It's July 01, 2019 at 11:15AM
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Kafka Connectors Without Kafka
In this article, you will find basic information about change data capture and a high-level overview of Kafka Connect. We'll then see how one of the connectors (Debezium PostgreSQL) can work in standalone mode (without the platform) — moving CDC to another level of simplicity.
But let's start from the beginning.
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AWS Control Tower & VPC Traffic Mirroring
AWS re:Inforce 2019 is a two-day conference for security, identity, and compliance learning and community building. This year's keynote, presented by AWS Vice President and CIO, Stephen Schmidt, announced the general availability of AWS Control Tower and the new VPC Traffic Mirroring feature. These two announcements resonated with me, and I wanted to expand upon them to help you gain valuable insights into how Amazon Web Services (AWS) manages security at scale.
In this article, we'll take a closer look at each of these topics. To dive deeper and train on the leading security tools and best practices in the cloud, test your skills, and keep your cloud environment secure and compliant, check out Cloud Academy's Security Training Library.
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2019 Top Slack Channels for Software Testers
Slack is the hottest collaboration tool in the market today, both as an internal tool for teams working together and for external groups who share similar interest and need a place to collaborate and share ideas.
Slack also offers a free tier which is used by many public communities such as software developers and testers. This tier includes unlimited private and public channels, 10K messages, up to 10 apps (Github, Bitbucket, etc.), file sharing, custom notifications and more.
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Merkle Trees Underpinning Civilization Going Forward
History-retaining Merkle trees (like Git with force-push turned off) are a significant advance towards a better society, government, and industry. No, not blockchains with distributed consensus, history-retaining Merkle trees with no distributed consensus (Byzantine or not).
Example: UK Number Plates
The Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) is decades old and runs operations for the UK from Swansea in Wales, and allows high-street stores to apply for and then operate license plate printing services (for profit). They are supposed to check that you have the right to that “plate”, but the BBC found that checking is skipped by some firms. People are using those firms to make plates for other people’s cars, in order to evade parking/speeding fines (and worse). Of course, criminals could print their own, but if dodgy firms are mixing illegal plate printing among legal plate printing then whole the system needs an upgrade. Now, it could be (I don’t know) that the license firms mail in paper forms to DVLA who then put them in a pile ahead of scanning them. If true, that is a bit Victorian. Maybe there a website for those firms making changes, and DVLA runs a 10 person dev team just to maintain the site. If it exists, it’s still a bit Victorian as people who own plates that have been cloned “by mistake” are not informed when that cloning happens. I say mistake because the firms caught by the BBC mentioned in their article all have good excuses and pledge to not let it happen again.
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Build an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server With Spring Boot and Spring Security
User management is required for most web applications, but building it isn't always an easy task. Many developers work around the clock to ensure their app is secure by seeking out individual vulnerabilities to patch. Luckily, you can increase your own efficiency by implementing OAuth 2.0 to your web application with Spring Security and Spring Boot. The process gets even easier by integrating with Okta on top of Spring Boot.
In this tutorial, you’ll first build an OAuth 2.0 web application and authentication server using Spring Boot and Spring Security. After that, you’ll use Okta to get rid of your self-hosted authentication server and simplify your Spring Boot application even more.
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The Key to No-Code App Optimization: Deep Configs
What if you had the ability to change the behavior and appearance of your app with zero code? The prospect of adding new layouts, changing color themes, and modifying widgets and icons without engineering intervention or an app updates may seem too good to be true, but it isn’t. This depth of configuration is made possible by “Deep Configs.”
What Are Deep Configs and How Do They Work?
Deep Configs enable you to change the default values in-app that control the behavior and appearance of your application. It abstracts your code and its data into values that can be tweaked in real-time. To get started, you have to identify and define the aspects of your app as parameters that can be altered using Deep Configs. For example, you can define a button that has two parameters: Color, which is red by default, and text as “Coming Soon.” When your app first fetches these parameters, their default data is reflected until new values are activated by the config, which overrides the previous value, thus enabling remote configuration. You can define parts of your code with Deep Configs, or populate the entire product architecture with it.
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DevSecOps #Fails
To understand the current and future state of DevSecOps, we gathered insights from 29 IT professionals in 27 companies. We asked them, "What are the most common DevSecOps fails? How are they rectified?" Here's what they told us:
Culture
- Changing the culture and mindset is not easy. Executives are tasked with this. We look to our executives to make DevSecOps and security something that’s infused throughout the organization. Until recently there was still a lot of talk and not a lot of action. 30% had not implemented a DevSecOps model. The executive team needs to create a built-in security culture, every step of the process so security is a priority for personal, team, and organizational goals. You must change mindsets throughout the organization.
- Security staff must embrace the DevOps culture and show that they add value without adding friction. In particular, the security organization must be willing to give up manual release approvals.
- The most common DevSecOps fails are: 1) Lack of assurance to business and project teams: understand the business context; identify and rank risk; engage senior technical people to work on security; integrate security activities (Threat Modeling, SAST, DAST, Pen Testing) in the SDLC. 2) Cultural barriers to collaboration: build collaboration between security, development, and operations teams; build a continuous security mindset. 3) Lack of security as a top priority for the business, auditors, and development teams: aim for long-term retention rather than short-term training; integrate workflows across teams to promote security. Starting from scratch: use existing standards OWASP Top 10, NIST 800-53, ISO 27001. 4) Lack of automation: emphasize automation wherever possible to drive consistency; use of virtualization and containers; continuous application and performance monitoring.
- 1) Security must be an up-front concern for the team. Adding security later is not going to provide enough protection. 2) Don’t assume your developers and testers are experts in security. Train them up and continue to supplement their training on an ongoing basis to keep up with new developments and threats. 3) Partner with security professionals to ensure that your efforts are effective and efficient. 4) Your development and test environments are not necessarily your production environment. Security testing must be performed in production in order to uncover vulnerabilities that might not be apparent during development. 5) If you’re using open source libraries and components, check regularly that the versions you’re using have no known vulnerabilities, and update them if necessary.
- DevOps overall is first and foremost a cultural transformation within an organization. It is aimed at breaking down the barriers between development, support and QA in order to create an environment based on collaboration and shared accountability. Difficulty in communication and collaboration, finger-pointing and a lack of enthusiasm for the common goals of the team are generally early warning signs that the DevOps initiative is not going well. These same principles apply to DevSecOps. In order to be successful, DevSecOps must be embraced by the entire team.
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Seata: Simple, Extensible, Autonomous Transaction Architecture
A global exclusive write lock implemented by Seata is used to achieve write isolation at the Read Uncommitted isolation level.
Seata, formerly known as Fescar, is a distributed transaction solution with high performance and ease of use for microservices architecture.
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4 Spring Annotations Every Java Developer Should Know
The complexity of modern applications never ceases to grow, with more and more features being packed into single applications or groups of applications. Although this growth brings with it some fantastic benefits, such as rich functionality and impressive versatility, it requires that developers utilize an ever-increasing number of paradigms and libraries. To reduce the workload of developers — and the amount of information that developers must memorize — many Java frameworks have turned to annotations.
Spring, in particular, is renowned for its use of annotations, allowing developers to create entire Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) with only a handful of annotations. These annotations reduce the amount of boilerplate code that is required to perform essential functions, but it also can obscure what is happening behind the scenes. For example, how does applying a Dependency Injection (DI) annotation to a field result in a specific bean being injected at runtime? Or, how does a REST annotation know which URL path to bind to?
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Japan will restrict the export of some materials used in smartphones and chips to South Korea
Japan’s trade ministry said today that it will restrict the export of some tech materials to South Korea, including polyimides used in flexible displays made by companies like Samsung Electronics. The new rules come as the two countries argue over compensation for South Koreans forced to work in Japanese factories during World War II.
The list of restricted supplies, expected to go into effect on July 4, includes polyimides used in smartphone and flexible organic LED displays, and etching gas and resist used to make semiconductors. That means Japanese suppliers who wish to sell those materials to South Korean tech companies such as Samsung, LG and SK Hynix will need to submit each contract for approval.
Japan’s government may also remove South Korea from its list of countries that have fewer restrictions on trading technology that might have national security implications, reports Nikkei Asian Review.
Earlier this year, South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled several Japanese companies, including Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, that had used forced labor during World War II must pay compensation and began seizing assets for liquidation. But Japan’s government claims the issue was settled in 1965 as part of a treaty that restored basic diplomatic relations between the two countries and is asking South Korea to put the matter before an international arbitration panel instead.
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Facebook civil rights audit says white supremacy policy is ‘too narrow’
Facebook’s second progress report pertaining to the civil rights audit conducted by former ACLU Washington Director Laura Murphy is here. Over the last six months, Facebook has made changes around enforcing against hate, fighting discrimination in ads and protecting against misinformation and suppression in the upcoming U.S. presidential election and 2020 Census, according to the progress report.
While Facebook has made changes in some of these areas — Facebook banned white supremacy in March — auditors say Facebook’s policy is still “too narrow.” That’s because it solely prohibits explicit praise, support or representation of the terms “white nationalism” or “white separatism,” but does not technically prohibit references to those terms and ideologies.
“The narrow scope of the policy leaves up content that expressly espouses white nationalist ideology without using the term ‘white nationalist,'” the report states. “As a result, content that would cause the same harm is permitted to remain on the platform.”
Therefore, the audit team recommends Facebook expand its policy to prohibit content that “expressly praises, supports, or represents white nationalist ideology” even if the content does not explicitly use the terms “white nationalism” or “white separatism.”
In Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s note today, she acknowledges the recommendation.
“We’re addressing this by identifying hate slogans and symbols connected to white nationalism and white separatism to better enforce our policy,” she wrote.
Sandberg also noted how Facebook recently updated its policies to ensure people don’t use Facebook to organize events intended to intimidate or harass people.
“Getting our policies right is just one part of the solution,” Sandberg said. “We also need to get better at enforcement — both in taking down and leaving up the right content.”
Sandberg is referring to the fact that Facebook has sometimes wrongfully taken down content meant to draw attention to racism and discrimination.
As Murphy noted in her report, “the definition and policing of hate speech and harassment on the platform has long been an area of concern. The civil rights community also claims that a lack of civil rights expertise informing content decisions leads to vastly different outcomes for users from marginalized communities.”
Facebook now says it’s taking steps to address this. One step, Sandberg says, is to have some content reviewers focus just on hate speech.
“We believe allowing reviewers to specialize only in hate speech could help them further build the expertise that may lead to increased accuracy over time,” Sandberg wrote.
Additionally, Sandberg has formalized a civil rights task force at Facebook. This task force will live on beyond the audit in order to continue building more awareness around civil rights issues on Facebook.
And ahead of the upcoming presidential election, Facebook says it is working on new protections against voter interference and is adding a policy that prohibits “don’t vote” ads. That policy is expected to go into effect before the 2019 gubernatorial election. On the census side, Facebook is working on an interference policy that it expects to launch this fall.
In March of this year, Facebook settled with the ACLU and others pertaining to discriminatory job ads. Just days later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said Facebook was in violation of the Fair Housing Act through its ad-targeting tools. This case is still pending.
In the meantime, Facebook has since begun working on a new system so that advertisers running US housing, employment and credit ads will no longer be able to target by age, gender, race, religion or zip code.
When this system launches, there will be a limited number of options by which to target. Additionally, Facebook won’t make any new terms available without first running it by the ACLU and the other plaintiffs from the March 2019 settlement.
In order to implement this new system, Facebook will ask advertisers to explicitly note if the ad involves housing, employment or credit opportunities. If it does, advertisers will be directed to the new system. Facebook is also putting tools in place to identify ads that advertisers failed to flag.
Additionally, Facebook is working on a tool that will let users search active housing ads by the advertiser and by location, whether or not they are in the target audience. This is expected to be available by the end of this year. Down the road, Facebook plans to make similar tools available for employment and credit opportunities.
“Given how critical access to housing, employment and credit opportunities are, this could have a significant impact on people’s lives,” Murphy wrote in her progress report.
This audit began in May 2018 following one scandal after the other pertaining to misinformation, and Facebook’s policies and people of color on its platform. The first six months entailed Murphy conducting interviews with civil rights organizations to determine their concerns. This last six months largely focused on content moderation and enforcement. The civil rights audit is far from over, and Facebook says we can expect to see the next update early next year.
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Saturday, June 29, 2019
Friday, June 28, 2019
A rare glimpse into the sweeping — and potentially troubling — cloud kitchens trend
Independent restaurant owners are doomed, and perhaps grocery stores, too.
Such is the conclusion of a growing chorus of observers who’ve been closely watching a new and powerful trend gain strength: that of cloud kitchens, or fully equipped shared spaces for restaurant owners, most of them quick-serve operations.
While viewed peripherally as an interesting and, for some companies, lucrative development, the movement may well transform our lives in ways that enrich a small set of companies while zapping jobs and otherwise taking a toll on our neighborhoods. Renowned VC Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital seemed to warn about this very thing in a Financial Times column that appeared last month, titled “The cloud kitchen brews a storm for local restaurants.”
Moritz begins by pointing to the runaway success of Deliveroo, the London-based delivery service that relies on low-paid, self-employed delivery riders who delivery local restaurant food to customers — including from shared kitchens that Deliveroo itself operates, including in London and Paris. He believes that Amazon’s recent investment in the company “might just foreshadow the day when the company, once just known as the world’s largest bookseller, also becomes the world’s largest restaurant company.”
That’s bad news for people who run restaurants, he adds, writing, “For now the investment looks like a simple endorsement of Deliveroo. But proprietors of small, independent restaurants should tighten their apron strings. Amazon is now one step away from becoming a multi-brand restaurant company — and that could mean doomsday for many dining haunts.”
The good news . . . and the bad
He’s not exaggerating. While shared kitchens have received accolades so far as a potential pathway for food entrepreneurs to launch and grow their businesses — particularly as more people turn to take out — there are many downsides to them that may well outweigh the good. Last year, for example, UBS wrote a note to its clients titled “Is the kitchen dead?” wherein it suggested that though few outside the food industry were paying much attention, the rise of food delivery apps like Deliveroo and Uber Eats could well prove ruinous for home cooks and as well as fresh food providers, including restaurants and supermarkets.
The economics are just too alluring, suggested the bank. Food is already inexpensive to have delivered because of cheap labor, and that will disappear entirely if delivery drones every take off. Meanwhile, food is becoming cheaper to make because of central kitchens, the kind that Deliveroo is opening and Uber is reportedly beginning move into, as well. (In March, Bloomberg reported that Uber is testing out a program in Paris where it’s renting out fully equipped, commercial-grade kitchens to serve businesses that selling food on delivery apps like Uber Eats.)
Yes, the businesses using the spaces are paying less than they would for traditional restaurant real estate, but the reality is also that most of the businesses moving into them right now aren’t small restaurateurs but quick service brands that aren’t particular known for emphasis on food quality but instead for churning out affordable food, fast.
As Eric Greenspan, an L.A.-based chef who has appeared on many Food Network shows and has opened and closed numerous restaurants over the course of his career, explains in a new, independent documentary about cloud kitchens: “Delivery is the fastest growing market in restaurants. What started out as 10 percent of your sales is now 30 percent of your sales, and [the industry predicts] it will be 50 to 60 percent of a quick-serve restaurant’s sales within the next three to five years. So you take that, plus the fact that quick-serve brands are kind of the key to getting a fat payout at the end of the day . . .”
During an age when fewer people frequent them traditional restaurants — with their overhead and turnover and razor-thin margins — running one simply makes less and less sense, Greenspan continues.
“[Opening] up a brick-and-mortar restaurant these days is just like giving yourself a job. Now [with centralized kitchens], as long as the product is coming out strong, I don’t need to be there as a presence. I can quality control remotely now. I can go online and [sign out of a marketplace like Postmates or UberEats or Deliveroo] and not piss off any customers, because if I just decided to close the restaurant one day, and you drove over and it was closed, you’d be pissed. But if you’re looking for [one of my restaurants] in Uber Eats and you can’t find it because I turned it off, well, you’re not pissed. You just order something else.”
Big players only need apply . . .
The model works for now for Greenspan, who is running numerous restaurant “concepts” from one cloud kitchen in L.A. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that facility belongs in part to Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick, who was early to grok the opportunity that shared kitchens present. In fact, it was early last year that he announced he was investing $150 million in a startup called City Storage Systems that focused on repurposing distressed real estate assets and turning them into spaces for new industries, like food delivery.
That company owns CloudKitchens, which invites chains, as well as independent restaurant and food truck owners, to lease space in one of their facilities for a monthly fee, along with additional fees for data analytics meant to help the entrepreneurs boost their sales.
The pitch to restaurateurs is that CloudKitchens can reduce their overhead, but of course, the company is also amassing all kinds of data about its tenants in the process that one could seeing using over time. Little wonder that Amazon wants in or that these outfits have at least one serious competitor in China — Panda Selected — that is doing exactly the same thing and which raised $50 million led by Tiger Global Management earlier this year.
No one can fault these savvy entrepreneurs for seizing on what looks like a gigantic business opportunity. Still, the kitchens, which make all the sense in the world from an investment standpoint, should not be embraced so readily as a panacea, either.
Most obviously, they rely on the same people who drive Ubers and handle food deliveries — people who aren’t afforded health benefits and whose financial picture is forever precarious as a result. As with Uber drivers, Deliveroo employees tried to gain status as “workers” last year with better pay and paid but they were denied these rights because they have the option of asking other riders to take their deliveries. The EU Parliament more recently passed new rules to protect so-called gig economy workers, though the measures don’t go far.
Meanwhile, in the U.S, Uber and Lyft continue to fight legislation, including in California, that would turn their drivers and other gig workers into employees. In fact, though a bill passed the California assembly late last month that would give employee status to contract workers, Uber and Lyft are worried enough about its possible passage now in the state’s senate that the fierce rivals have teamed up to battle it.)
Ripple effects . . .
As Moritz suggests, shared kitchens stand to benefit some far more than others. While big chains, and renowned chefs like Greenberg, can take advantage of them given their brand recognition, smaller restaurants are more likely to be adversely impacted by them, and if they disappear, there are other ripple effects, including on housing markets.
Even Matt Newberg, a founder and foodie from New York, could see the writing on the wall when he recently toured CloudKitchen’s two L.A. facilities, along with the shared kitchens of two other companies: Kitchen United which last fall raised $10 million from GV, and and Fulton Kitchens, which offers commercial kitchens for rent on an annual basis.
Newberg is responsible for the aforementioned documentary (which you can also watch below), and he suggests that he most taken aback by the conditions of the first facility that CloudKitchens opened and operates, on West Washington Boulevard in South L.A. Though most restaurant kitchens are chaotic scenes, Newberg said that as “someone who loves food and sustainability” the easy-to-miss warehouse didn’t feel “very humane” to him. It’s windowless for one thing (it’s a warehouse). Newberg says that he also counted 27 kitchens packed into what are “maybe 250-square-feet to 300 square-foot spaces,” and a lot of people who appeared to be in panic mode. “Imagine lots of screaming, lots of sirens triggered when an order gets backed up, tablets everywhere.”
Adds Newberg, “When i walked in, I was like, holy shit, no one even knows this exists in L.A. It felt like Ground Zero. It felt like a military base. I mean, it seemed genius, but also crazy.”
Notably, Newberg says CloudKitchen’s second, newer location is far nicer, as are the facilities of Kitchen United and Fulton Kitchens. “That [second CloudKitchen warehouse] felt like a WeWork for kitchens. Super sleek. It was as quiet as a server farm. There were still no windows, but the kitchens are nicer and bigger.”
Growing pains . . .
Every startup has growing pains, naturally, and presumably, shared kitchen companies are not immune to these. Still, Moritz, the venture capitalist, recalls a telling story in that FT column. He says that in the early 2000s, his firm, Sequoia, invested in a chain of kebab restaurants called Faasos that planned to delivery meals to customers’ homes but was getting crushed by high rents and turnover among other things, so opened a centralized kitchen to sell kebobs. Now, he says, Fassos produces a wide variety of foods, including other Indian specialities but also Chinese and Italian dishes under separate brand names.
It’s the same playbook that Eric Greenspan is using, telling Food & WIne magazine last year that his goal was ultimately to have six delivery-only concepts running simultaneously, with two menus each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Greenberg, who is obviously media savvy, can probably pull it off, too, as has Fassos. But for restaurants that are not known franchises or have the star appeal of celebrity chef, the future might not look so bright.
Writes Moritz: “In some markets there is still an opportunity for hardened restaurant and kitchen operators — particularly if they are gifted in the use of social media to build a following and refashion themselves. But they need to move quickly before it becomes too expensive to compete with the larger, faster-moving companies. The mere prospect of Amazon using cloud kitchens to provide cuisine catering to every taste — and delivering these meals through services such as Deliveroo — should be enough to give any restaurateur heartburn.”
It should also worry people who care about their neighborhoods. Cloud kitchens may make it easier and cheaper than ever to order take-out, but there will be consequences, some of which most of us have yet to imagine.
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Google finance head joins Postmates board ahead of anticipated IPO
Google’s vice president of finance, has joined Postmates’ board of directors, the latest sign that the on-demand food delivery startup is prepping to take the company public.
Postmates announced Friday that Kristin Reinke, vice president of Finance at Google, will join the San Francisco startup as an independent director.
Reinke has been with Google since 2005. Prior to Google, Reinke was at Oracle for eight years. Reinke also serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Economic Advisory Council.
Her skill set will come in handy as Postmates creeps towards an IPO.
Earlier this year, the company lined up a $100 million pre-IPO financing that valued the business at $1.85 billion. Postmates is backed by Tiger Global, BlackRock, Spark Capital, Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Slow Ventures and others. Spark Capital’s Nabeel Hyatt tweeted the news earlier Friday.
Happy to welcome Kristin to the board of @Postmates.
Great times ahead. https://t.co/nEqu3A2YkE
— Nabeel Hyatt (@nabeel) June 28, 2019
“Postmates has established itself as the market leader with a focus on innovation and route efficiency in the fast‐growing on‐demand delivery sector. Given their strong execution, accelerating growth, and financial discipline, they are well positioned for continued market growth across the U.S.,” said Reinke. “I’m thrilled to join the board.”
The startup has been beefing up its executive quiver, most recently hiring Apple veteran and author Ken Kocienda as a principal software engineer at Postmates X, the team building the food delivery company’s semi-autonomous sidewalk rover, Serve.
Kocienda, author of “Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” spent 15 years at Apple focused on human interface design, collaborating with engineers to develop the first iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
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SpaceX aims to provide commercial Starship launches by 2021
SpaceX is only getting started launching Falcon Heavy commercial missions, but it already has its eyes on the next prize – launching Starship. Now, we know that it’s hoping to start commercial service for this next-generation, fully reusable rocket by 2021, according to SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales Jonathan Hofeller.
Hofeller was speaking at a conference in Indonesia (via SpaceNews), and noted that the private space launch company is currently talking to three different telecom companies about selecting which will be the first mission aboard the new spacecraft. Starship, formerly knowns as ‘BFR’ or ‘Big Falcon Rocket’) is currently in development at two separate SpaceX facilities, one in Texas and one in Florida, in what amounts to an internal company ‘bake-off’ to see which team can delivery the better solution faster. An engineering show-down of this kind is not uncommon among tech companies, and often produces results from both efforts that complement or enhance whatever the final product ends up being, rather than being a ‘winner take all’ scenario.
Starship, once complete, will include a launch system propelled to orbit by a ‘Super Heavy’ booster, with even more lift capacity than the existing Falcon Heavy rocket. It’ll be able to delivery as many as 20 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit, or over 100 tons to low-Earth orbit. It’s also intended to be the spacecraft that enables SpaceX to achieve its goal of running crewed missions to Mars.
Previously stated target dates for Starship milestones include achieving orbital launches by 2020, though based on this new info those will be test or demonstration missions rather than for paying customers. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also previously said that the company is looking at 2023 as the earliest target date for providing a Moon circuit space trip to his first paying tourist customer, Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa.
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Thursday, June 27, 2019
Unit Testing in ReactJS using Jest and Enzyme
According to Michael Feathers, “Any code that has no tests is a legacy code.” So as a developer it is your duty to avoid creating legacy code by using test-driven development (TDD).
There are many tools available for unit testing in ReactJS but we will be going through Enzyme and Jest.
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How the Data Transformation Process Works
As your business grows and evolves, so does the number of data formats and applications you must also support. Whether an enterprise is trying to onboard a new trading partner or ensure that it meets all the requirements a customer has, data is coming from many different places.
The last thing your enterprise wants is to be difficult do business with. You need to be able to communicate efficiently with the members of your digital ecosystem in order to expand and take on more customers. That’s why efficiency in the data transformation process is so valuable to an organization: companies that can handle data formats of any size, shape, or form are the ones that are going to thrive in the age of the cloud.
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Marker Tracking via WebSockets With a Raspberry Pi
Imagine you intend to automatically move a couple of robots within a room. You need accurate position and orientation (direction frontside is pointing to) of each robot. Apparently, outdoor systems like GPS don't work and you have a small budget. What do you do?
After some research for easy-to-apply solutions, my students and I decided to visually track our robots. We put a camera at the ceiling continuously streaming a video stream of our robots below. What remained to be done was capturing the frames of the video stream, search for the objects of interest inside, and serving the findings.
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Spring MVC and MongoDB: A Match Made in Platform.sh Heaven
How difficult is it for a Java developer to create an application that needs to handle front-end technology? It’s a difficult question — and one that I hear every single day from back-end developers. So, how can we solve it in the Spring world? Well, with Spring MVC.
Spring MVC makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade, Spring-based applications that you can just run. In this post, we’ll show the perfect union between Spring MVC, the MongoDB database, and the NoSQL database most popular around the globe, running in the cloud on Platform.sh.
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Spotify needs to crack down on labels’ apps snatching user data
Spotify seems to have learned little from the Facebook developer platform’s scandals despite getting a huge boost from the social network in its early days. Spotify has been caught allowing record labels to grab tons of unnecessary user data and permissions to even control their accounts just so people can “pre-save” upcoming song releases.
An investigation by Billboard’s Micah Singleton found major label Sony’s app for pre-saving demanded access to users’ email address, what you’ve listened to and saved to your library, playlists you’ve made or subscribed to, artists you follow, and what you’re playing right now. It also asks to be able to take actions on your behalf including change who you follow, add or remove songs from your library, create/edit/follow playlists, and even control Spotify on your devices.
An example of Universal Music Group’s pre-save app that asks for unnecessary user data and access permissions
This means that by agreeing to use a pre-save feature, a record label could index you music tastes and determine your current mood for marketing purposes, subscribe you to all of their artists and playlists, force you to create playlists that include their artists or add them to your existing playlists, and delete or unfollow any music or artists represented by their competitors.
Since users often speed through platform app permission screens assuming they’re just asking for what’s required, many likely gave up valuable data about themselves and the ability to manipulate their accounts without fully understanding what was happening. Other major labels like Warner and Universal’s pre-save apps like this one similarly ask for 10 types of permission — most extraneous.
In reality, the only permission a pre-save app should need is to be able to add the song you wanted to pre-save to your library. Anything else is theoretically prohibited by Spotify’s developer policy section 5.2: “You will only request the data you need to operate your Spotify Developer Application.”
In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, platforms like Spotify should know better than to let developers run amok without proper oversight. That’s why I was so disappointed when Spotify refused to provide a statement, explanation, or even talk with me about the issue.
Offering a flexible developer platform has plenty of advantages for users. Apps for DJing with streaming music, discovering new bands, or synchronizing playback with friends could be built with rightful and transparent use of Spotify’s APIs. But for something as simple and common as volunteering to have a new song from your favorite band show up in your library on the day it’s released shouldn’t become a lure for an exploitative data grab.
That’s why Spotify should build its own in-house pre-save app that labels could all use to pre-promote their releases. Approved labels and their artists should be able to punch in their upcoming single’s Spotify URL and get a shareable link back that they can distribute through social media or wherever that only grants permission to pre-save that specific song, and that expires once that action is completed.
Spotify is widening its subscriber lead over Apple Music
Otherwise, Spotify risks losing all the goodwill its built up with listeners by being a music-first company compared to competitors like Apple and Google where music is a rounding error. Apple Music provides app developers with less data about users.
Just today Apple Music announced it has 60 million subscribers, lagging increasingly further behind Spotify which now has 100 million subscribers and 217 million total monthly users. Spotify already dominates cultural mind share for streaming, having used the playlists it controls to become a hit-maker and gain leverage over the labels for royalty negotiations. But turning a blind eye to shady developers just because they own the music it streams could make listeners question their loyalty and stray to Apple, which is notoriously serious about privacy.
If Spotify is unwilling to push back on data abuse by its record label partners, then it’s undeserving of users’ ears and subscription dollars.
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SV Academy just landed $9.5 million to offer tuition-free training that puts people in tech jobs
When you live in Silicon Valley, it feels like nearly everyone works in tech and that entry into the industry is wide open. Of course, the reality is very different. Even as software eats the world, not everyone has the training or connections to land a high-paying job in either the traditional tech industry or with a company that’s actively embracing its digital future.
In fact, it would be challenging to interest an executive recruiter in someone who doesn’t have a tech background and didn’t go to college, yet a company called SV Academy is doing just that. In fact, according to cofounder and CEO Rahim Fazel, the nearly two-and-a-half-year-old, Bay Area company is currently helping 100 people every 30 days — or 1,200 per year — land jobs at companies like SurveyMonkey, Palo Alto Networks, and PayPal.
Did we mention that it costs these job candidates nothing, that instead employers pay SV Academy between $12,000 to $15,00 per hire? All the prospects really need to do is convince SV Academy that they have the grit required to take a 12-week, tuition-free training program that teaches human-centered skills that place these individuals in sales roles, as well as that they will embrace a year of ongoing training and mentorship for a year after graduating.
It sounds like a great deal, and it is, which is why SV Academy says it has more interest than it can handle. In fact, Fazel tells us that the company, which received 1,000 applications over eight months in its first year of operations, is now receiving 1,000 applications a week from people who’ve largely heard of the company through word of mouth.
Because it’s focused on finding candidates who it can stand behind and who won’t quit after their first year on the job, SV Academy is loath to scale up to accommodate that kind of demand. Still, a new round of funding should help widen the funnel a bit. Until recently, the company was backed by $2 million that it raised a couple of years ago from Bloomberg Beta, Rethink Education, Precursor Ventures, Uprising Ventures, 500 Startups and WTI.
The money was enough to SV Academy to achieve profitability and get to the point of putting employers on a waiting list. But with demand beginning to more seriously exceed its supply of candidates, SV Academy recently hit the market again, sharing exclusively that it has just closed on $9.5 million in Series A funding led by Owl Ventures with participation from Kapor Capital, Strada Education Network, and several earlier backer participating, namely Bloomberg, Rethink, and Uprising.
It isn’t the first time that Fazal has started a company that has taken off. In fact, he cofounded a company a decade ago that sold to Oracle, where he spent the next two and a half years. But SV Academy is even closer to his heart, given that he is exactly the kind of person who he wants to help with SV Academy — someone smart but lacking resources. Fazel himself grew up in government housing. He didn’t go to college. He knows firsthand that with determination and right amount of guidance and support, obstacles like not financial stability or a fancy degree can fall away.
Fazel also recognizes the importance of having the right cofounder, which he seems to have landed on with Joel Scott, who is also the company’s COO. A Stanford-trained lawyer, Scott was previously VP of operations at Hewlett Packard, and according to Fazel has trained upwards of 500 SaaS salespeople since college.
Indeed, Scott has played a major role in creating SV Academy’s curriculum, which is very focused on training people for SaaS jobs (for now) and that is entirely virtual, from the 12-week-training period, to the coaching that comes afterward. The unsurprising reason: it enables it to reach students in the U.S. wherever they may be, and whatever their experience might be. (Though some of the applicants who it accepts are college graduates, many are also “working full-time jobs, or they’re caretakers, and it’s impossible for them to drive into the city several times a week for classes,” he explains.)
It seems to be working, too. Fazel says that 100% of the individuals who complete the program are not only receiving median job offers of $79,000 plus benefits and, in many cases, equity, but 70% of them are also receiving promotions within their first year. Yes, the law of small numbers is a factor, but it’s also easy to understand investors’ enthusiasm for what they are seeing — including the cautious approach SV Academy is taking to scaling up.
“Real transformation is difficult,” says Fazel. “You can’t create outcomes like this by throwing software at the problem.”
Above, left to right: Joel Scott and Rahim Fazel of SV Academy
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