In the vast world of software development, choosing the right programming language is crucial to the success of any project. Java, a stalwart language renowned for its versatility and portability, has been a dominant force in the industry for decades. However, with the emergence of new and specialized languages, developers often find themselves wondering which language is best suited for their needs. In this article, we will conduct a comparative analysis of Java against other popular programming languages, exploring their strengths, weaknesses, and ideal use cases, to help you make informed decisions for your next development endeavor.
Whether you love it or hate it, Git has proven to be the nearly ubiquitous method engineering organizations employ to ship code today. However, when you’re just getting started and building your team, you may be thinking about which strategy is the right one for you to choose based on your current and future needs.
We recently wrote a longer article about effective branching strategies, and the considerations involved when selecting your branching strategy of choice. However, we still believe it could be useful to dive in more deeply into the underlying philosophy for each branching strategy, to help you decide what code shipping strategy is the right one for your engineering team.
In modern distributed computing systems, messaging has become an essential way of enabling different applications and systems to communicate with each other in a microservice architecture. Message queues and message brokers are two popular technologies used in messaging systems, but many people confuse or use the two terms interchangeably. In this article, we will explore the key differences between message queues and message brokers and provide an understanding of when and why you would use one technology over the other. Additionally, the article will clarify whether it’s possible to use message queues and message brokers together for communication between software applications. By the end of this article, you will better understand what message brokers and message queues are alongside their differences.
Learning from incidents has become something of a hot topic within the software industry, and for good reason.
Analyzing mistakes and mishaps can help organizations avoid similar issues in the future, leading to improved operations and increased safety. But too often we treat learning from incidents as the end goal, rather than a means to achieving greater business success.
The goal is not for our organizations to learn from incidents: It’s for them to be better, more successful businesses. I know, how corporate.
The more we learn, the more successful we are, and the cycle continues. We learn because we want to succeed.
The Growing Gap Between Theory and Practice
You might conclude that I don’t care about learning from incidents; I do, deeply. But I care about learning from incidents because more informed, more experienced people are going to be more effective at their jobs, and likely happier, too. A culture of learning is good for the people that work here, it’s good for our customers, and ultimately, that’s good for business.
The more we learn, the more successful we are, and the cycle continues.
We learn because we want to succeed.
I’ve seen a considerable amount of research and effort being applied to study of learning from incidents in software, and a lot of interesting and thought provoking material shared as a result.
Often though, what I see highlights a growing gap between the academia and the practical challenges that most face on a day-to-day basis. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve given up on reading papers or watching some talks because they felt so wildly disconnected as to be useless.
I spend every working day thinking about, and talking with people about incidents and it feels impenetrable to me — that feels wrong.
Most Organizations Are Struggling With the Basics
At incident.io, I’m fortunate to work with a diverse set of customers: from 10-person startups to enterprises with tens of thousands of employees. For the majority of these customers, the problem isn’t anchored in academic concepts and complex theories. It’s a lot more fundamental.
Many struggle to define what an incident is, how they should react when something goes wrong, or how to make sure the right people are looped into the right incidents so things run as smoothly as possible.
When it comes to post-incident activities, they don’t know how to run an incident debrief, they can’t keep track of follow-up actions, and they’re stuck trying to convince their senior leaders that targeting an ever reducing mean time to recovery isn’t a great idea (Pro tip: It’s not a good idea).
Connecting Learning, Change, and Business Outcomes
If you’re are trying to improve the incident culture at your organization, or convince your management that an investment of time to really learn from a major incident is a good idea, an academic approach just doesn’t work.
Telling someone who wants a report on the root cause that there’s “no root cause” alienates the very people we need to convince. If we want buy-in from the top, more needs to be done to take people on the journey of zero-to-one, and that means connecting learning and change to tangible business outcomes.
None of this is meant to criticize the good work of the incident community. There are plenty of folks doing excellent work and extolling the value of more practically focused incident management. But I’ve equally seen what I consider to be semi-harmful advice given too. Advice around devoting days or weeks of effort to investigate even the smallest of incidents. I’m almost certain you’ll be able to learn something, but does the return on investment justify it?
And then there’s all the things people are told they shouldn’t be doing, like reducing incidents down to numbers for comparison. Yes, MTTR is fundamentally flawed metric, but when you have a conversation about replacing it with people who believe it’s useful, what are you suggesting? Most people are time constrained and if they’re told to draw the rest of the owl, they simply won’t.
Practical Advice for Incorporating Learning into Your Organization
I've been at the business end of highly effective incident management programs, semi-broken ones, and many in between.
What’s common among the high performers is the fact that a healthy culture has started from a position of engaging the whole organization. Learning is connected to practical benefits that everyone understands, and there’s been a person (or group of people) at the heart of the culture, applying time and effort to meet people where they are and bring them on the journey. Learning has never been positioned as the primary motivator, it’s been a side-benefit of more business-oriented objectives.
So, to make this a little more action focused, here’s a few tidbits of advice for how to practically synthesize learning alongside your role.
Think Carefully About the Return on Investment of Your Actions
Nothing will put roadblocks up faster than work being done without good justification for how it helps the business. Whether you think it’s meaningful or not, if you’re spending a week performing a thorough investigation of an incident that degraded a small part of your app for a few minutes, you’re unlikely to win over anyone who cares about delivering on the broader priorities of the organization. This might mean less time (or no time) spent on these incidents, in favour of using more significant ones.
Use Transparency as a Catalyst for Serendipitous Learning
Whether you like it or not, folks learn. Collisions of teams, individuals, and systems result in knowledge transfer and a front row seat to expertise in action. If you’re looking for the fastest way to learn from incidents, the best starting point is making them very visible to the whole organization, and actively celebrate great examples of incidents that have been done well. Don’t underestimate the power of implicit learning that happens alongside everyone just doing their job.
Sell the Upside of Changes, Rather Than Telling People What They Shouldn’t Do
If your leaders believe a monthly report on shallow incident data, like MTTR and number of incidents, is the most useful for way for them to understand the risks facing the business, you’ll struggle to wrestle it out of their hands. And if you haven’t got a concrete answer for what they should be looking at instead, telling them what they shouldn’t do simply isn’t helpful. First, find a better way. Give them a qualitative assessment of the risks and a handful of key learnings alongside their numbers. If what you have is more valuable and useful, removing the numbers becomes an easy task.
Ultimately, if you’re struggling to make change to how your organization learns from incidents, start small, start practical, and connect the activity to something that advances the goals of your business.
It’s absolutely fine to cherry-pick more academic concepts and sequence them alongside less valuable practices that many organizations are anchored to today. Incremental improvements compound over time, and every small change can aggregate to something meaningful.
If you work in software development, or indeed within any sector of the technology industry, you will have undoubtedly been part of discussions about, read headlines on, or even trialed a platform for generative artificial intelligence (AI). Put simply, this new and quickly evolving technology is everywhere.
Yet along with the exciting promise of greater productivity with AI code generation tools — GitHub argues the increase in developer productivity due to AI could boost global GDP by over $1.5 trillion — there is also increased risk. These risks include concerns around code quality, as AI models can produce complex code that is both difficult to understand and explain.
The hype around blockchain technologies may have quieted, but the builders are still building. The toughest technical problems that kept blockchain from mass adoption over the past few years—slow and expensive transactions—are being solved by layer 2s. zkEVMs, and Linea in particular, are a key part of this solution.
Let’s look at layer 2s on Ethereum—their architecture, why they are needed, what zkEVMs are and how they work, and the details of the new Linea mainnet release.
If you are reading this, you are a coder. The modern developer is an overarching term covering a large variety of different roles, responsibilities, and skills. From using only a simple form, to hand coding low-level machine code, to building multi-tier machine learning applications — the breadth and depth of who coders are and what they do is broad. For some of us, this comes naturally; you want to solve problems, build solutions, and never manually do the same thing twice.
Is it possible to test everything using a single tool? Seems like a dream, but I would say it is almost possible with Cypress, a JavaScript frontend testing framework. Cypress is primarily designed for end-to-end testing of web applications, which includes both the frontend user interface (UI) and the backend API interactions.
With Cypress, you can write tests that cover the entire application flow, from interacting with the UI elements to making API requests and validating the responses. This makes Cypress a versatile tool that allows you to test the integration between the UI and the API.
Do you want to add a screenshot to your blog post but are not sure of the best way to do it?
Screenshots allow you to share an image snapshot of your desktop or mobile screen in your blog posts. This makes it easier for your audience to follow the steps in a tutorial and better understand your content.
In this article, we will show you how to take a screenshot for your WordPress blog posts.
The Benefits of Taking Screenshots for Your Blog Posts
Adding screenshots to your WordPress blog can make your content more engaging. These are screen captures or snapshots of whatever is on your mobile or desktop screen.
You can use screenshots for a tutorial and guide users step by step. This way, people will know exactly where to click and what to enter when setting up software or plugins.
Similarly, you can use screenshots for a roundup or list post. For example, let’s say you are writing about the top 10 best email marketing tools. You can take screenshots of each tool’s homepage and show them in your content.
Since there are so many different ways to take a screenshot, we have created a step-by-step guide on how to take a screenshot on different devices and apps.
To make it easy for you, we have also created a table of contents below, so you can quickly find the method that’s applicable to you.
Droplr is a popular screen capture app. It allows you to easily take a screenshot on your computer and share it.
Droplr automatically saves the screenshot and screen recordings to the cloud and provides a link to share with others. Plus, you can manage all your screenshots from a dashboard and share them on any platform, including WordPress.
It works great with Mac, Windows, and Chromebook devices to quickly capture a selected area or entire screen. There is also a Chrome extension, so you can quickly take screenshots from your browser.
To take a screenshot using Droplr, you will first need to install the app for your preferred device. After that, you can click the Droplr icon in the Mac menu bar or the Windows Taskbar.
From here, simply click the ‘Screenshot’ option.
If you are a Mac user, then you can also press ‘Option + Shift + 4’ to capture the screenshots. You can press ‘Alt + Shift + 4’ on Windows to take a screenshot with Droplr.
Next, you need to select the area you’d like to take a screenshot of.
Droplr will open the screenshot in a browser window as soon as you are done. Here, you can download the image or share the link with others.
If you click the ‘Markup’ button at the top, then you will find options to edit the screenshot.
For instance, you can add arrows to point at a button or an important feature. You can also draw shapes, add emojis, blur different parts of the image, add text, and more.
Once you are done, simply save the image or download it.
Taking Screenshots Using Droplr Chrome Extension
You can also use the Droplr Chrome extension to take screenshots and screen recordings. The extension works just like the desktop app, and you can easily access it from the Chrome extension toolbar.
First, you will need to install the Droplr extension by visiting the Chrome web store.
Then, click on ‘Add to Chrome’.
Once the extension is added, you can click on the Droplr icon from the toolbar at the top of your browser.
Next, you can screenshot a selected area, application window, full screen, or entire page.
After taking a screenshot, Droplr will open the image in a new tab with a link that you can share.
Droplr also allows you to create a video screencast to create quick tutorials with audio. Simply click the Droplr icon in your browser’s menu bar and select the TV icon to record your screen.
If you choose the ‘Full desktop’ option, then you will need to select which window to record. On the other hand, you can use the ‘Current tab’ option and screencast your browser tab.
How to Take a Screenshot on Mac
If you are using a Mac device and want to take a screenshot, then there are several options.
On Mac devices, you can capture the entire screen, a selected portion of your screen, a specific window, and more.
To take a screenshot of the entire screen on a Mac device, simply press ‘Shift + Command + 3’, and it will capture your screen.
If you want to capture a selected portion, then press ‘Shift + Command + 4’. Next, click and drag the crosshair (pointer) to take a screenshot of the selected area.
If you want to take a screenshot of a specific window, then press ‘Shift + Command + 4’ and also press the ‘Space bar’ on your keyboard.
You will see that the pointer will change into a camera icon. Simply drag the camera icon on a window to highlight and capture it.
Note: Not all apps will allow you to take a screenshot of their window. In that case, you can take a screenshot of the selected portion and crop it.
By default, all the screenshots will be saved on your desktop with the capturing time/date as the filename and .png as the file extension.
How to Take a Screenshot on Windows
To take a screenshot on Windows devices, you will need to press the ‘PrtSc’ keys. This will capture the entire screen.
Next, you can open this screenshot in an image editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo to crop the required area and save it on your computer.
Another way of taking screenshots is by using the Snipping tool. The tool lets you capture a specific part of your screen and automatically save it to a clipboard.
Another way to take screenshots in Windows is by pressing the ‘Windows + Shift + S’ keys to start taking screenshots with the Snipping tool.
Next, click and drag the pointer to select an area on your screen. It will capture the screenshot automatically when you release the right click.
Since the screenshot is saved to a clipboard, you can paste it into any image editing software like Adobe Photoshop for further changes and then save it on your computer.
How to Take a Screenshot on Chromebook
In Chromebook, you can simply click the Screenshot key with a camera icon. This will take a screenshot of your entire screen or a selected area.
Besides that, you can click the Quick Settings option in the right corner and then select the ‘Screen Capture’ option.
After that, you need to choose whether you’d like to capture the entire screen or a selected area.
Once you have taken a screenshot, it will be automatically copied to the Clipboard.
If you are using Chrome OS 64.0.3282.134 or later, then you can simply press the ‘Power + Volume Down’ buttons to capture your entire screen.
To take a screenshot of a selected area, you need to press the ‘Ctrl + Shift + Switch Window’ keys. Then, click and drag the crosshair (pointer) to select the area that you want to capture.
Upon releasing the click, you will see a notification in the bottom right corner of your screen that shows your screenshot is saved in the ‘Downloads’ folder.
If you are using a Chromebox with an external (general) keyboard attached to it, then press ‘Ctrl + F5’ to take a screenshot. The F5 key will function the same as the ‘Switch Window’ key on a Chromebook.
How to Take a Screenshot on iPhone
Taking a screenshot on iPhones and other smartphones is actually quite simple.
If you are using an iPhone X or higher, then you need to open your blog post or the app on the screen. After that, simply press the ‘Side’ button on the right side and the ‘Volume Up’ button on the left side of your phone.
Make sure that you press both buttons at the same time. This will take a screenshot of the screen and save it to the ‘Screenshots’ folder on your phone.
If you are using an iPhone 8 or earlier model, then open the screen that you want to capture. Then, simply press the ‘Power + Home’ buttons at the same time to take a screenshot.
How to Take a Screenshot on Android Phone
There are many different phone manufacturers that sell smartphones with Android OS (such as Samsung Galaxy, Motorola, Google Pixel, etc). However, most new devices follow the same universal process to take a screenshot.
On your Android phone, you need to open the screen that you want to capture. Next, press the ‘Power + Volume Down’ buttons together.
This will take the screenshot and save it in your photo gallery.
Neural networks and deep learning have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning by enabling remarkable advancements in various domains.
This research article aims to comprehensively introduce the fundamentals of neural networks and deep learning.
GraphQL is an open-source query language and runtime for APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that Facebook developed. It provides a more efficient and flexible approach to fetching and manipulating data compared to traditional RESTful APIs. GraphQL allows clients to request only the specific data they need, making it more efficient in terms of network usage and reducing over-fetching or under-fetching of data.
GraphQL was initially developed by Facebook in 2012 to address the challenges they faced with their mobile applications. They needed a more efficient way to retrieve data from their servers, as the traditional RESTful APIs led to over-fetching of data and multiple roundtrips to the server. Facebook introduced GraphQL internally in 2012 and later released it publicly in 2015.
Blogs used to be the highest converting activity online. You search for something on Google and find a blog that answers your query. Then, you read it and make a purchase. All brands use blogs...
In the landscape of software development, bugs are an inevitable part of the journey, and debugging, albeit frustrating at times, is an integral part of the process. There's no escaping this truth, and the sooner we embrace it, the sooner we can master the art of debugging.
In the next few posts in this series, I will explain the little-known “theory” behind debugging. We all know the practice of debugging (to some degree), but there is also a theoretical underpinning that most of us never learned in university (I sure as hell didn’t). Understanding this theory will help you apply a more methodical approach to problem resolution and will improve your understanding of your code.
In today's fast-paced digital world, mobile app development has become the backbone of businesses seeking to engage customers on various platforms. Gone are the days of developing separate apps for different operating systems. Cross-platform mobile app development has emerged as the go-to solution for efficient and cost-effective app creation.
In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the essential tech stack for building successful cross-platform apps, with a special focus on the power and potential of Flutter mobile app development.
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