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10 Project Management Tools for Startups

According to a report by Capterra, 59% of U.S. workers say communication is their team’s biggest obstacle to success. Managing multiple projects and healthy communication at once is difficult on a good day and absolutely impossible when an unwanted problem get in the way.

Project management is an art of orchestrating all the moving pieces into a concrete plan. And doing this is not an easy job. But how do successful project managers do it so effortlessly? With the use of best project management tools.

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What’s Your AI Differentiator?

Companies are scrambling to build their artificial intelligence (AI) arsenal, machine learning (ML) capabilities are evolving, and organizations are employing several robust third-party plug-and-play AI solutions (such as Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning, Amazon’s SageMaker, and Google’s TensorFlow).

However, companies seem to overlook a significant differentiator — "Good Data." Whenever I interact with an infant AI team, I see behind-the-scenes data-panic. Even though businesses have tons of data, the question to ask yourself is: Do you have good data? For implementing or adopting ML into your products, good or useful data is your significant differentiator. Many organizations do not realize it because good data is uncommon.

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The Imitation Game

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of the most discussed software concepts in the past few years and its influence has seeped into casual conversations. While AI is not a new concept, the advancements of modern technology have finally progressed to the point where practical AI is possible. From the mind-boggling computational power of modern graphics processors to the early phases of 5G, the Utopia dream of seeing AI play a role in daily life is nearly a reality.

Even with this evolution in technology, AI continues to root itself in some of the veteran laws and concepts developed in the 20th century. Foremost among these concepts is the Imitation Game. In this article, we will delve into Alan Turing's famous game and explore some of the many critiques and rebuttals to this famous experiment. We will also explore some of Turing's refutations of these criticisms and the vision the famous computer scientist had for AI.

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Example Java Microservices App Running in the Cloud via Kubernetes

Over the last few weeks, I’ve worked on a new sample application which demonstrates how to build microservices-based architectures. While there are still some minor things I’d like to add, I think the sample is pretty comprehensive now and a good option for developers, especially Java EE developers, to learn microservices and cloud-native patterns.

The example is available as open source. The GitHub repo is called cloud-native-starter.

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Store One Billion Files in Alluxio 2.0

Alluxio is a virtual distributed file system that enables applications to access files and objects in different external storage like S3 or HDFS in a unified file system namespace with a single API. Scaling the capacity of Alluxio metadata service is vital to Alluxio for a couple of reasons:

  1. Alluxio provides a single namespace where multiple storage systems can be mounted. So the size of Alluxio's namespace needs to match the sum of the sizes of all mounted storages.
  2. Object storage is increasing in popularity, and object stores often hold many more small files compared with file systems like HDFS.

In Alluxio 1.x, the metadata service is limited to around 200 million files in practice. Scaling further would cause garbage collection issues due to the limited JVM heap size of the Alluxio master process. Also, storing 200 million files would require a large memory footprint (around 200GB) of JVM heap in a single machine running Alluxio master.

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Custom appsettings.json File for ASP.NET Core Integration Tests

ASP.NET Core introduced the concept of TestServer for the integration testing of web applications. Integration tests need web applications to run with all the bells and whistles to make sure that all the components work together with no flaws. Often we need special settings for integration tests as web applications cannot use live services and the easiest way to do it is to use a special appsettings.json file. This blog post shows how to do it.

Getting Started

Let's start with minimalistic integration test from ASP.NET Core integration tests document.

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Why I Took the Time to Turn On Two-Factor Authentication

For the past few years, my dad has been encouraging me to turn on two-factor authentication (2FA) on any service that offers it. Having grown up in the social media age, I felt his requests were unwarranted.

I know social media inside and out (and I have a master’s degree to prove it). I have always taken care not to share personal information online that I wouldn’t share in person, and I regularly update my security settings across all my accounts on the internet. So, what was the big deal with turning on two-factor authentication?

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Why Every Developer Should Write a Blog

It's unavoidable. At some point — if not on a regular basis — as a developer, you will need to produce some type of content in written form to share with your team or others. Since clear and concise technical writing takes practice, it makes sense that you should make a proactive effort to practice your writing. Writing a blog is a perfect (and an easy, low- or no-cost) opportunity to get some practice.

There are plenty more reasons, however, why blogging is beneficial and useful for all developers. In no particular order, here's why you should be blogging:

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How to Scale Up QA in A DevOps Environment

We've teamed up with Detectify, an automated web application and domain security company powered by white hat hackers, to discuss how security testing can be automated into your CI/CD pipeline. This article goes into how automated testing helps QA scale up productivity and practices with a DevOps environment, and to learn more about how automated security benefits DevOps, visit Detectify's blog.

CI/CD Pipelines Increase Development Velocity

Continuous integration and delivery continue to increase the flexibility and momentum of software product development. The results from a recent Atlassian survey include statistics that more than half of all software teams employ CI/CD in their environment. About one-third of survey respondents say their team has plans to move to CI/CD. The survey results also indicate that more than half of the respondent organizations can accommodate daily changes and deploy those changes to the end of the pipeline.