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The creation of design models as well as visualization of solutions is for some reason always a subject of great interest among all members of a productive team, be it a manager eager to master Sketch, or a developer who wants to make cool interfaces without the need to go to a designer. But we all know what happens when it comes to actually doing stuff.

My way

Hi, everybody!

My name is Anna and I work for an American company Scentbird NY as a product designer. Prior to that I was involved in developing flagship products in Alfa-Bank design team.

I was probably born under a lucky star but all my life I've been working with the developers who suggest the best product solutions, better than a lot of product managers and product owners. But anyway, my observation is that the earlier you involve developers into working on a particular task, the better off you are.

What you are about to read is actually a blueprint on how to conduct brainstorm sessions and generate not-so-obvious yet effective solutions, which are apparently really easy to reach and not that time-consuming.

The increasingly competitive job market demonstrates that performing only based on hard skills alone is no longer sufficient. In project management reality, hard skills contain creating work breakdown structures, managing a project budget, earned value assessments and critical path charts. All these skills require technical background and applying professional knowledge and tools to perform well. What are the soft skills of leadership and how they help to uncover project managers' facilities?

Apache Dubbo is one of the most popular Java projects on GitHub. It's not surprising. It was created 8 years ago and is widely applied as a high-performance RPC environment. Of course, most of the bugs in its code have long been fixed and the quality of the code is maintained at a high level. However, there is no reason to opt out of checking such an interesting project using the PVS-Studio static code analyzer. Let's see how it turned out.

Books with the word «Agile» in their titles began to appear on the shelves of IT experts and other industries' professionals after 2001. The term was used during the declaration of the Agile Software Development Manifesto. Agile describes a software development methodology that is characterized by short life cycles leading to frequent product releases.

Today this iterative or incremental method affects various aspects of development and business including project management. What are the best sources to learn Agile? This post covers 10 powerful books that may enhance the skills of project managers and their teams.

For the past two years, there’s been a lot of buzzing about the Internet of Things (IoT). This has to lead to the rapid selection of connected devices over industries and is determined to pass the 11 billion mark by the end of the year. Major Companies including IoT software development as their major services.

All these “things” are now creating their things, namely, lots and lots of data. This data will be at the core of commercial and industrial digital transformation (which is essentially the underlying force behind the fourth industrial revolution).

In other words, life as we know it is about to change forever! How is it going to change? Let’s take a look.

1. AI (Artifical Intelligence) can Effectively Manage Oceans of information

We can’t talk about IoT without AI as the latter has the power to make IoT a whole lot smarter and more efficient.

In fact, consultants believe that AI is the brains behind IoT systems that may facilitate build them run power tool.

For example, as more and more connected devices start communicating with each other, enterprises will need to leverage deep learning, image recognition, natural language processes, and neural-network driven decisions to help them understand each other (and us humans) better.

So far, we can say that IoT has felt like an isolated experience where it was just about simple data. Going forward, businesses will strive to achieve highly integrated experiences by using AI to better understand their employees, customers, and the general public living in smart cities.

Travis CI is a distributed web service for building and testing software that uses GitHub as a source code hosting service. In addition to the above scripts, you can add your own, thanks to the extensive configuration options. In this article we will set up Travis CI for working with PVS-Studio by the example of PPSSPP code.

Surely you've heard the expression «bug hunting» many times. I dare to assume, you won't mind earning one or two hundred (or even thousand) dollars by finding a potential vulnerability in someone's program. In this article, I'll tell you about a trick that will help analyzing open source projects in order to find such vulnerabilities.

A developer, who first encountered generating emails, has almost no chance to write an application, that will do it correctly. Around 40% of emails, generated by corporate applications, are violating some form of standard, and due to this, there are problems with delivery and display. There are reasons for this: emails are technically more difficult than the web, and operating emails is regulated by a few hundred standards, as well as an uncountable number of generally accepted (and not as much) practices, whereas the email clients are more varied and unpredictable than browsers. Testing may significantly improve the situation, but materials that are dedicated to testing the email system, are practically non-existent.

Mail.ru regularly interacts with its users by email. In our projects, all the components responsible for generating emails and even individual mailings, are subject to mandatory testing. In this article, we will share our experience (learning from our mistakes).

A PVS-Studio team and our product make a great contribution to upgrading of software quality. Moreover, in addition to detecting errors in closed and open source projects, there is an indirect contribution to the development of compilers and other tools of code analysis. We are pleased that in some cases we are trendsetters and we decided to dedicate a small note to this in our blog.

There’s a problem we needed to address in the course of developing our games. It’s complicated to generate a random number in a distributed network. Almost all blockchains have already faced this issue. Indeed, in networks where there is no trust between anyone, the creation of a random number solves a wide range of problems.

In this article, we explain how we solved this problem for our games. The first of these was Waves Xmas Tree.

CMake is a cross-platform system for automating project builds. This system is much older than the PVS-Studio static code analyzer, but no one has tried to apply the analyzer on its code and review the errors. As it turned out, there are a lot of them. The CMake audience is huge. New projects start on it and old ones are ported. I shudder to think of how many developers could have had any given error.

For the past ten years, the open-source movement has been one of the key drivers of the IT industry's development, and its crucial component. The role of open-source projects is becoming more and more prominent not only in terms of quantity but also in terms of quality, which changes the very concept of how they are positioned on the IT market in general. Our courageous PVS-Studio team is not sitting idly and is taking an active part in strengthening the presence of open-source software by finding hidden bugs in the enormous depths of codebases and offering free license options to the authors of such projects. This article is just another piece of that activity! Today we are going to talk about Apache Hive. I've got the report — and there are things worth looking at.

TL;DR: Client-server architecture of our internal configuration management tool, QControl.
At its basement, there’s a two-layered transport protocol working with gzip-compressed messages without decompression between endpoints. Distributed routers and endpoints receive the configuration updates, and the protocol itself makes it possible to install intermediary localized relays. It is based on a differential backup (“recent-stable,” explained further) design and employs JMESpath query language and Jinja templating for configuration rendering.

Qrator Labs operates on and maintains a globally distributed mitigation network. Our network is anycast, based on announcing our subnets via BGP. Being a BGP anycast network physically located in several regions across the Earth makes it possible for us to process and filter illegitimate traffic closer to the Internet backbone — Tier-1 operators.

On the other hand, being a geographically distributed network bears its difficulties. Communication between the network points-of-presence (PoP) is essential for a security provider to have a coherent configuration for all network nodes and update it in a timely and cohesive manner. So to provide the best possible service for customers, we had to find a way to synchronize the configuration data between different continents reliably.

In the beginning, there was the Word… which quickly became communication protocol in need of an upgrade.

.NET Core libraries is one of the most popular C# projects on GitHub. It's hardly a surprise, since it's widely known and used. Owing to this, an attempt to reveal the dark corners of the source code is becoming more captivating. So this is what we'll try to do with the help of the PVS-Studio static analyzer. What do you think – will we eventually find something interesting?

Backlog prioritization requires simplification and weighting of tasks. Each one belongs to strategy like ads acquisition or CRO. We may consider turnover, operational costs, other metrics as input; profit margin, ROI — as output in case of retail. The perfect goal is to find 20/80 solution and focus resources on a single strategy at a time. Metrics tied to strategies gives the dimension of model. Sometimes unit economy relations are violated because of non-linearity. In practice it means low/insignificant correlation and poor regression. Example: it is impossible to separate acquisition and conversion — the quantity of acquisition affect its quality and vice versa. Decomposition of tasks/strategies assumes linear decomposition of nonlinear system. Besides nonlinear statistical evaluation of strategies is required when CJM can't be tracked or online/offline channels can't be separated.

Managing your competition is an important skill that you need to have as a company. The management of competition can either be done by letting go of a market because it is too much to handle. You can also consider either selling yourself to a competition in a particular local market or acquiring them. Different companies adopted varied strategies according to the moment’s and the market’s demands.

Focus on Uber

Uber needs no introduction as a corporate or as a service provider. It has become synonymous with on-demand cab services and is slowly progressing towards providing many other services in the same fashion.

The phrase ‘Let's book an Uber’ has become common. In a decade, Uber has gained the status of a monopoly and has marked a prominent presence in more than 70 countries ever since its inception in 2009. However, it hasn't always been a bed of roses for Uber.

Uber has faced a lot of legal issues, some of them because of the legislature of the country, local drivers and passengers.

This article will tell you how to launch analysis of an embedded project and how to work with the analyzer's report. The PVS-Studio analyzer supports a number of compilers for embedded systems. The current version allows checking projects built with one of the following compilers under Window, Linux, and macOS:

• IAR Embedded Workbench
• Keil Embedded Development Tools for Arm
• TI ARM Code Generation Tools
• GNU Embedded Toolchain

This is a short story about how PVS-Studio helped us find an error in the source code of the library used in PVS-Studio. And it was not a theoretical error but an actual one — the error appeared in practice when using the library in the analyzer.

It is a new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

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You can’t mutate closure variables by simply assigning them. Python treats assignment as a definition inside a function body and doesn’t make closure at all.

We like to search for errors in Microsoft projects. Why? It's simple: their projects are usually easy to check (you can work in Visual Studio environment for which PVS-Studio has a convenient plugin) and they contain few errors. That's why the usual work algorithm is as follows: find and download an open source project from MS; check it; choose interesting errors; make sure there are few of them; write an article without forgetting to praise the developers. Great! Win-win-win: it took a little time, the bosses are glad to see new materials in the blog, and karma is fine. But this time «something went wrong». Let's see what we have found in the source code of Windows Forms and whether we should speak highly of Microsoft this time.