Software Craftsmanship

A simple, universal UX enhancement

UI and UX aspects pays nowadays a tremendous role in application development. Yet there is little advance since the release of the Desktop and Windows concepts.
I think these paradigms of interaction should be reconsidered and a re-evaluation of psychical impact should be further researched.
This interaction not only exercises a subliminal coercion but in time it has cemented some mechanistic behaviors which extended to everyday life. And that accounts for small but stressful accumulating factors so we must acknowledge the interaction with the PC and nowadays devices are far for being an ally, an enhancement of our well being.
One simple enhancement that I think it was overlooked and still do not understand why it is not implemented at all it is a clickable “nothing” menu entry. While in the process of human activity there is room for reevaluation the actual UI does not allow a natural state of: I changed my mind, so I have to click somewhere else, and thus produce an undesired click event somewhere I should decide where. That is obviously not only time consuming but also adds subliminally an anxiety factor to the interaction.
That is I propose the DoNothing escape entry in context menus as a must for a better UX experience:

Here the: **Nothing to do 🙂** menu entry I used for the SoundX multimedia player in year 2000. By the way this tool still works, just as a side note it can be downloaded here. (excuse some bugs, use at your own risk!)

MD5 checksum: f2c23029ebf30c8b34d4c4a7b90fdb7d *SoundX0.2.3.2000.zip

SoundX0.2.3.2000 Download

DevOps Skills

The broad picture. Skills to address the “from Code to Infrastructure” paradigm. Bridging ends from code producers to deployment in production – mindset of all involved, get a sense of the process as well do the automation of it and the orchestration and monitoring.

Collaborate with internal management teams involved in the DevOps process and stay familiar with the objectives, roadmap, blocking issues and other project areas.
Have the skills to mentor and advise team members on the best ways to deliver code, what tools to use when coding and how to test the latest features.

The target. Fast provisioning: be able to setup new machines fast. Good monitoring: to be quickly able to diagnose failures and trace them down. Quickly rollback to a previous version of the microservice. Rapid app deployment through fully automated pipelines. Create the Devops mindset / culture.

DevOps engineers need to know how to use and understand the roles of the following types of tools:
1. Version control: GitHub, GitLab
2. Continuous Integration servers: code coming in repository server and triggers build and doc: Jenkins, GitLab CI, Atlassian Bamboo, Circle CI, GitHub Actions
3. Configuration management: Software Configuration Management SCM Tools: Configuration management occurs when a configuration platform is used to automate, monitor, design and manage otherwise manual configuration processes. System-wide changes take place across servers and networks, storage, applications, and other managed systems: Puppet, Ansible, Chef
4. Deployment automation: Ansible Tower, Bamboo
5. Containers: containerd, Docker, Artifactory
6. Infrastructure Orchestration: automating the provisioning of the infrastructure services needed to support an app moving into production – in the right order, is orchestration: Terraform, Ansible (also Config. Management Tool), Chef, Kubernetes
7. Monitoring and analytics: Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk
8. Testing and Cloud Quality tools: a test automation platform uses scripts to automate the whole process of software testing. Identify the tests that need to be automated. Research and analyze the automation tools that meet your automation needs and budget. Based on the requirements, shortlist two most suitable tools. Do a pilot for two best tools and select the better one. Discuss the chosen automation tools with other stakeholders, explain the choice, and get their approval. Proceed to test automation
Tools: Kobiton, Eggplant, TestProject, LambdaTest
9. Network protocols from layers 4 to 7, nginx, caching, Service Mesh.
10. Programming skills with Java, Shell, Python, JS, Ruby…

Also:
Monitoring production environments
Performance measurements
Security
Cloud administration
Get proper alerts when something is wrong or unavailable
Help resolve problems either through online support or technical troubleshooting

Job Breakthroughs

Startup vs. Larger Company:
Working for a smaller company is that you get to make more of an impact: Working in a larger corporation might have more benefits or a higher salary but a startup is where you can really make a difference and see the influence your work is having on the business. You’re heavily involved in each stage of production and your opinion is more likely to carry weight than at a larger, more structured operation. Decentralization of big companies would be done through tokenization. The shares will be done through ICOs.
Jobs in IT:
In Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, data security, virtual reality and augmented reality, virtual worlds (and virtual assets) and bank-less, free nodes back-boned, Internet of payment. Jobs to see as or related to: big data engineer, Software 2.0 Engineer (maintain Neural Networks that write code), full-stack developer, security engineer, IoT architect and VR/AR engineer and hybrid engineers, with agile mindsets through the teams, with solid technology stacks knowledge that working together are able to bind different ends of the domain spectrum (similarly like DevOps is to the “from Code to Infrastructure” mindset paradigm), runners of decentralized Internet (sustained by Blockchain and other similar technologies yet to come, in order to back-up the Virtual Assets in the Virtual Worlds in the Decentralized Network).
Thus the skills needed to succeed in the IT jobs of tomorrow revolve around security certifications, programming and applications development, proficiency with cloud, decentralized architectures and mobile technologies, and other specialized skill sets giving also way to the hybrid IT roles that bind the business to IT.
Roles grow vertically based on business domain vs. technology stacks. For example: a Solutions Architect has the business domain knowledge but has also a technical background. He will develop complex technology solutions in a specific business domain. Software Architect knows in a deeper way the technology stacks. He will design the architecture of the technical implementation. Technical Lead is one with deeper knowledge of the, or a part of the technology stack. He designs using established patterns, coaches teams into the adopted technologies and unlocks teams in order to succeed in project delivery.
Data Scientists: it is essential for data scientists to work with languages like R, Python, SAS, Hadoop, Netezza in which they apply their knowledge in statistics, mathematics (algebra), matrices (multivariable) calculus. And to have a knowledge in platforms like MapReduce, GridGain, HPCC, Storm, Hive, Pig, Amazon S3.
The user as valuable “in the network” resource, in parallel digital universes (eg. Metaverse). Their actions should be monetized and generate income. We are producing valuable data even now by only navigating on FB, Google and other social networks which the system themselves uses it to become better (the long therm plan is building the future AI systems together). The “Internaut” will be one of the nicest job of the future.