Tech Blitz: Industry Leaders Believe Value Rising for Programmers

Tech Blitz: Industry Leaders Believe Value Rising for Programmers

By Bob Pepalis, Izenda
[email protected]


Each month we take a look at recent technology news to spot the trends and advances in software and other industries. If you spot a piece of news that should be shared or have a comment, send it to me via email.

Software engineers, web developers and other technology industry leaders believe programmers, who are considered to handle more technical work than "developers," will become more valuable in 2017, according to Packt's "Skill Up: Developer Talk" report.

Will programmers heave a sigh of relief upon hearing this after reading stories that say AI writes better software? The Google Brain AI group set out to have software design a machine-learning system so it could test benchmark software that processes language. Its results surpassed previously published results from software humans designed.

What should developers and programmers study? The top programming languages used by their 2016 Skill Up respondents were JavaScript and Python. Python will be central in creating foundational technologies. Applications for the web and mobile devices will be built with Java, JavaScript and Objective-C. Developers building for desktops tend to use Objective-C or Visual C#.

The report covers security and mobile development, web development and programming, and data management.

In 2016, web developers saw two new standards driving front-end success, according to the report: Angular 2 and React drove front-end success in 2016, according to the report. Packt's developer survey reported that 50% of developers said they migrated or were migrating from AngularJS to Angular 2.

Microsoft Plans 2-Day Visual Studio 2017 Release

Mark your calendars for March 7, 2017. That's the date when Microsoft will make its general release of Visual Studio 2017. But keep your schedule open on the 8th, too, as that's when they'll offer a full day of live training.

Microsoft will livestream the two-day launch, with Brian Harry, Miguel de Icaza, and Scott Hanselman joining 25-year employee Julia Liuson, Corporate Vice President, Visual Studio, on stage to share innovations from Visual Studio, .NET, Xamarin, Azure, and more. They'll hold demo sessions focusing on improvements within the product.

They want your stories of Visual Studio as part of the launch, too. Share a photo or a short video clip on Instagram or post your story on Twitter and Facebook Video or YouTube using the hashtag #MyVSstory.

Quora Insists on Names of Influencers

Real influence on Quora will require a name from now on, as the crowdsourced Q&A site cracks down on spam and harassment. Anonymous posters won't get to influence other aspects of the process, so no more anonymous votes or comments.

If you need to protect your identity so you can share more personal or sensitive experiences, you'll still get to anonymously ask questions or share answers. As company officials acknowledged, "anonymity on Quora is not without its faults."

These Boots are Made for Walking - on Mars

NASA and others in the space industry want astronauts to stay on their feet. So researchers have been designing and testing new space boots.

Moon mission astronauts struggled to stay on their feet in their space suits, falling too many times. Those sharp rocks on the Moon could cause serious problems, injury or worse.

Plans to land humans on Mars increase the danger. The stronger gravity on the fourth planet from the Sun would cause astronauts to fall twice as hard on much rockier ground.

Alison Gibson, graduate researcher at MIT's Man Vehicle Lab, is testing some newfangled space boots. Vibrations in the boots and little orange dots give tactile and visual cues to an astronaut. There's no word yet on if Nike will let them license their "Space Jam" brand.

Maybe People Can Drive Better Than Computers - in Work Zones

Apparently self-driving cars have even more problems with construction zones than people do.

The automation to operate a vehicle depends upon double yellow lines, curbs, traffic lights, lane markers and all of the other standard roadway markings and signals. But put an orange cone in the lane, or some non-standard signage changing traffic lanes, and the self-driving car gets flummoxed. (I get that way sometimes, too. That's when I move into the even slower lane.)

So how do you teach machines to deal with our crazy patchwork of signs, a choice between cones or barrels, oddly painted lane switching or even humans standing in the road directing traffic with a flag, a sign or even a guide truck leading traffic into the left lane? And how do you manage this in the five years left before auto manufacturers want to have self-driving cars on dealer lots - er, on the road?

I suppose someone could create a visual database with every type of road sign used by every DOT, city or county public works agency and for every road construction company for individual vehicles' computers to sort out. But the more reasonable ideas include putting humans in call centers to handle these tricky navigation spots or to add more sensors and communications in cars to let them "talk" to each other to share road information. Some researchers even think state Departments of Transportation should get their acts together and standardize everything. I hazard to guess what they'll do with self-flying cars that Uber wants to use.

Izenda Releases 7 Series™ of its Embedded Self-Service Analytics Platform

Izenda recently announced the release of its 7 Series™ self-service business intelligence (Bl) and analytics platform, purpose-built for embedding for OEM use by software companies and solutions providers. This release further enhances lzenda's capabilities by empowering software companies to offer their end users intuitive real-time, self-service analytics inside their applications.

lzenda's 7 Series features the industry's first modern three-tier embedded architecture that is modular, extensible, and scalable. The architecture shortens time to market and reduces the cost to integrate in software as a service (SaaS), cloud, and on premise applications.

A new administrative user interface (UI) empowers business analysts to manage the analytics platform and frees scarce developer time. For software product teams not ready to embed, a BI Portal approach enables an even shorter time to market while providing self-service analytics in a white-labeled environment for users.

An open source ReactJS front end provides unparalleled OEM integration opportunities and makes customization and white labeling easy. It is framework agnostic, allowing for embedding of the front end in Java, .NET, and other technology stacks. Read the complete release.

Opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of WITI.