SD Times November 2022

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N

Cloudflare announces CAPTCHA alternative

Turnstile is an easy to use and private replacement for CAPTCHA (Completely Auto mated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart)

With this, any site can choose to replace CAPTCHA through an A P I , re g a rd l ess of whether or not they a re a c u sto m e r of Cloudflare

According to Cloud flare, this alternative to CAPTCHA is intend ed to solve the issues of poor user experi ence and privacy practices through a drop in replacement for reCAPTCHA that works to preserve the users privacy

Turnstile works by auto m a t i ca l l y c h o os i n g f ro m a rotating suite of browser chal lenges that operate behind the scenes, searching for sig nals that there is a human user Turnstile can also fine tune the difficulty of the chal lenge, offering more difficult c h a l l e n g es to v i s i to rs t h a t exhibit non human behaviors

DALL-E now available without waitlist

DALL E allows users to type i nf i n i te co m b i n a t i o n s of prompts that will each gener ate a unique set of images generated by ML/AI.

Whether the prompts are as simple as “an armchair in the shape of an avocado” or as elaborate and abstract as “a f u t u r i st i c c y b o rg p oste r hanging in a neon lit subway station,” the model generates digital images from natural language descriptions.

DALL E was originally revealed by OpenAI in a blog

Asana now tracks progress against strategic initiatives

The offerings are intended to assist organizations in shifting priorities as business needs change with new goals reporting, decrease repeated cross functional work and wasted costs with an integrated tech stack, and scale global security with enterprise security features.

With this release, enterprises have access to advanced reporting and dashboards for goals, built on the proprietary Asana Work Graph.

This provides executives with a birds eye view into the status of their company’s goals, which projects and portfolios are helping with the progress of those goals, impact on business outcomes, and roadblocks.

Additionally, with new ways to bring data from sev eral external tools into Asana, Asana becomes a cen tralized place for cross functional teams to better track work being done together, avoid time consuming redundancies, minimize costs, and decrease errors.

According to the company, these new features also work to improve security by auditing what information is entered, flagging vulnerabilities, and maintaining compliance within highly regulated industries.

post in January 2021, and it uses a version of GPT 3, anoth er project by OpenAI that can generate original writing, mod ified to generate images.

More than 1.5 million users are now actively creating over 2 million images a day with DALL E, according to OpenAI.

Google supports passkeys on Android, Chrome

Google has announced that it will be supporting passkeys on Android and Chrome Passkeys are an authentication method that offers an alternative to passwords, and the technology was announced by Apple over the summer at its WWDC con ference

For users, using a passkey is similar to confirming the use of a saved password by scanning one’s fingerprint or using facial recognition

The company has enabled two ca p a b i l i t i es re l a te d to passkeys First, users will now b e a b l e to c rea te a n d u se p a ss keys o n A n d ro i d Th e passkeys are synced through

Google’s Password Manager.

Second, developers can incorporate passkey support into their applications using the WebAuthn API for Chrome applications. Google’s next major milestone towards sup porting passkeys will be to offer an API for native Android apps.

According to Google, the p a ss keys t h a t a re c re a te d through that API will work with apps that are affiliated with the same domain. Google believes that the API will also provide a unified way to let users choose if they want to use a passkey or password.

Ubuntu 22.10 focuses on the IoT ecosystem

Canonical, the publishers of Ubuntu, have announced Ubuntu’s latest interim release Ubuntu 22 10, also named Kinetic Kudo, focuses mainly on the IoT ecosystem

“Connected devices are an exc i t i n g a rea of i n n ova t i o n that also create new digital risks in the home and the busi n ess We a re fo c u se d o n enabling a new generation of

easy to use and highly secure IoT, so these developers in particular will find a number of quality of life improvements fo r e m b e d d e d d ev i ce a n d remote development in Ubun tu 22.10”, said Mark Shuttle worth, CEO of Canonical. ”This release also brings new capa bilities to our enterprise man agement story. The new Land scape beta makes it easier than ever to administer your entire Ubuntu estate across any architecture.”

Ubuntu 22.10 adds support for MicroPython on microcon trollers, such as the Raspberry Pi Pico W. The graphics stack has been transitioned to kms, which means that developers can also run Pi based graphi cal applications outside of a desktop session, such as on an embedded display.

Landscape 22.10 is in beta and it allows developers to run and manage Ubuntu on any architecture and the monitor i n g , m a n a g e m e nt, pa tc h i n g , and compliance reporting is handled on the server. Land sca p e S e r ve r ca n n ow b e i n sta l l e d o n A r m o r A r m based computers

This release also supports RISC V processors and hard ware, which will enable Land scape to be deployed as a portable management system.

Datadog introduces new continuous testing platform

The team at the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications, Datadog, has announced the general avail ability of Datadog Continuous Testing This helps developers and quality engineers create, manage, and run end to end tests for their web applications

This release is intended to simplify test creation in order to speed up software release cycles by providing users with a complete testing workbench that simplifies test creation and maintenance

According to the company, this release allows engineers to create tests directly from the UI without the need for scripting, run tests in parallel, and integrate with CI tools so tests can become a part of their existing CI process

Node.js 19 updates V8 JavaScript engine

The Node js team has released Node js 19, which updates the V8 JavaScript engine to ver s i o n 1 0 7 a n d e n a b l es H T T P (s) / 1 1 Ke e p A l i ve by default

Ve rs i o n 1 0 7 of t h e V 8 JavaScript engine adds to the JavaScript API the latest ver s i o n of I n t l N u m b e r Fo r m a t, which lets developers create a fo r m a tte r i n sta n ce t h a t i s reusable and that suppor ts locale aware number format ting

By h av i n g H T T P (s) / 1 1 KeepAlive enabled by default,

any outgoing connection will automatically use it and it will p rov i d e b e tte r t h ro u g h p u t. This is because connections are reused.

Acco rd i n g to t h e te a m , Node.js 19 will become the “Current” release line after Node.js 18 enters Long Term Suppor t at the end of the month, and it will remain that way through April 2023.

Tricentis introduces portfolio updates

The continuous testing compa ny Tricentis announced the release of version 9 0 of Tricen tis NeoLoad as well as new products Tricentis Test Man agement for Jira and Tricentis Test Automation for Salesforce

Th ese so l u t i o n s wo r k to further expand the company’s capabilities in continuous per formance testing, test man agement, and test automation in order to bring organizations improved application quality and delivery time

Key benefits of NeoLoad 9 0 i n c l u d e b rowse r b a se d testing to allow users to lever age RealBrowser to scale their p e r fo r m a n ce e n g i n e e r i n g practice into Agile, a standard solution for browser and pro tocol testing, efficient tech nology that consumes around 30% fewer memory and CPU resources than legacy tools, an easy to use low code/no co d e a p p ro a c h , a n d C I /C D integration ability

With Test management for Jira, users gain the ability to establish and maintain trace ability between requirements from the development team and tests to validate require ments, performance and usabil ity for several teams and proj ects at scale, and an intuitive UI

Lastly, Test Automation for Salesforce offers customers

context aware pre built func tions in order to lower the time to set up reusable test compo nents; no code, stable, lan guage and release agnostic automation to lower the time to identify Salesforce Lightning elements; and profile based testing to test Salesforce func tionality for each profile.

PostgreSQL 15 targets developers

According to the project main tainers, this release builds on t h e p e r fo r m a n ce i m p rove ments of recent releases with gains for managing workloads in both local and distributed d e p l oy m e n t s, i n c l u d i n g improved sorting

PostgreSQL 15 is intended to improve the overall develop er experience with the addition of the MERGE command for writing conditional SQL state ments that can include INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE actions

People on the move

within one statement as well as several capabilities for observ ing the state of the database.

This latest release improves on PostgreSQL’s in memory and on disk sorting algorithms, with benchmarks showing speedups of 25% 400% depending on which data types are sorted.

Additionally, using row num ber(), rank(), dense rank(), and count() as window functions also bring performance bene fits in PostgreSQL 15.

This release also provides heightened flexibility for man aging logical replication with row filtering and column lists. These features allow users to choose to replicate a subset of data from a table.

It also introduces a new logging format: jsonlog which o u t p u t s l o g d a ta u s i n g a d e f i n e d J S O N st r u c t u re, allowing PostgreSQL logs to b e p ro cesse d i n st r u c tu re d logging systems. z

n Mike Burkland has been announced as the CEO of Five9 Burkland was previously CEO of the company, but stepped down after being diagnosed with cancer in 2017, remaining involved with the company as Chairman He is resuming the role as a result of current CEO Rowan Trollope leaving the company The role transition will be effective on November 28

n PagerDuty has announced two new executive appointments: Sesh Tirumala as chief information officer (CIO) and Heather Hinton as chief information security officer (CISO). Tirumala has over 25 years of experience in the industry and has held leadership roles at Anaplan and Cis co. Hinton has over 30 years of experience, with her most recent role being CISO at RingCentral after holding several leadership roles at IBM.

n Red Hat has named Carolyn Nash as its new senior vice president and chief operating officer Previously she served as the company’s chief financial officer, a role that will be taken over by Robert Leibrock, who will report to Nash Before joining Red Hat, Nash held leadership roles at Cisco, Hewlett Packard, and KPMG

What’s new in Visual Studio in 2022

BY J E N N A SA R G E N T BA R R O N

Visual Studio is Microsoft’s inte grated development environment (IDE) that is used by developers all around the world

According to Stack Overflow’s 2022 development survey, 32% of developers preferred Visual Studio as their IDE, coming in second to the more light weight IDE Visual Studio Code, which was used by 74% of respondents

Given its popularity, we ’ re going back through the past year to highlight what’s new in Visual Studio. There were several releases in 2022, so it’s possible to have missed a new feature here or there that you could be taking advantage of.

W h i l e m a n y n e w f e a t u r e s w e r e added to the platform in 2022, Simon Calvert, partner director of product m a n a g e m e n t f o r Vi s u a l S t u d i o a t Microsoft, explained that the customer themes the Visual Studio team focused on this past year were productivity and performance, enterprise success and scale, support for modern workloads, and innovation in AI assistance, collab oration, and Git tools

On the performance front, one sig nificant change of note is that Visual Studio 2022 is the first 64 bit version This will enable it to be used for larger scale projects

According to Tim Huckaby, a Microsoft global regional director, a pre vious critique of Visual Studio was that it struggled when handling large and com plex projects, and the 64 bit version makes it more capable of taking on those complex projects. “So the really huge projects, you know, the multimillion lines of code, or complex machine learning and AI tech stuff, now can perform and actually use these powerful CPUs that computers are shipping with,” he said.

Other performance additions that came this year include reducing the time it takes to load in large solutions, reducing the time it takes to search for text in files, and ensuring that typing is responsive

On the developer productivity side, Microsoft introduced a number of AI assisted capabilities that make coding easier for developers These include things like suggesting code or applying repeated edits, Calvert explained

.NET Hot Reload was another capa bility that became generally available in Visual Studio 2022. It enables develop ers to modify code while the application is running, rather than having to pause or hit a breakpoint.

“Regardless of the type of app you ’ re working on, our goal with Hot Reload is t o s a v e y o u a s m a n y a p p r e s t a r t s between edits as possible, making you more productive by reducing the time you spend waiting for apps to rebuild, restart, re navigate to the previous loca tion where you were in the app itself, etc,” Dmitry Lyalin, principal program manager for NET, wrote in a blog post explaining the feature

Calvert believes that Hot Reload combined with the previously men tioned AI assisted capabilities make Visual Studio "the best place for devel opers to rapidly create and innovate ”

“The productivity is just so good,” said Huckaby “You can actually learn how to build software from the tool itself, and I think that’s great I’ve always made these predictions that soft w a r e d e v e l o p m e n t w i l l u l t i m a t e l y become easy and we’ll get software architecture for free, and it seems like my predictions are coming true. The difficulty these days is actually the defi nition of the business problem you ’ re trying to solve, and how you ’ re going to

solve it, as opposed to the code you ’ re going to write to do it ”

.NET MAUI released this year

Another major introduction into Visual Studio this year is NET MAUI, which s t a n d s f o r m u l t i p l a t f o r m A p p U I NET MAUI allows developers to cre ate applications for different operating s y s t e m s a n d d e v i c e s u s i n g a s i n g l e codebase

According to Calvert, these apps will look and feel like the operating system they belong on and the layouts are fully adapted to each device, without the developer having to write additional code.

“The GA release of .NET MAUI was a notable moment because of the simpli fication it brings developers targeting different platforms for their apps, ” said Calvert “We had many different control vendors and library developers provide support for NET MAUI from day one and this continues to grow day by day ”

The team also had accessibility in mind when developing NET MAUI It introduced semantic properties, which allow anyone developing with NET MAUI to build accessible applications “This allows developers to precisely con trol the accessibility of their application to suit their app needs,” said Calvert

The team also published documen tation and a blog series to get develop ers up to speed on these accessibility features quickly

Accessibility in Visual Studio 2022

Accessibility wasn’t just a consideration in .NET MAUI, but in Visual Studio as a whole. This past year, Microsoft put a lot of effort and resources into both, making Visual Studio more accessible.

Within Visual Studio, one new fea ture is font ligatures, which can help

r e d u c e c o g n i t i v e l o a d a n d i m p r o v e readability. Ligatures are characters that are combined together to make them easier to read For example, a lig ature of “Th” would appear as if the tops of the two letters touch, rather than as separate characters with a gap in between them

Calvert also went on to explain that the new colorized tabs and themes may be helpful for developers with different visual disabilities The team also recent ly added audio cues that can be used by developers using a screen reader, which plays a sound when the caret comes to a line containing a breakpoint, error, or warning

And code synthesis tools, such as IntelliCode and Whole Line Comple tion, can help developers with motor d i s a b i l i t i e s b y r e d u c i n g k e y s t r o k e s , Calvert explained

An upcoming feature for developers with reading disabilities is the spell checker. According to Calvert, this has been a frequently requested feature “from our users with reading disabilities to reduce anxiety that comes from spelling mistakes.”

What’s next?

The Visual Studio team’s next goal is to accelerate developers’ journey to the c l o u d , a c c o r d i n g t o C a l v e r t T h i s includes making sure Visual Studio works well with Microsoft Azure They are also working to reduce friction in deploying container based applications to scalable platform services

Building on the release of Microsoft Dev Box, which is an Azure service that g i v e s a c c e s s t o d e v e n v i r o n m e n t s , developers can also expect more devel o p e r f o c u s e d o p t i m i z a t i o n s f o r t h e cloud to come as well

“Visual Studio remains the absolute best in class fully integrated develop ment environment for NET develop ment of any kind, and we will continue to deliver updates in productivity in c o d i n g w o r k f l o w s , m o r e A I a s s i s t e d development improvements, perform ance, and improving the inner loop for API development for developers, keep ing them closer to their code in a single development tool,” said Calvert. z

Key features in each preview release

While this article has gone over the broad changes to the language this year, here are several of the specific additions to Visual Studio that came out in the various preview releases this year

Visual Studio 2022 17.1

1. Find in Files is now enabled by default, which creates an index of files when an application is loaded in order to make search faster

2. Git updates include the ability to compare the current Git branch against other branches, and the ability to check out a commit or the tip of any remote branch to more easily review history.

3. New visualizations for embedded reg isters and RTOS threads.

4. Solution Filters allow developers to choose what projects to load, which helps avoid loading entire solutions if all you want is an individual project.

Visual Studio 2022 17.2

1. Embedded source and Source Link can now be surfaced as part of ‘Go to Implementation.’ This allows you to nav igate to original source files that imple ment a target symbol.

2. You can now convert normal or ver batim string literals to a raw string liter al, which is a new language feature in C# 11 that does not require escaping.

3. A new visualizer for IEnumerable object types has been added to the debugging experience, providing a clearer view of information and easier navigation

4. In the Razor editor, they’ve added the ability to collapse region, support for snippet functionality in C# code, and a shortcut for ‘wrap div ’

5. Web Live Preview for ASP NET Frame work allows you to turn the application you’re working on into your design sur face It also provides code synchroniza tion across source and web surface

6. Expanded capabilities in Connected S e r v i ces to ex te n d d eve l o p m e n t to Azure

Visual Studio 2022 17.3

1. Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio: Allows you to develop apps that embed UI in a tab, send a notification to a channel, trigger a task from a command in the chat, and more

2. Azure Container Apps: Allows you to r u n m i c rose r v i ces a n d co nta i n e r i ze d applications on a serverless platform, so that they can receive the benefits of containers without worrying about con figuring the underlying infrastructure

3. Live Unit Testing now scales better by scoping the builds to only what is neces sary, and improvements to the build mechanism make builds more reliable and support a bigger range of solutions

4. Git Line staging allows you to stage lines of code from the editor and the diff view

5. Tabs can be wrapped into multiple rows, allowing for more horizontal tabs to be opened at the same time

6. You can now easily re open your most recently closed tab by right clicking on another tab, using the Ctrl + K or Ctrl + Z shortcut, or by navigating through the menu

What’s next for Visual Studio?'

While not out yet, the next release is Visual Studio 17.4. It will be a long term servicing channel release and will receive updates through July 2024

Here are some of the highlights from the various preview releases for 17 4:

1. Rollback and Remove out of support co m p o n e nts a re two fea tu res b e i n g added to the installer Rollback allows you to return to a previously installed version of Visual Studio and Remove lets you remove all the components that have transitioned to no longer being supported

2. The Document Outline window in .NET shows the file structure as a sym bol tree for easy navigation

3. Support for Arm64 on Windows 11

4. An early preview of the markdown edi tor

5. Inline Rename UI in .NET allows you to rename a type

6. F i l te r i n g , so r t i n g , ex p o r t i n g , a n d theming have been added to the DataT able visualizer

Digital.ai’s AI-Powered DevOps Platform aggregates data across delivery life cycle

BY K AT I E D E E

The digital transformation company Digital ai announced the Banff release of its AI Pow ered DevOps Platform This release brings users expanded intelligence, automation, and collaboration in order to help companies accelerate their dig ital transformation

A c c o r d i n g t o D i g i t a l a i , with this latest version, public sector and enterprise organi zations can speed up delivery while still managing risks and focusing on driving value from software investments.

T h e a d d e d i n t e l l i g e n c e capabilities work to aggregate customer data across the entire soft ware development and delivery lifecy cle, automatically creating a DevOps data lake to create a single source of truth for an organization’s investments from planning to production

“Software strategy now underpins every business strategy and business leaders need to navigate global economic uncertainty with agility, automation and security,” said Stephen Elop, CEO of

Digital.ai. “We are truly excited to be delivering to our customers our latest release that removes the mystery and complexities in mapping software invest ments to topline business goals and prior ities Digital ai believes that the future of enterprise DevOps is being able to turn data into actionable, predictive insights ”

Additionally, users gain real time insights, historical trend analysis, and predictability in augmented analytic

dashboards. This contextualizes data and allows for organizations to observe trends across the enterprise

Users also gain access to a Hoylu whiteboard integration so users can uti l i z e w h i t e b o a r d b a s e d c o l l a b o r a t i o n w i t h H o y l u ’ s v i s u a l a n d i t e r a t i v e approach to achieve better Agile prac tices, enhancements to the recorder for Testing, expanded application security, and more z

CloudBees acquires ReleaseIQ to expand DevSecOps offerings

BY JA KU B L E W KOW I C Z

C l o u d B e e s a c q u i r e d t h e R e l e a s e I Q

DevOps Platform to expand the compa n y ’ s D e v S e c O p s c a p a b i l i t i e s a n d t o empower customers with a low code, end to end release orchestration and visibility solution.

The SaaS offering enables DevOps organizations to compose and analyze workflows, and also orchestrate a com b i n a t i o n o f C I / C D t e c h n o l o g i e s including Jenkins without the need to

migrate or replace

“The decision to acquire ReleaseIQ was rooted in three core beliefs: choice, visibility and continuous value,” said Anuj Kapur, president and CEO at CloudBees “First, businesses need to empower developers by providing a choice of tools versus forcing a toolset. Second, as DevSecOps matures, it is no longer acceptable to have a limited view of your software delivery ecosystem. And lastly, the future of business is root

ed in the ability to continuously deliver innovation to the customers you serve ”

The new capability enables teams to coordinate coherent, effective deploy ments and releases across teams, appli cations and environments

The pipeline coordinator is compat ible with most CI technologies includ ing CloudBees CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab, and Bamboo, as well as CD technologies such as ArgoCD or home grown deployment tools.

Digital.ai Intelligence Change Risk Prediction Overview dashboard.

Ford’s Cloud-Native Transformation:

a Q&A

Every company is now a software company, as Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, famously said That includes Ford Motor Company, which is now six years into its transition to running on cloud native software In this Q&A, Ford employees Beckie Riss and Satish Puranam share their perspectives about Ford’s technology, helping their people adapt and how having an advanced technology strategy helps them recruit new talent

BECKIE RISS (Principal Architect, Devel oper Relations, Tools & Enablement): My team is part of Enterprise Architecture, and builds internal platforms, tools, and processes to support cloud native software development across Ford.

SATISH PURANAM (Technical Leader, Cloud): My team is a part of Ford’s IT Operations, where we specialize in public and private cloud technologies, which includes a lot of Research & Development, product evaluation, services inception, and are always on call to solve any major service disruption across our portfolio

Why should software exper ts consider Ford?

RISS: We have committed to a compre hensive, company wide digital transfor mation, have our best product lineup ever (including #2 in EV sales to Tesla) and are making it even more enjoyable to own a Ford vehicle with software led always on technologies, services and experiences For example, we learn cus tomer preferences from connected vehi cle data and then can add new features or make other improvements by ship ping software over the air to those prod ucts. Just consider F 150 and Mustang

Langdon White is a clinical assistant professor of Computing and Data Sciences at Boston University He joined BU after nine years at Red Hat

Mach E customers who recently received Ford Power Up software updates with our BlueCruise hands free, eyes on the road highway driving tech nology One day, they were driving their vehicles normally but the next day they could go hands free To support all of this, we are making it easier for software experts to focus on the best parts of the jobs while removing many of the obsta cles that before prevented them from being more creative and productive

How did Ford get star ted on this technical transformation?

RISS: In 2016, Marcy Klevorn, Ford Smart Mobility CIO, kicked off an initia tive to begin Ford Motor Company’s cloud native application development journey to harness the full power of

modern cloud computing technologies and infrastructure As part of this initia tive, the Cloud & DevOps Growth and Maturation (CDGM) team was formed under the Enterprise Architecture Leadership to accelerate the develop ment of cloud native applications and upskill many Software Engineers Ford’s journey to modernize application host ing environment, to support software development, was driven by a desire to reduce lead time to market and keep our cost and complexity in check for the development community and infrastruc ture site reliability engineers.

PURANAM: We have shifted our digital strategy over that time as new technolo gies have become more mainstream and believe that will continue as there is no end in sight for the innovations

BY L A N G D O N W H I T E

that may become reality in the future

Our main challenges are around end user enablement and reducing the huge barrier to entry to these modern tech nology stacks.

What does success look like for you?

PURANAM: Our software engineers can q u i c k l y d e l i v e r b u s i n e s s c a p a b i l i t i e s with a high level of satisfaction and effectiveness

RISS: The team goal is to allow freedom of choice to Software Engineers to pick and choose technology and toolsets that innovate and provide an “opinionated stack ”

What tools and technologies are you adopting?

PURANAM: Our focus areas include public cloud, and open technologies like Kubernetes, Knative, Istio, Tekton, ArgoCD, Kubevirt, Prometheus, Sig Store, and Terraform Also, data plat forms like Airflow, Kubeflow, Seldon to name a few

RISS: The team is currently working on a software platform using Backstage to consolidate and make the various por tals, services, guides, tools, and infra structure onboarding utilities seamless for Software Engineers.

Part of your work is “cultural transforma tion”. What parts of Ford’s development culture need to evolve as part of adopting new technology?

PURANAM: We recognized early on we needed to redefine the roles we valued, educate our workforce to fill those roles, and organize differently to be nimbler First, IT leadership team defined the key culture values: “be curious”, “do the right thing”, and “create tomorrow ”

RISS: Our people started to recognize they needed to own their own profes sional development Our CIO created PowerUp Time, which is four hours p e r w e e k w h e r e e m p l o y e e s c o u l d spend time upskilling or working on an i n n o v a t i v e p r o j e c t t o t r a n s f o r m t h e tools and platforms we used We also recognized it made sense to have a cen tral team to work out the kinks of put ting dev tools together and make those platforms available for software engi neers, rather than having people repeat integration work

What have been the most difficult changes around Cloud Native and Open Source for your staff?

RISS: Self service. The cloud native platform puts you, the developer, behind the wheel. That realization has been a mixed bag; some people are excited to be in control, while others are terrified. Hence, we need to build platforms/ser vices that provide an easy on ramp with adequate guard rails built in Advocacy became hugely important So much of our work is getting started guides, videos, FAQs, and 1 on 1s

PURANAM: Lack of an easy on ramp and rapid pace of change, so developers need to be always on their toes Reducing cog nitive load for our developers is hard

Did KubeByExample.com help with adopting these changes?

PURANAM: We created a reference application based on the KubeByExam ple tutorials that helps our people learn Kubernetes and Tekton Everything that the site talks about is something that our developers need to learn

Speaking of Tekton, how did your team come to adopt it? Were they already familiar with Continuous Integration/ Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)?

RISS: When we started our journey in 2016, the organization started to adopt

using CI/CD pipelines, mainly using Jenkins. The culture change of moving to CI/CD was slow and relied on where we wanted to invest on modernizing our legacy, but quick as we developed greenfield applications Tekton didn’t come on our horizon until we got a sup porting partner So, the teams went from adopting CI/CD to adopting Tek ton in the last 18 months

P U RA N A M : Te k t o n i s K u b e r n e t e s native, and we wanted that to leverage our growing expertise We were looking for reusable components with loose coupling to create individual tasks and let developers re use those tasks

Tekton has let us abstract a lot of con cepts away, so that teams don’t need to be experts in CI/CD to use it We had Terraform to do provisioning, and Tek ton gave us a parallel way to drive other infrastructure changes

RISS: We have been working on adopt ing best practices recommended by DORA, which advocates Infrastruc ture as Code (IaC), CI/CD to drive fre q u e n t a n d s m a l l r e l e a s e s t h a t g o through proper functional and security testing. We believe this approach and practices are essential to succeed.

What about adopting Knative and serverless platforms?

PURANAM: Knative is an abstraction layer to remove the complexities of Kubernetes Do developers need to have expertise in 1000s of Kubernetes objects? Or do they have some code and don’t need to care about infrastruc ture? It’s all about how we reduce the cognitive load on developers

RISS: It lets our team abstract away all the complexities around building and deploying containers for the Angular, Java Spring Boot, and Node js Technol ogy stacks

Any final thoughts about Ford and the future of Cloud Native?

RISS: I have seen so many technological advancements over my career it is hard to anticipate the future. I can say with confidence that we will adopt new tech nologies as they emerge and leverage them to the benefit of software devel opment for the company.

BY K AT I E D E E

It can be argued that the only con

a

advancements being made in cloud computing along with the evolution of the development process, the ability to keep up with the newest skills is an essential part of a developer’s job

That being said, an essential part of a developer manager ’ s job is to get their team trained on the newly required skills while also not falling behind on current work

How managers are training

So, what is the best way to accomplish this? According to Jonathan Herke, manager of developer relations at the advanced analytics and machine learn i n g c o m p a n y Ti g e r G r a p h , h a n d s o n training is the key.

Herke discovered that both he and the members of his team prefer to learn by doing, rather than learning a new skill and then trying to put it into prac tice.

“It’s about project based work,” he said “You can learn things through books and videos but if you don’t apply it, you won’t really learn it ”

Josep Prat, open source engineering director at the data infrastructure com pany Aiven, agreed that hands on train ing is the most effective method, how ever, he also pointed out that this could vary from developer to developer

“In my opinion, it depends on the lev el the developer is on, ” Prat said “If they have just started their career we might need one type of training but if they are at a later stage we may need another ”

He explained that the best kind of training is one that is tailored to each individual, rather than mandating that managers have to follow a company wide standard

Morgan Logue, VP of research and development at the low code software d e v e l o p m e n t c o m p a n y O u t S y s t e m s , emphasized that every developer has specific strengths and weaknesses that influence the way they learn.

“I’ve found some developers that are extremely good at understanding how to properly use a tool, I’ve found some that are extremely good at evaluating whether a tool is a fit for a particular use case, and I have found some that are really good at evaluating the shifting landscape and combination of tools So it really depends on the phase of the development cycle,” Logue said

B e s i d e s a h a n d s o n a p p r o a c h though, Andrew Knight, director of Test Automation University at the test automation company Applitools, said that he feels self guided, online training can be incredibly effective

He explained that with the amount o f i n f o r m a t i o n a n d c o u r s e s r e a d i l y available at every developer’s fingertips, not taking advantage of this prolifera tion of material would be a huge missed opportunity.

The benefits of collaborative learning

For managers who want to stick to a more hands on approach, Herke went

on to say that collaborative learning is a good way to accomplish this

He said that appointing a more sen ior developer to assist a junior develop e r o f t e n t i m e s a i d s i n t h e l e a r n i n g process

“There’s times when a developer will get stuck on a task that if they just had someone to ask, it would probably take them about five minutes,” he said “So we highly encourage that if the devel oper runs into something, they are not afraid to just ask and have that one minute conversation ”

Additionally, Logue said that one useful way to put collaborative learning into practice is through the "train the trainer" approach

This is where a developer is sent to training in order to become a subject matter expert. The developer would then be able to apply their new skills to the use cases best suited for the busi ness as well as help other developers on their team master those skills.

“I think it’s a lot easier to learn a tool

if you already understand how it applies to what you are using it for rather than constantly having to take the reference use case and extrapolate that and think about your own use cases at the same time,” Logue explained

Prat also spoke about the impor tance of creating these learning net works within an organization

He said that while it is the manager ’ s job to lead their team, it is not necessar ily their job to teach Rather, a good manager works to enable their team with the correct mentors and tools needed to support their developers’ learning

He explained that pairing a newer developer with a more senior one can enrich both of their learning experi ences as the newer developer learns the skills and the senior developer learns how to effectively teach

“What I need to make sure is that I know where to direct people so they can find the answers that they need… I believe that we just need to guide them and show them the path but not neces sarily pitch them a specific skill,” Prat explained.

Remote training

Additionally, remote and hybrid work has greatly altered the way that devel oper training looks today

According to Knight, the remote working world has led to online learn i n g p r o g r a m s b e c o m i n g e v e n m o r e prevalent

“ T h e r e h a s d e f i n i t e l y b e e n a n

Dev Manager

the remote training process.

“How can we foster that conversa t i o n a l w a y t o s t a y e n g a g e d ? O u r standups are not meant to be like ‘How do you do this?’ and ‘Did you do this?’ it’s more of a communication touch point so we can have a discussion and really understand what’s happening,” said Herke

Prat noted that the effects of the pandemic are still being felt, and so the perfect solution has not been found yet

He explained that organizations are slowly moving towards better training methods that are more well suited for fully remote or hybrid work, but there are still improvements to be made

“We are now also dealing with time zones and having half of the team mem bers on the West Coast of the U S while others are in eastern Europe,” Prat said “Now, Instead of doing live sessions, we ’ ve needed to do more pre recorded sessions… Now the develop ers can learn at their will and there are no deadlines and everyone can go at their own pace… And I think that is one of the right steps.”

OutSystems’ Logue said training in a remote or hybrid setting is actually slightly easier, due to the decrease in the size of groups that are being trained at one time With travel and budgetary restrictions imposed by the pandemic, the attendance at training events has g o n e d o w n H o w e v e r, a c c o r d i n g t o Logue, organizations are still reaping the same benefits

emphasis placed on online and virtual learning,” he said “Those courses have kind of become the standard rather than the exception.”

Herke also emphasized the impor t a n c e o f c r e a t i n g a n d m a i n t a i n i n g m e a n i n g f u l c o m m u n i c a t i o n b e t w e e n the manager and their team throughout

“If you send the right individuals to that training, the information that is then transmitted to the organization is very contextual to what the organization is doing and I think people learn how we ’ re using the technology faster,” he said “It doesn’t necessarily mean that they understand all of the ways that the technology can pivot and evolve, but they definitely understand how to use it for the problems directly in front of them right now ”

Training via conferences

Beyond training within the organiza tion, though, Herke said that confer ences can be a valuable learning experi

ence as well.

He explained that while conferences alone may not be hands on enough to fully teach a new skill, they open up the possibility for unexpected learning

“Going to a conference you might be exposed to something that you might not typically have been exposed to, and that’s the great part about them,” Herke e x p l a i

d

Yo

glimpse, it’s like an appetizer into some thing ”

According to Herke, after a confer ence, developers can look deeper into those little tidbits of information and see how they can apply to their own organization and the current work that they are doing

This allows for developers to proac tively participate in their own education and really learn about the things that interest them.

While Prat agreed that conferences have a valuable place in training, he also said that their value decreases the more skilled a developer becomes.

He explained that as the skills some one is learning become more and more complex, the less of that skill they will be able to effectively learn during a lecture

“Conferences may be seen in the earlier stages, not so much as a learning area, but a kick off to those training ses sions that will happen in the future,” said Prat

According to Logue, conferences are also a useful way to understand the full intention behind a certain technol ogy This is essential in determining whether or not that technology is right for a particular business

He expanded on this, saying that he does not believe that conferences feed training directly, but rather work to ensure that managers are training their teams on only the most useful and fitting technology for their particular use cases

Learning has no stopping point

Herke also explained the importance of continuous learning. He said that while a formal training period is paramount for certain skills, developers should be learning almost constantly throughout

Knowing your team

As a manager, the importance of knowing your developers well enough to under stand when they are struggling with a skill cannot be understated, according to Jonathan Herke, manager of developer relations at the advanced analytics and machine learning company TigerGraph

“I never want to set someone up for failure, so if I do not feel like they are confident enough to accomplish something solo, I will usually pair people together,” he said

As a manager, knowing your developers on this level is an essential aspect of being an effective leader

Morgan Logue, VP of research and development at the low code software devel opment company OutSystems, explained that when a manager takes the time to get to know the developers on their team, it not only helps to determine when they are struggling, but this knowledge is essential when it comes to discerning learning styles in the training process

“[Learning styles] lend themselves to very different skill sets that have very par ticular use cases and are optimal in certain situations and not ideal in others,” he said “You have to know your team at that level You have to know how they think because without understanding that, it is very hard to be able to predictively figure out how your team is going to process information ”

When trying to discern these differences in learning styles among the developers on a team, Knight said that intentionality is essential

He explained, “Mentorship is not something where someone just jumps in every now and again to answer a quick question, there is an established and explicit rela tionship that must be made and maintained there, and that takes time and effort

Katie Dee

their careers

“If you ’ re not learning, you should try and push yourself into a place where you are continuing to learn,” he said “I like to align work with something that my team wants to explore and has never explored but I know they can do… I always try to put somebody in the posi tion to learn if possible.”

When it comes to creating a culture that promotes continuous learning, Prat said that managers must lead by exam

p l e H e e x p l a i n e d t h a t w h e n t e a m members see their manager trying out new skills, they feel more comfortable pursuing their own learning endeavors, even if they make a mistake or two

“Everybody should know that they need to be learning new things and keep growing and that they can do that without the need to think of if they will be allowed,” Prat said. “I think the more clear it is that that can be done, the more people will grow.

BY M I C H A E L LOV E

With only about one quarter of SAP customers having moved from their existing ECC environments to S / 4 H A N A , i t ’ s c l e a r b u s i n e s s e s a r e looking for guidance on the best way to manage such a transformative migra tion This hesitancy is understandable

SAP S/4HANA represents more than a technical upgrade, it’s a major functional change

That means IT leaders are thinking about more than just the costs of moving and the timing of workload migration They’re also faced with developing a strategy for taking full advantage of S/4HANA’s radically different, cloud optimized application and database environments, and using the move as an opportunity to adopt a clean core methodology. After all, the real driver for moving to S/4HANA isn’t a deadline, it’s the business value of modernizing one ’ s code, data, processes, and infra structure. Put another way, if customers are going to make a significant invest ment to migrate to S/4HANA, they want to do it in the smartest possible way.

A c l e a n c o r e m e t h o d o l o g y c a n decouple ERP environments from cus tomization that has increased complex ity and made such environments much more difficult to upgrade Specific to S A P, c l e a n c o r e m e a n s k e e p i n g S/4HANA free of customization, creat ing a system that’s manageable, easy to upgrade, and extensible to meet unique business needs Such modernization will enable businesses to leverage new s o u r c e s o f d a t a , m o r e e f f e c t i v e l y respond to changes in their markets, and innovate at a pace that will delight their customers

Let’s break down S/4HANA migra tion into its component parts:

Code modernization Code modernization which relies heavily on the clean core methodology

Michael Love is IBM, SAP Alliance technical leader.

establishes a path away from current monolithic ERP models and custom code, which make integrations across enterprise applications complex and slow innovation The first step in code modernization is to ensure there is a cloud native DevOps platform in place to contain the SAP extensions During m i g r a t i o n t o S / 4 H A N A , e x t e n s i o n s requiring custom development should be done on the cloud native platform a n d i n t e g r a t e d t o t h e d i g i t a l c o r e through web service APIs

Once an SAP ERP digital core is “clean”, SAP version upgrades become significantly less disruptive Businesses are also better able to use advanced technology native to cloud environ ments, including machine learning and AI In addition, code modernization lets businesses incorporate new data sources into their applications. Consid er, for example, the impact of adding weather data to a company ’ s applica tions for supply chain management, financial forecasting, predictive mainte

nance, or logistics routing.

W h e n c h o o s i n g a c l o u d n a t i v e DevOps platform that is inherently able to run your extension workloads on any m a j o r c l o u d p r o v i d e r, t h e n a t u r a l choice for SAP extensions is SAP’s Busi ness Technology Platform (BTP) SAP BTP facilitates the necessary connectiv ity setup that needs to exist between the extensions and the S/4HANA core in terms of users, authorizations and access to APIs Additionally, SAP BTP comes with several modern cloud serv ices for business workflows, integration and analytical scenarios

In addition, many organizations have already chosen a cloud provider and used the cloud native services available to create innovative solutions Many have a preferred cloud native DevOps platform, supporting a “develop once, deploy anywhere” capability, such as Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher, or V M w a r e V C F. E n t e r p r i s e s c a l e

D e v O p s p l a t f o r m s a r e s o m e t i m e s selected because they can be used to

extend any application across the enter prise, not just SAP Also, in addition to being able to deploy workloads to any cloud, a runtime and management tool ing is provided to deploy cloud native workloads to an on prem datacenter Of the enterprise multi cloud DevOps platforms available in the market, Red Hat Openshift has a strong leadership position with nearly 50% of the top For tune 100 companies using it

Data quality and conversion

A s b u s i n e s s e s p l a n t h e i r m o v e t o S/4HANA, it’s critical to determine if t h e c u r r e n t s t a t e o f d a t a s u p p o r t s p l a n n e d b u s i n e s s o u t c o m e s , a n d t o automate remediation of data errors to r e d u c e o v e r a l l d a t a c o m p l e x i t y a n d f o o t p r i n t O n e o f S A P S / 4 H A N A ' s biggest changes is the consolidation of master data and transactional data data bases across the various application modules. In previous versions of SAP, for example, there were multiple cus tomer master databases for ERP, CRM,

supply chain, and other modules each of which needed to be constantly synchronized for consistency.

In addition, a migration to SAP S/4HANA provides an opportunity to cleanse and archive data that has accu mulated in SAP for years In most cas es, there are duplicate, incomplete, obsolete, and old records that are no l o n g e r n e e d e d E x a m p l e s c o u l d include five different customer record entries for a single customer, or invoice records from 12 years ago

An S/4HANA migration provides a great opportunity to consolidate and c l e a n s e t h i s d a t a B e c a u s e S A P S/4HANA requires the HANA data base to run in memory on the server, reducing the data footprint can provide significant savings on hardware or cloud IaaS subscription costs

Process optimization

Process optimization offers a way to simplify and optimize business process es to improve outcomes. SAP is tradi tionally a transaction driven applica tion, not a process driven application. SAP has a repository where processes can be graphically designed and docu mented, but there is no process run time engine that ensures SAP users fol low that process flow as they use SAP

A migration to S/4HANA provides an opportunity to analyze whether users are using SAP as it was intended based on the original process design, analyze for potential to improve business processes, and put technology in place that can automate and monitor processes in SAP That gives businesses the opportunity to gain real time visibility into active processes and to proactively manage inefficiencies through automation

Infrastructure modernization

Infrastructure modernization involves introducing cloud native capabilities to ERP environments while extending the value of existing investments When m o v i n g t o S / 4 H A N A a n d t h e S A P H A N A d a t a b a s e , b u s i n e s s e s s h o u l d look for a cloud provider that can accel e r a t e t i m e t o v a l u e l e v e r a g i n g y o u r existing investments and offer infra structure capacity that can scale in

granular increments. This helps you maintain right sized environments and pay for only what you need without being forced to overprovision capacity

Organizations have the choice of deploying SAP S/4HANA on premise o r i n t h e c l o u d To d e p l o y S A P S/4HANA on premise, an SAP perpet ual software license is needed On premise licenses can also be deployed t h r o u g h a n S A P c e r t i f i e d c l o u d provider However, most who choose to modernize their SAP environment with cloud IaaS will opt to license SAP as a subscription service

In order to help smooth the transi tion of running SAP workloads in the cloud, SAP introduced RISE with SAP at the beginning of 2021 RISE with SAP is a fully managed subscription service that comes with a pre defined s e t o f S e r v i c e L e v e l A r g r e e m e n t s (SLAs) for parameters such as applica t i o n a v a i l a b i l i t y, p e r f o r m a n c e , a n d backup retention. Organizations can use their preferred cloud provider for RISE with SAP S/4HANA cloud pri vate edition, including IBM Cloud.

HANA database sizes and whether S/4HANA databases need to run on a bare metal environment should also be considered, or if there is more benefit in the flexibility of a virtualized cloud infrastructure to run their SAP work loads as part of modernization efforts SAP HANA is an in memory database that works best when the entire data base is fully contained in the system’s m e m o r y S o m e h a r d w a r e p l a t f o r m options have limitations of how large of a HANA database can be supported while virtualization is enabled When clients hit the memory limits of virtual i z a t i o n o n x 8 6 p l a t f o r m s , t h e y a r e forced to switch to bare metal environ ments, which reduce the value/benefits of cloud and can involve a multi year commitment to the specific bare metal server As an alternative, the IBM Power platform does not have any lim itations associated with HANA data base size and virtualization and offers better scaling in granular increments as database size grows. The ultimate goal is to not have to pay for more than what you need in the cloud.

Guest View

B Y S H AYA K S E N

AI models need automated testing

In the 1990’s, when software started to become ubiquitous in the business world, quality was still a big issue It was common for new software and upgrades to be buggy and unreliable, and roll outs were difficult

Software testing was mostly a manual process, and the people developing the software typically also tested it Eventually, automated testing com panies emerged, performing high volume, accu rate feature and load testing Soon after, automat ed software monitoring tools emerged, to help ensure software quality in production Eventually, automated testing and monitoring became the standard, and software quality soared, which of course helped accelerate software adoption.

AI model development is at a similar inflection point. AI and machine learning technologies are being adopted at a rapid pace, but quality varies.

proactive steps to work automated testing and monitoring into the

Often, the data scientists developing the models are also the ones manually testing them, and that can lead to blind spots. Testing is manual and slow Monitoring is nascent and ad hoc And AI model quality is suffering, becoming a gating factor for the suc cessful adoption of AI In fact, Gart ner estimates that 85 percent of AI projects fail

The stakes are getting higher While AI was first primarily used for low stakes decisions such as movie recommendations and delivery ETAs, more and more often, AI is now the basis for models that can have a big impact on people’s lives and on busi nesses Consider credit scoring models that can impact a person ’ s ability to get a mortgage, and the Zillow home buying model debacle that led to the closure of the company ’ s multi billion dollar line of business buying and flipping homes

M a n y o r g a n i z a t i o n s l e a r n e d t o o l a t e t h a t COVID 19 broke their models changing market conditions left models with outdated variables that no longer made sense (for instance, basing credit decisions for a travel related credit card on volume of travel, when all non essential travel had halted).

Not to mention, regulators are watching.

Emulating testing approaches in sof tware development

F i r s t , l e t ’ s r e c o g n i z e t h a t t e s t i n g t r a d i t i o n a l software and testing AI models require signifi

cantly different processes That is because AI bugs a r e d i f f e r e n t A I b u g s a r e c o m p l e x s t a t i s t i c a l d a t a a n o m a l i e s ( n o t f u n c t i o n a l b u g s ) , a n d t h e A I b l a c k b o x m a k e s i t r e a l l y h a r d t o i d e n t i f y a n d d e b u g t h e m

AI model development differs from software development in three important ways:

• It involves iterative training/experimentation vs being task and completion oriented;

• It’s predictive vs functional; and

• Models are created via black box automation vs designed by humans

Machine learning also presents unique techni cal challenges:

• Opaqueness/Black box nature

• Bias and fairness

• Overfitting and unsoundness

• Model reliability

• Drift

The training data that AI and ML model devel opment depend on can also be problematic. In the software world, you could purchase generic soft ware testing data, and it could work across differ ent types of applications In the AI world, training data sets need to be specifically formulated for the industry and model type in order to work

Taking proactive steps to ensure AI model quality

So what should companies leveraging AI models do now? Take proactive steps to work automated testing and monitoring into the AI model lifecycle

A solid AI model quality strategy will encom pass four categories:

• Real world model performance, including con ceptual soundness, stability/monitoring and reli ability, and segment and global performance

• Societal factors, including fairness and trans parency, and security and privacy

• Operational factors, such as explainability and collaboration, and documentation

• Data quality, including missing and bad data

For AI models to become ubiquitous in the business world as software eventually did the industry has to dedicate time and resources to quality assurance. We are nowhere near the five 9's of quality that’s expected for software, but auto mated testing and monitoring is putting us on the path to get there.

Shayak Sen is co founder and CTO of AI Quality solutions provider TruEra

Analyst View

Y J A

O

Codifying sof tware: Logic vs. belief

Developers write code, thereby codifying soft ware ’ s internal rules and outward appear

ances

Programming is not a belief system it’s part of computer science for a reason There is a sys t e m a t i c a p p r o a c h f o r i m p r o v i n g d e v e l o p m e n t expertise, gathering and analyzing data, and prov ing or disproving that the software works Logic and data are codified in software and in our processes around creating software

The human influences of societal norms or reli gion should have little to do with the quality or per formance of the software a group of developers can churn out

Ideology precedes architecture

A particular ideology for codifying technology sets an organization apart from its peers. When team members share beliefs and behaviors, the resulting products can gain consistency in design and utility that ‘just makes sense ’ to customers who resonate with the approach.

The company ’ s founder, or an executive can set the tone for an organization of course think Steve Jobs or Andy Grove But for software devel opment, an ideology is usually more than a cult of personality

A services methodology is not an ideology

A lot of services companies tout an overarching Agile or DevOps methodology, a ‘customer first’ mentality, or ‘ proven processes ’ for delivering great work A skeptic sees these as branding exer cises to give clients confidence and recruit better developers

As analysts, we have a hard time evaluating and comparing services offerings as they relate to prod uct value, except when they relate directly to prod uct delivery and training, or operationalization of a SaaS solution for customers

Open source collaboration magic

O p e n s o u r c e p r o j e c t s s t a r t o u t a s a k e r n e l o f c o d e i n a r e p o s i t o r y, a n d a c o d e o f c o n d u c t f o r f o u n d i n g t h e c o m m u n i t y o f c u r r e n t a n d f u t u r e c o n t r i b u t o r s .

Open source believes in a shared collaborative ideology and democratizing access to non propri

etary platforms, thereby leveling the playing field for individuals to build solutions atop them Soci eties to benefit from the resulting innovation

Attending an open source conference, the ide ology of an agreed upon code of conduct for treat ing each other with respect supersedes any actual discussion of code and components

Design-first versus product-first

Design led ideologies lean on developer intuition, the healthy competition of ideas, and fast iteration to constantly improve the software customer expe rience, whereas product led development focuses on constantly delivering and improving features that meet customer demand.

Engineering and operations groups may be able to bridge the gap between design and product ori entations by crafting shared models that represent their commonalities.

Coding for global good

E v e r s i n c e G o o g l e q u i e t l y dropped its own ‘don’t be evil’ mantra more than a decade ago, I’ve been skeptical of companies that say they exist to improve the greater good The recent trend of ESG (environ mental, social & governance) has been co opted as the latest form of ‘greenwashing’ by corporate enti ties seeking to publicize their environmental con cerns

Still, if such goals make data centers increase efficiency and run on renewable energy, and cause logistics vendors to reduce overall emissions by optimizing truck routes, that’s inherently good

An AI company developing healthcare or self driving cars can set out to save human lives, and the resulting software will be more likely to do so if it matters

The Intellyx Take

A useful development ideology is not just defined, it is cultivated by a group over time. It is not some thing that corporate leadership can dictate.

In today’s fast paced world, merged companies never retain their ideological foundations for long, as principal collaborators move on, engaging their efforts and beliefs in the next startup. z

Jason English is a principal analyst and CMO at Intellyx

Societal norms should have little to do with the quality of software developers can churn out.

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what they mean to them.