evolved into exploring film and animation and then finally led to game design and programming. Exploring all these areas allowed me to become a well-rounded creative, meaning I could do everything from creating the art, the associated stories as well as execute the technical aspects of the work to make it come to life. That’s quite impressive and fascinating to know! What programming language did you learn first and why? What was your approach to learning the language? Do you also dabble in other languages? How can artists overcome the fear of learning technology? Working with the game engine Unity 3D to create my VR and AR Experiences, the engine allows you to program in either C# or Javascript. C# was the the most prevalent language of the two and for me I found it easier to pick up. As a visual learner, I initially came to understand the language through node based programming tools like Playmaker and Uscript. These plug-ins for Unity are great for beginners as they allow you to visually program behaviors and functionality into your experience by creating interconnected node trees or maps which then generates the code. I’m familiar with this form of logic building as other programs I use, such as Adobe After Effects, Maya and Blend, use similar systems for building shaders, materials or effects. Through node based programming or visual scripting, you can take a look under the hood and understand the syntax iteratively. It’s like understanding a language through reverse-engineering. By seeing the code being generated based on the node maps you create you could quickly understand how the language is structured. I try to think of learning new things as adding skills to your arsenal and the more skills you possess the greater you can expand on your ideas. I don’t think it’s so much a fear of learning new technology. I think it’s more a question of ‘Will learning this new technology be worth my time and benefit my current practice?’ The beautiful age we live in makes it so much easier to learn new skills online. So there’s so much support already available for anyone wanting to explore game design technologies in their creative practice. What tools do you use in the process and why those tools? What is the actual process you follow? What are the various steps? The Augmented Reality Art I created has two parts to them: Creating the Art Everything is drawn on paper first using your typical office ballpoint pens, inkwash and sometimes watercolours or gouache. I prefer creating my work that way. To me keeping that 'hand-crafted' style and aesthetic has its charm when bringing it to life through Augmented Reality. I think it's really important to demonstrate the importance of other traditional mediums, techniques and disciplines when working with immersive technologies as they're still very valid in creating engaging content. I see a lot of AR experiences that have a lack of charm and feel somewhat 'gamey' which is why I want to continue integrating more raw-looking aesthetics in this area. Augmented Representation & Implementation Once the art is planned and created, I then scan it and start splicing it up digitally. From the preserved textures and linework I then create a 3D representation of the artwork through 3D modeling and animation software called Blender. It's one of many 3D authoring tools out there. It not only packs a significant number of features, it's also free which makes it ideal for beginners and students. Once the 3D representation of the work is created it's then imported into a game engine called Unity3D where I implement the AR functionality. Unity 3D is a widely used game engine. It's one of many engines out there but what makes it great is its support to deploy to all manners of devices. It also has a large community base behind it should you need help. How long does a typical project take? Do you work by yourself or with a team? How long do you work? On average an Augmented Artwork may take anywhere from 3 to 4 weeks to create, which includes the Art, Animation, Modeling and AR Implementation. When I first started out it'd take much longer but overtime I've streamlined my own processes to get things done faster. My alias Marc-O-Matic tends to be mistaken as a team but I'm actually just one person. I much prefer being able to create and direct everything myself. What is your advice to a budding artist who is interested in learning tech to produce art? From my experience, don't confine yourself to one specific medium and try practising a different skill or technique everyday. As artists we should be constantly evolving not just our technical skills but also our thought processes to push the boundaries on what's achievable. 'How can I tell my story in a more engaging and interesting manner?' 'What can I create if I combine these different skill sets together?" "How do I bring an end to systematic racism and white privilege?' etc. The more knowledge you have the greater you can push the boundaries of your creative expression. How do you support yourself financially? As in do you also sell your art pieces or make art for clients etc.? Where do you sell stuff, and meet people? I work under my own Artist Entity 'Marc-O-Matic.' I much prefer working independently than within larger studios or agencies. I juggle a balance between commercial work and personal projects. There's generally a high demand for Augmented/Virtual Reality experiences and I'm really lucky and grateful that clients want content in my particular style. I work with a variety of organisations generally consulting, providing creative direction and in most cases building the experiences too. Aside from the commercial work, I'm currently touring my own Augmented Reality Art/Storytelling collection called 'Moving Marvels' where audiences get to see my illustrated works come to life right in front of them. It's also how I sell various limited edition prints of my augmented artworks. My collection is exhibited at tech/innovation conferences, symposiums, galleries and even at universities/educational institutes. It's a great way to make connections and demonstrate what immersive technologies can do in a creative capacity. No interview would be complete without a discussion on AI and machine learning. As a technophile artist, are you excited about merging AI and art in new ways? What are some of your hopes and fears about this new tech? Do you plan to try machine learning anytime soon? It’s like a double edged sword with + 5 to Creativity. Technology can enhance our creative abilities and processes in a number of ways. At the same time it can also make some of us lazy because we can become so reliant on it. Like any new technology that aims to assist in the creative process, there’s always the fear that technology will make creatives lazy or will replace professions altogether. In some ways technology has done this but from saying that it has also created new job opportunities and abilities for artists. In areas like character animation for example the assistance of machine learning algorithms means creatives can worry less about the laborious physical processes of rigging and complex animation and focus more on the storytelling. For example, we can significantly reduce production times in the areas of facial rigging through facial recognition. Through learning the behaviour and structure of your own face, machine learning algorithms can map your facial movements directly to a 3D character’s face. By simply recording your own facial movements and gestures, you’ve created an entire impression map for your 3D character to use. What’s also crazy is, on top of that, by running a voice over track on that 3D character, you can also train it to play it out to sync with the voice AS well as have the entire face emotionally react based on the tone of the audio. It’s game-changing but also terrifying stuff as this sort of technology can be used to create highly realistic fake impressions of real people. As also an animator, I’ve started experimenting with this technology for my own VR animations. What would take me animator hours or even days to animate a talking 3D character can now take mere minutes. Author Bio Marc-O-Matic is the moniker of Marco Matic Ryan. He is a multidisciplinary Artist, Animator, Director, Storyteller and Technologist working across Augmented and Virtual Reality technologies. He is based in Victoria, Australia. https://player.vimeo.com/video/125218939 Unity plugins for augmented reality application development. Google ARCore is pushing immersive computing forward. There’s another player in the advertising game: augmented reality.

Angular is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks. Today, it's jostling for position with React and Vue as the leading front-end development framework. But if you're not using it, you're probably wondering why you should switch to Angular at all. What makes Angular such a good web development framework? And what does it give you that the likes of Vue and React don't? To help you decide if you should switch to Angular, we spoke to Minko Gechev, author of the third edition of Switching to Angular. Minko has worked incredibly closely with the Angular project - he was the author of the Angular 2 style guide. That means he's well placed to explain the benefits of Angular and to help you decide if its the right framework for you. Key Takeaways: Angular as against the public opinion has a consistent development lifecycle and is trustworthy for the developers to start their career with. The primary goal of the Angular community is to make the framework lighter and much more efficient. The book Switching to Angular - Third Edition works as a perfect stepping stone for new developers looking to start their journey with Angular. Angular.js and Angular are two different frameworks. Often people incorrectly refer to AngularJS as Angular version 1 which makes developers think that Angular is the next version of AngularJS. Although similar in nature, they should never be considered as predecessor and successor.   How has Angular come to dominate front-end development? What do you think is the primary reason for Angular to have the lion's share of front-end development market? Minko Gechev: There are several important reasons: Angular is a really well-designed framework which provides entire solution for the developers working on the user interface. The framework is developed and maintained by Google. This means that it is very well engineered and a high-quality solution. Angular provides great development experience. Since the beginning Angular was designed to simplify the development process dramatically. The framework provides friendly APIs which makes the process of building complex user interface trivial. Out of the box, Angular has very performant and well tested implementations of two-way data-binding, dependency injection and change detection. Notice that these will not only reduce the boilerplates in the process of application development but also make our code more testable, thanks to dependency injection. This means that the Angular team also thinks about improving the quality characteristics of our applications. On top of that Angular for web development provides a lot of external modules maintained by the Angular team itself, so the same team which works on Angular core, also develops Angular router, Angular forms, Angular material, etc. This allows us to confidently use the entire stack without bothering that the individual pieces of the puzzle may not fit well together. Another important fact is that the framework is developed by Google. This implies a high-quality engineering power for enterprises and individuals who can confidently bet on Angular as a long-term solution for development framework. As it is unlikely from Google to drop support for the framework unexpectedly. Keeping in mind that Angular is used in tonnes of projects inside Google itself, we can rest assured that it’s being tested on a very high-scale constantly. Google would never make a compromise in terms of quality. Development experience is something I am really interested in. The framework is developed with TypeScript. It provides great tooling support implemented in different text editors and IDEs; with precise auto completion suggestions and warning about typing errors; developers’ productivity can increase a lot. On top of that, Angular’s templates are very convenient for static analysis. This helps programmers to build tools which ease the development process even further. A few examples of such tools are codelyzer and the Angular Language Service. Finally, the framework provides predictable release schedule following semantic versioning. We always know what changes to expect in the next release to plan accordingly. What would you like to tell your followers about the latest development in the Angular eco-system? MG: Google is constantly making Angular for web development smaller and faster. Each new release introduces better tooling which drops more unused code from the bundles and makes them smaller. The Angular compiler also brings plenty of optimizations which transform our applications to better  performant versions of themselves. At the same time, we can see very minor incompatibility changes across major releases. The Angular team does an amazing job in making sure that they improve the framework a lot behind the surface but for us, the developers, they leave the APIs unchanged. On the other hand, we have the Angular community which builds on top of the core. There are plenty of community tools improving our day-to-day development process. Also, there are plenty of high quality material which help us to get started with the framework. Should beginners use Angular? Would it be advisable for a newbie JavaScript developer to start using Angular or would you suggest any other framework? MG: I’d definitely encourage beginner JavaScript developers to give Angular a try. They will build good habits by using TypeScript and have less bugs in their code because of the language’s type system. Also, Angular CLI is a great starting point for bootstrapping a new project - no matter whether you’re a beginner or an expert. What makes this book a must have for the would be Angular developers? MG: The book provides a gentle introduction to all the framework’s concepts. In the first chapters, we focus on ideas rather than digging into unfamiliar code. By the time we start writing applications, readers already have a good understanding of the framework foundation so they can just start coding without any struggle. As a former member of the Angular mobile team and long-term contributor, I have revealed implementation details which will help readers get in-depth knowledge about how everything works under the hood. From my teaching experience, I’ve noticed different patterns which help people develop a deeper understanding of new concepts and use them in practice. The main challenges of making the switch to Angular What are the main challenges that anyone would face while shifting to Angular framework? MG: There might be some conceptual overhead in the beginning. The framework encourages us to use best practices which means there might be a lot of new concepts, such as dependency injection, two-way data-binding, observables and Ahead-of-Time compilation. It takes time and practice to digest everything but the good thing is that we can do that incrementally. In the book I provide a step-by-step approach - we start developing fully functional applications with the bare minimum and after that increase our expressiveness and architecture by introducing new ideas and concepts. [box type="info" align="" class="" width=""]Check out this post to learn how to build components using Angular.[/box] Is Angular's dominance fragile? Angular is going through a lot of changes presently, do you feel that these many changes can impact the developer retainability of a particular tool or tech, especially when there are frameworks like React and Vue breathing down the neck of Angular? MG: The incorrect perception about fragility in the Angular’s API is a result of the rewrite of AngularJS. Often people incorrectly refer to AngularJS as Angular version 1 which makes developers think that Angular is the next version of AngularJS. This is incorrect. Angular and AngularJS are completely different frameworks, the only thing in common is that Angular is inspired by AngularJS. This incorrect statement also makes people think that the changes which will happen between Angular version 5 and Angular version 6, for instance, will be as impactful as the changes which happened between Angular version 2 and AngularJS. This is wrong as well. In fact, there were almost no backwards incompatible changes between Angular version 2 and Angular version 5 which means that the API is under strict control and the migration process between major releases is always only related to update of the project’s dependencies’ versions. Regarding the other libraries and frameworks out there such as React and Vue, I see that they are introducing a lot of new ideas as well. There’s competition which is very healthy since it allows the entire ecosystem to constantly evolve. 3 key features of Angular Please share three of the most remarkable features that you feel makes Angular special. Why should people switch to Angular? The dependency injection mechanism of the framework which makes our code testable and enforces better separation of concerns. I’ve had to use other alternative technologies in the past and I can honestly say that this is the feature I missed a lot. The Angular compiler is another remarkable feature. It transforms our application to much more performant versions of itself. Finally, I like the Angular templates. They have plenty of good features and thanks to the great design the Angular compiler is ableto perform a variety of optimizations over our applications. Could another framework replace Angular? Do you in the near future see any framework replacing Angular in popularity and if yes then why? MG: The JavaScript landscape has been very dynamic for the past couple of years. Although Vue is built by independent developers, recently there’s a noticeable focus on frameworks developed and maintained by large companies, such as React and Angular. I think this trend will stay because it’s much safer to bet the future of your product on a framework supported by a big organization. This means it is less likely to have unexpectedly discontinued maintenance and support. With all the qualities that Angular has, I believe that the framework has a very bright future. It has been adopted by a lot of large companies - Microsoft, Capital One, NBA, VMware, Google and many others. [box type="info" align="" class="" width=""]Check out this post on 5 web development tools that will matter in 2018[/box] When Angular made the breaking change to version 2, everyone was divided in their opinion about whether it was the right step, what was your thought? MG: As I mentioned above, Google didn’t introduce breaking changes to version 2 - they created a brand new framework inspired by AngularJS. It’s incorrect to refer to Angular as Angular 2, Angular 4, or Angular 5, etc. It’s just Angular. There’s a new major release of the framework every 6 months. At the moment we’re at version 5; 5 months from now Angular will reach version 6, etc. The differences between Angular version 2 and Angular version 5 are insignificant, there were very minimal backwards incompatible changes. It’s pointless to refer to every new version of Angular by placing a number behind unless we’re describing any specific change which happened across releases. In “Switching to Angular” I’ve focused on the solid foundation of the framework which is unlikely to change in near future. At ng-conf 2017 I introduced a tool which can automatically migrate any Angular application between versions 2 and 4 which simplified the transition process even further. On the other hand, AngularJS (which is incorrectly called Angular 1) is still in use, although Google strongly encourages developers to migrate to Angular. How is this book a stepping stone for a new Angular web developer and what should they try their hands on next? MG: “Switching to Angular” provides a great starting point for any intermediate JavaScript developer who wants to learn Angular. In case the reader has prior experience in AngularJS the transition of their mindset from AngularJS to Angular will be extremely smooth because of the comparison between the two frameworks that is provided. The book also explains in detail what should be the expectations of the readers regarding the future of the framework. If you are interested to get started with Angular javascript framework Switching to Angular - Third Edition is the go-to book to align with.  

Data analysis plays a vital role in organizations today. It enables effective decision-making by addressing fundamental business questions based on the understanding of the available data. While there are tons of open source and enterprise tools for conducting data analysis, IBM SPSS Statistics has emerged as a popular tool among statistical analysts and researchers. It offers them the perfect platform to quickly perform data exploration and analysis, and share their findings with ease. [author title=""]  Dr. Kenneth Stehlik-Barry Kenneth joined SPSS as Manager of Training in 1980 after using SPSS for his own research for several years. He has used SPSS extensively to analyze and discover valuable patterns that can be used to address pertinent business issues. He received his PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University and currently teaches in the Masters of Science in Predictive Analytics program there. Anthony J. Babinec Anthony joined SPSS as a Statistician in 1978 after assisting Norman Nie, the founder of SPSS, at the University of Chicago. Anthony has led a business development effort to find products implementing technologies such as CHAID decision trees and neural networks. Anthony received his BA and MA in Sociology with a specialization in Advanced Statistics from the University of Chicago and is on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association, where he has served in different positions including the President. [/author] In this interview, we take a look at the world of statistical data analysis and see how IBM SPSS Statistics makes it easier to derive business sense from data. Kenneth and Anthony also walk us through their recently published book - Data Analysis with IBM SPSS Statistics - and tell us how it benefits aspiring data analysts and statistical researchers. Key Takeaways - IBM SPSS Statistics IBM SPSS Statistics is a key offering of IBM Analytics - providing an integrated interface for statistical analysis on-premise and on the cloud SPSS Statistics is a self-sufficient tool - it does not require you to have any knowledge of SQL or any other scripting language SPSS Statistics helps you avoid the 3 most common pitfalls in data analysis, i.e. handling missing data, choosing the best statistical method for analysis and understanding the results of the analysis R and Python are not direct competitors to SPSS Statistics - instead, you can create customized solutions by integrating SPSS Statistics with these tools for effective analyses and visualization Data Analysis with IBM SPSS Statistics highlights various popular statistical techniques to the readers, and how to use them in order to gather useful hidden insights from their data Full Interview IBM SPSS Statistics is a popular tool for efficient statistical analysis. What do you think are the 3 notable features of SPSS Statistics that make it stand apart from the other tools available out there? SPSS Statistics has a very short learning curve which makes it ideal for analysts to use efficiently. It also has a very comprehensive set of statistical capabilities so virtually everything a researcher would ever need is encompassed in a single application. Finally, SPSS Statistics provides a wealth of features for preparing and managing data so it is not necessary to master SQL or another database language to address data-related tasks. With over 20 years of experience in this field, you have a solid understanding of the subject and, equally, of SPSS Statistics. How do you use the tool in your work? How does it simplify your day to day tasks related to data analysis? I have used SPSS Statistics in my work with SPSS and IBM clients over the years. In addition, I use SPSS for my own research analysis. It allows me to make good use of my time whether I'm serving clients or doing my own analysis because of the breadth of capabilities available within this one program. The fact that SPSS produces presentation-ready output further simplifies things for me since I can collect key results as I work and put them into a draft report and share them as required. What are the prerequisites to use SPSS Statistics effectively? For someone who intends to use SPSS Statistics for their data analysis tasks, how steep is the curve when it comes to mastering the tool? It certainly helps to have a understanding of basic statistics when you begin to use SPSS Statistics but it can be a valuable tool even with a limited background in statistics. The learning curve is a very "gentle slope" when it comes to acquiring sufficient familiarity with SPSS Statistics to use it very effectively. Mastering the software does involve more time and effort but one can accomplish this over time as one builds on the initial knowledge that comes fairly easily. The good news is that one can obtain a lot of value from the software well before one truly masters it by discovering the many features.   What are some of the common problems in data analysis? How does this book help the readers overcome them? Some of the most common pitfalls encountered when analyzing data involve handling missing/incomplete data, deciding which statistical method(s) to employ and understanding the results. In the book, we go into the details of detecting and addressing data issues including missing data. We also describe what each statistical technique provides and when it is most appropriate to use each of them. There are numerous examples of SPSS Statistics output and how the results can be used to assess whether a meaningful pattern exists. In the context of all the above, how does your book Data Analysis with IBM SPSS Statistics help readers in their statistical analysis journey? What, according to you, are the 3 key takeaways for the readers from this book? The approach we took with our book was to share with readers the most straightforward ways to use SPSS Statistics to quickly obtain the results needed to effectively conduct data analysis. We did this by showing the best way to proceed when it comes to analyzing data and then showing how this process can be done best in the software. The key takeaways from our book are the way to approach the discovery process when analyzing data, how to find hidden patterns present in the data and what to look for in the results provided by the statistical techniques covered in the book.   IBM SPSS Statistics 25 was released recently. What are the major improvements or features introduced in this version? How do these features help the analysts and researchers? There are a lot of interesting new features introduced in SPSS Statistics 25. For starters, you can copy charts as Microsoft Graphic Objects, which allows you to manipulate charts in Microsoft Office. There are changes to the chart editor that make it easier to customize colors, borders, and grid line settings in charts. Most importantly, it allows the implementation of Bayesian statistical methods. Bayesian statistical methods enable the researcher to incorporate prior knowledge and assumptions about model parameters. This facility looks like a good teaching tool for Statistical Educators. Data visualization goes a long way in helping decision-makers get an accurate sense of their data. How does SPSS Statistics help them in this regard? Kenneth: Data visualization is very helpful when it comes to communicating findings to a broader audience and we spend time in the book describing when and how to create useful graphics to use for this purpose. Graphical examination of the data can also provide clues regarding data issues and hidden patterns that warrant deeper exploration. These topics are also covered in the book. Anthony: SPSS Statistics’ data visualizations capabilities are excellent. The menu system makes it easy to generate common chart types. You can develop customized looks and save them as a template to be applied to future charts. Underlying SPSS Graphics is an influential approach called the Grammar of Graphics. The SPSS graphics capabilities are embodied in a versatile syntax called Graphics Programming Language. Do you foresee SPSS Statistics facing stiff competition from open source alternatives in the near future? What is the current sentiment in the SPSS community regarding these topics? Kenneth: Open source tools based alternatives such as Python and R are potential competition for SPSS Statistics but I would argue otherwise. These tools, while powerful, have a much steeper learning curve and will prove difficult for subject matter experts that periodically need to analyze data. SPSS is ideally suited for these periodic analysts whose main expertise lies in their field which could be healthcare, law enforcement, education, human resources, marketing, etc. Anthony: The open source programs have a lot of capability but they are also fairly low-level languages, so you must learn to code. The learning curve is steep, and there are many maintainability issues. R has 2 major releases a year. You can have a situation where the data and commands remain the same, but the result changes when you update R. There are many dependencies among R packages. R has many contributors and is an avenue for getting your hands on new methods. However, there is a wide variance in the quality of the contributors and contributed packages. The occasional user of SPSS has an easier time jumping back in than does the occasional user of open source software. Most importantly, it is easier to employ SPSS in production settings. SPSS Statistics supports custom analytical solutions through integration with R and Python. Is this an intent from IBM to join hands with the open source community? This is a good follow-up question to the one asked before. Actually, the integration with R and Python allows SPSS Statistics to be extended to accommodate a situation in which an analyst wishes to try an algorithm or graphical technique not directly available in the software but which is supported in one of these languages. It also allows those familiar with R or Python to use SPSS Statistics as their platform and take advantage of all the built-in features it comes with, out of the box while still having the option to employ these other languages where they provide additional value. Lastly, this book is designed for analysts and researchers who want to get meaningful insights from their data as quickly as possible. How does this book help them in this regard? SPSS Statistics does make it possible to very quickly pull in data and get insightful results. This book is designed to streamline the steps involved in getting this done while also pointing out some of the less obvious "hidden gems" that we have discovered during the decades of using SPSS in virtually every possible situation.

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