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Big Orange Heart Opens 2020 Remote Work Wellbeing and Mental Health Survey

A Big Orange Heart, formerly known as WP&UP, has opened its 2020 Remote Work Wellbeing and Mental Health Survey. The charity organization focuses on supporting remote working communities with education and resources for mental and physical health. It is also home to a community of more than 4,700 members who support each other in growing their businesses and building new skills.

The survey asks fairly broad questions about your mental health and the mental health support in your work environment. It takes approximately three minutes and is completely anonymous.

Results from the 2019 survey showed that the majority of people in the WordPress community work alone and a significant percentage are dealing with anxiety and suicidal thoughts:

  • 8% of the WordPress community have had suicidal thoughts in the last 12 months
  • 47% stated their workplace makes them feel anxious
  • 56% of the WordPress community works alone

Big Orange Heart founder Dan Maby believes these results are helping his team save lives. The charity is actively creating and maintaining services and a peer support network that encourage people to stay connected to their community, in order to reduce the isolation they experience.

“Our 2019 results identified that almost 8% of all respondents had been dealing with sustained periods of feeling suicidal over the previous 12-months, twice the national US average,” Maby said. “This finding led to more training being provided in suicide prevention and support for our team, which enabled us to support multiple individuals that have contacted us requiring suicidal support, all of whom are still with us today.”  

There are more people working alone remotely now than ever before due to the pandemic. Spend a short time on any social media network and you will likely hear several people say they are not doing okay. This survey helps the team at Big Orange Heart understand the extent of mental health related issues within the remote working community and informs various initiatives the organization plans throughout the year.

“As a charity, like so many others at this time, we have been heavily impacted by the COVID-19 global crisis,” Maby said. “Now more than ever we need to ensure our limited resources are used in the most effective way possible. Your anonymous data will allow us to best understand how we can help improve the lives of others within our community.”

The Remote Work Wellbeing and Mental Health Survey runs for one month and will close on August 31st. Take the survey and check out Big Orange Heart’s blog for several helpful posts on how to maintain your mental health while working during this crisis.

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Deploy Friday EP — 16 Micronaut: A Modern Full-Stack Framework for Building Microservice and Serverless

A Question and Answer session with guests: 

Micronaut is an open-source, JVM-based framework for building full-stack, modular, easily testable microservice and serverless applications. Unlike reflection-based IoC frameworks that load and cache reflection data for every single field, method, and constructor in your code, with Micronaut, your application startup time and memory consumption are not bound to the size of your codebase. Micronaut's cloud support is built right in, including support for common discovery services, distributed tracing tools, and cloud runtimes. 

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FizzBuzz on Mule 4 With a While Loop Using VM Queue

A friend shared this youtube video on the Art of Code where FizzBuzz was demonstrated on SonicPi and also at end of the video (I won’t spoil it for you). After watching it, I was highly inspired to also implement it on Mule, because why not? I even searched the web to see if anyone had already done a FizzBuzz loop on Mule. The fact that I then did it last night kinda tells you that the answer was no.

It turns out that I also learned a thing or two implementing FizzBuzz on Mule 4. FizzBuzz is one of the ways loops are introduced when learning a programming language. Even the recent Golang course I took also introduces loops using FizzBuzz. For the uninitiated, FizzBuzz is derived from a children’s game, the problem statement for a FizzBuzz program is pretty straightforward. This is the same one you can find at HackerRank.

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WordPress 5.6 Wish List: Homepage Post Type Selection and Block Management

With the WordPress 5.5 development cycle coming to a close, it is time to begin mapping out what features should land in WordPress 5.6 later this year. Earlier today, Chloe Bringmann asked the community to chime in with its wish list on the Make Core blog.

As usual, I have a few thoughts. I tend to lean toward addressing some of the long-standing developer-friendly tickets because these features allow plugin authors to build better products for end-users in the long run.

A complete custom post status API tops my usual list of most-wanted features. I have already opined over this for my WordPress 5.5 wish list. It may be time for more realistic dreams. Maybe we will revisit it another year or two down the road. However, if any core leads want to give the feature a green light, I will gladly be the evangelist and get others excited about it.

Homepage Post Type Selection

For this release, I want to call out one of my other years-long wishes. WordPress should allow end-users to select any custom post type for display on the homepage.

Imagine a WordPress where users can head to their Reading Settings screen in the admin and select something other than their normal posts list or a page to appear on the homepage. Have a forum plugin installed? Maybe users want to list their latest topics or forums list. Running an eCommerce plugin? Users should be able to display their products. Setting up a web design portfolio? Display the most recent projects by simply selecting this choice in the admin.

This is an area where the software has always catered to bloggers and has avoided throwing a little love to other types of sites.

Currently, plugin authors must perform some crazy hacks to make this work. The WooCommerce custom query class is enough to make any developer give up. Not all of the code in that file is for the front page, but it has a frustrating amount to make something work that should be far simpler for plugin authors.

The reason this needs to be in core WordPress is so that each and every plugin does not need to roll a custom solution. Plugins should be able to flag their post types during registration as “allowed on homepage” — not all post types are meant for this type of display. Then, WordPress should handle all the dirty work behind the scenes if a particular post type is selected by the end-user. The addition to the API for plugin authors would be simple, and plugins that are already hacking this feature together can drop a lot of unnecessary code.

There is an existing 8-year-old ticket for the feature. It has a few old and likely outdated patches and has not seen any real activity in the past four years. Nevertheless, it would be nice to see this feature in core WordPress and finally close the ticket.

Block System Wish List

Like most releases, the block system will be getting the most attention. The things that will land in WordPress 5.6 are mostly already set in stone, assuming a particular feature does not fall behind in development like widgets and nav menus did for the 5.5 release.

On the whole, I like the general direction the block system has been headed. If anything, I have been impatient with some things, such as awaiting the integrated block management screen in the admin. For other features, such as full-site editing, I am still wondering whether they are realistic goals for the WordPress 5.6 release.

I would take a release and focus on tightening up and polishing the existing system. Take stock of the pain points — and there are many — that users are mentioning. Spend time working on smoothing out the editing experience before tacking on new features.

That is not going to happen. New features are what get developers up in the morning and excited about the project. Therefore, my fallback request is to bring on the block management screen.

What’s on your wish list?

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Securing Open Liberty Applications With Azure Active Directory via OpenID Connect

Long gone are the days when you had to create your own user account management, authentication, and authorization for your web delivered software. Instead, contemporary applications leverage these functions (Identity and Access Management, IAM for short) from an external provider. As a full featured Java application runtime, Open Liberty has great options for externally provided IAM. Open Liberty supports IAM mainstays such as social media login, SAML and OpenID Connect. In Bruce Tiffany's blog post Securing Open Liberty apps and micro-services with MicroProfile JWT and Social Media login, you have a solid example on how to use the Open Liberty social media login feature to authenticate users using their existing social media credentials. In this blog post, let's take a look at another example on how to configure the Liberty social login feature as an OpenID Connect client to secure Java applications with Azure Active Directory.

The code used in this blog post is hosted on this GitHub repository as part of the official Azure samples - feel free to check it out and follow its user guide to run the Java EE demo application before or after reading this blog.

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code for these two programs

Write a program to sort an array of integers in ascending order by using pointers

Write a program to sort an array of integers in descending order by using pointers

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Java Performance Optimization

Getting Java apps to run is one thing. But getting them to run fast is another. Performance is a tricky beast in any object-oriented environment, but the complexity of the JVM adds a whole new level of performance-tweaking trickiness — and opportunity. This Refcard covers garbage collection monitoring and tuning, memory leaks, object caching, concurrency, and more.
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FXCubic Introduces Real-time Markup API

FXCubic, a trading technology provider, has introduced a real-time bridge markup API. The API targets high volume brokers and traders. Through the API, users gain access to market data calculations and can adjust their markups in real-time according to an algorithm of choice.

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4 Ways Cloud Helps Future-Proof Your Teams

Cloud is no longer a differentiator – it’s a strategic requirement for long-term success. So says Forrester’s Benchmark Your Enterprise Cloud Adoption report, and so say our customers, 90 percent of whom choose our cloud products over hosting tools on-premise (on-prem). 

Ten years ago, moving to the cloud was about staying ahead of the curve – no longer. Now, it’s about keeping up, and providing customers and employees with the always-on services they expect.

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5 Data Encryption Best Practices To Follow

Any device that is connected to the internet is vulnerable to data breaches. McAfee estimates that more than 780,000 records are lost to hacking each day. 

Data encryption is one of the best available protection against unauthorized access to your files. Data encryption converts plain-text information into an unreadable form, which can only be accessed by a user with the correct decryption key. 

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Anatomy of Sequential Data Processing With Java Streams

Functional Programming History

The history of functional programming can be traced back to Lambda-calculus. It is a mathematical language invented by Alonzo in 1930. In some ways, lambda-calculus is the first programming language. Some principles of lambda calculus can be found in modern functional languages and even in Java also. The first principle is that the main object in this kind of language is functions and functions in the mathematical sense of these words. something that takes input and returns the output.

It always returns the same output if based on the same input. Hence, this property goes by the name of being stateless. In other words, the function has no memory of previous inputs.

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Tutorial: Build a Serverless API Back-end for Slack

Webhook backends are a popular use case for Serverless functions. FaaS (Functions-as-a-service) offerings make it relatively easy to provide an HTTP endpoint which hosts the Webhook logic which can be as simple as sending an email to something as entertaining as responding with funny GIFs!

In this tutorial, we will explore funcy — a Serverless webhook backend which is a trimmed down version of the awesome Giphy for Slack. The (original) Giphy Slack app returns a bunch of GIFs for a search term, and the user can pick one of them. Funcy tweaks it a bit by simply returning a (single) random image for a search keyword using the Giphy Random API.