Why Oracle Brings Hundreds of Its Machine Learning Experts Together Each Year

Originally published on the Oracle blog By: Alexa Morales The machine learning expertise at Oracle isn’t concentrated in a single department or R&D effort, it’s dispersed all over the world. That was made clear recently when more than 250 of the company’s experts spent three days together at Oracle headquarters for a machine-learning summit. It …

This Free Programming School Teaches Far More Than Coding

PARIS—It’s a fortuitous day to be sitting in a padded geodesic workbooth at 42, the tuition-free computer programming school created and funded by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel. I’m waiting to meet with Olivier Crouzet, the dean of studies. It happens to be the first day of La Piscine (the pool), a four-week programming endurance test that 800 people ages 18 to 30 will vie to complete.

Become A Software Hero: Top 10 Priorities For Growth-Oriented Developers

Originally published January 25, 2018 on Forbes The last few years have seen thrilling changes in the software landscape and mushrooming opportunities for coders. Today software developers are critical not just for every enterprise looking to grow, but also for every government or nonprofit organization wrestling with the world’s problems. That means we’ll need software …

Cloud Is Secret Behind Developer Lounge IoT, Art

Six CNC routers are cutting and etching faces into fluorescent acrylic while German artist Mirja Wellmann watches nearby. A woman admiring Wellmann’s sculpture gushes, “It’s beautiful! It’s like if you have talent, there are no limits!” Nearby, four flavors of microbrewed beer are perfected with data from IoT sensors. Oracle OpenWorld 2017 attendees rate the brews on touch screens. Others assemble colorful furniture made from 3D-printed beams designed by Java expert Michael Hoffer. Adorable robots intrigue passers-by. Welcome to Oracle’s annual Developer Lounge.

Bad Design: the ‘dark patterns’ of unethical, addictive software

Originally published August 14th, 2017 in SD Times We’ve all fallen prey to them at one time or another: Design techniques such as the bait-and-switch, disguised ads, faraway billing, friend spam and sneaking items into the checkout cart. These “dark patterns” are interfaces are “carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance …

What you want, when you want it: Trends in modern UX design

Unveiling his third annual “Design in Tech Report” in a March 12, 2017, talk, Silicon Valley design guru John Maeda noted that design is now a top priority for venture capitalists, consultancies and even stuffy enterprise software giants.

11 reasons why Android is winning

You know the smartphone has supplanted every other consumer technology when all anyone really wants in a car now is a “smartphone on wheels.” In a world where most smartphone users have Android-based models, Google is aiming to reach the next billion users coming online — with Android as the nexus of activity.

Four features on Oracle cloud and developer initiatives in Oracle Magazine

I've been busy! I wrote thousands upon thousands of words -- four feature stories in all -- on the Oracle's second-generation cloud technology and the company's nascent developer outreach programs for the January/February edition of Oracle Magazine: Cover story: "Open for Developers: There has never been more freedom of choice for developers building on Oracle …

12 tips for the New Visual Studio: Prepping for a future beyond Windows

Originally published September 28, 2016, SD Times. 12 tips for the new Visual Studio: Prepping for a future beyond Windows By Alexandra Weber Morales Microsoft Visual Studio is the most popular integrated development environment in the world, but the target keeps moving for IDEs. As device, language, platform and application diversity expand ever more rapidly, …

Necessity is the mother of the Rugged DevOps movement

No matter how good your perimeter security is, experts agree: Your system has been breached, whether you know it or not. The costs of security flaws—cybersecurity expert Joe Franscella calls them “The Five Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse: Scam, Extortion, Embarrassment, Theft and Death”—are enormous. So why don’t we consider security a first-class citizen in DevOps?