Organic Composite looks promising

Cool! This organic composite described in Phys.org looks promising for providing a light-stimulated electric current producing media 😀

The Raspberry Pi Story

Ever wonder how those little boards got created and who was behind them? Check out this article from TechRepublic.

Sometimes the way forward is backwards...

A thought-provoking article from System Engineer Paul Czarkowski on why VMs may be poised to make a come-back in 2019 😲

Metaphysical Migraine :-o

This WIRED article discussing Quantum Error Correcting Codes is guaranteed to give most laypeople a metaphysical migraine 😮

Spring Boot gets Big Props

Spring Boot, the open source Java application framework, got big props this week with Netflix's announcement that it will migrate its Java production environment from its custom-made application infrastructure to Spring Boot! 😮

Book Review: Ethics and Data Science

Ethics and Data Science by Mike Loukides

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Every data scientist or software engineer working with Big Data should read this book! It's short and to the point, distilling what could be a confusing consideration of ethics into a few simple approaches, which will make a big difference for any applied project. Starting with the obvious, pledges and creeds, it quickly shows why they're inadequate. Then, the authors discuss the checklist approach, which is applied, systematic, and reproducible. The book gives practical examples of ethical challenges, showing how easily unexamined projects with noble intentions can go awry! Just raising awareness is a big take-away from the book - and if teams develop and apply the checklist approach, it's far more likely they'll deliver solutions that actually "Walk the Talk" of consumer privacy and responsible data management.

Off to Mars we go!

Here's an amazing summary from C|Net of the massive SpaceX Starship, which is envisioned to take up to 100 humans to Mars ahead. Three times a Saturn V rocket by most measures! 😮

Most popular GitHub programming languages in 2018

Interesting! 😀 See GitHub's blog post concerning the most popular programming languages for GitHub projects in 2018.

Back to Basics; capiche?

This ZD|Net article's right on. Navigating the frequent and massive Windows 10 Updates is simply "burdensome". And the new features aren't that compelling. Time to re-think the strategy, MSFT!

Another interesting insight from the article, "it's widely known that Microsoft let go a bunch of its Windows testers back in 2014, substituting flighting and new unit testing procedures in their stead. I don't think Microsoft will reverse this course and bring back testing as a separate discipline. But they could improve their testing procedures and supporting infrastructure as part of a return to a focus on fundamentals."

I've worked at large companies that effectively eliminated QA engineers on behalf of "Agile Stretch". It generally doesn't work well! Developers have a different mindset and focus than Testers, and the end quality often reflects that. You really don't want to go there! 😮

WPA3 Me!

WPA3 is on the way, cool!