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Basic Agile Practices for Technical and Non-Technical Teams in 2019

Reading time6 min
Views2.2K
Teams that apply popular Agile practices explain why they have chosen this methodology in their own ways. For someone, it seems obvious to work with obligatory and “sacred” Agile; someone can define non-binding or controversial practices. In any case, Agile is one of the most popular methodologies in project management nowadays. Its practices and concepts are appreciated by many developers and managers around the globe.

What are these powerful practices that make Agile popular and trendy? Here we share the list that is definitely incomplete but foundational.

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Building a global legal network for open source

Reading time8 min
Views819
In late 2006 I became the first coordinator of the Free Software Foundation Europe’s legal department. It was called, for reasons lost to time, the “Freedom Task Force,” and it constituted myself, Carlo Piana as the General Counsel, and several volunteers with connections to organizations like gpl-violations.org. Our goal was strait forward. We wanted to enhance knowledge and communication across Europe with respect to open source software and to ensure that both commercial and non-commercial actors in the space would get the full benefit from its potential.

One may ask why a legal department was being used for what sounds like a relatively general goal. Such a question can be answered with context from the time period. In 2006 one of the main discussions about sustainability for open source was related to legal matters, particularly concerns or challenges related to patents and copyright matters. Simplifying things somewhat, there were open questions regarding whether patent challenges could make open source expensive or unsustainable for commercial actors, and there were open questions regarding whether parties could or should follow the terms of open source licenses.

On the latter point, and somewhat amusingly when used from the perspective of today, some parties were of the opinion that the terms of open source licenses might not be mandatory. Harold Welte, the team at gpl-violations.org and lawyers like Dr. Till Jeager in Germany are owed a debt for laying this question conclusively to rest not only in their own nation but globally. While it may seem superficially counter-intuitive, their work to ensure clarity a substantial foundation to encourage and sustain commercial investment in the sphere. After all, when it comes to investment, a clear, unambiguous and level playing-field is vital.
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It's high time to become part of an open source project

Reading time1 min
Views1.1K
JavaScript developers, I am working on an exciting opensource project pursuing two goals:

  1. Learning best practices in JavaScript/NodeJS
  2. Helping developers and myself to develop and launch MVPs to validate ideas quickly.

As developers, we have tons of ideas and would be awesome to have a simple tool to scaffold a secure project quickly, add a couple of forms, some project specific logic, and here you go — deploy and test your idea.
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WAF through the eyes of hackers

Reading time21 min
Views32K
Today we’re going to talk about one of the modern security mechanism for web applications, namely Web Application Firewall (WAF). We’ll discuss modern WAFs and what they are based on, as well as bypass techniques, how to use them, and why you should never entirely rely on WAF. We’re speaking from the pentesters’ perspective; we’ve never developed WAFs and only collected data from open sources. Thus, we can only refer to our own experience and may be unaware of some peculiarities of WAFs.
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Open source tool for intent-based search quality validation

Reading time2 min
Views1K
No matter how cool your search solution is, without a reliable way of testing it you will not be able to do any improvement without breaking something valuable.

Even a tiny increase in overall search result quality might have a noticeable effect on conversion rate. Naturally, you can use exit-rate to judge if your search needs improvements and do required adjustments, but will you be able to make sure those changes are safe? What if improved relevancy for a specific category breaks search for several other categories?

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Moreover, high exit-rate means no matter what you are going to do, the problem has taken place, so dozens of customers already didn’t manage to find what they were up to. Basically, the only way to proceed is to have a reliable search quality validation approach.
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Top 10 Chat, Audio & Video Calling API & SDK Providers for Enterprise Business

Reading time8 min
Views45K
The Worlds Leading Real-time Messaging, Audio & Video Chat Solutions That Made Biggest Impact In 2019

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With the growing trend of digitalization, most enterprises have transformed their communication methodology from mainstream to digital. In order to keep up with competitors, companies regularly upgrade their services, specially the way they relay information to their customers as well as their employees. Today, seamless real-time networking plays a critical role in engaging with individuals and enterprises, and the best way to implement such a feat is onboarding a Real-Time Chat, Voice & Video Calling SDK/API providers.
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Build tools in machine learning projects, an overview

Reading time12 min
Views3.3K
I was wondering about machine learning/data science project structure/workflow and was reading different opinions on the subject. And when people start to talk about workflow they want their workflows to be reproducible. There are a lot of posts out there that suggest to use make for keeping workflow reproducible. Although make is very stable and widely-used I personally like cross-platform solutions. It is 2019 after all, not 1977. One can argue that make itself is cross-platform, but in reality you will have troubles and will spend time on fixing your tool rather than on doing the actual work. So I decided to have a look around and to check out what other tools are available. Yes, I decided to spend some time on tools.

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This post is more an invitation for a dialogue rather than a tutorial. Perhaps your solution is perfect. If it is then it will be interesting to hear about it.

In this post I will use a small Python project and will do the same automation tasks with different systems:


There will be a comparison table in the end of the post.
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Build Visual Studio templates with tags, for efficient user search and grouping

Reading time3 min
Views3.8K

Visual Studio’s project templates enable you, the developer, to create multiple similar projects more efficiently by defining a common set of starter files. The project templates can be fully customized to meet the needs of a development team, or a group, and can be published to the Visual Studio Marketplace for others to download and use too! Once published, developers can install and access the template through Visual Studio’s New Project Dialog.


The newly designed New Project Dialog for Visual Studio 2019 was built to help developers get to their code faster. Using a search and filter focused experience, we are aiming to provide better discoverability for specific templates to start your application development

 

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Breaking down the fundamentals of C #: allocating memory for a reference type on the stack

Reading time6 min
Views7.3K
This article will show you the basics of types internals, as of course an example in which the memory for the reference type will be allocated completely on the stack (this is because I am a full-stack programmer).



Disclaimer


This article does not contain material that should be used in real projects. It is simply an extension of the boundaries in which a programming language is perceived.

Before proceeding with the story, I strongly recommend you to read the first post about StructLayout, because there is an example that will be used in this article (However, as always).
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Extending Azure security capabilities

Reading time6 min
Views1.4K

As more organizations are delivering innovation faster by moving their businesses to the cloud, increased security is critically important for every industry. Azure has built-in security controls across data, applications, compute, networking, identity, threat protection, and security management so you can customize protection and integrate partner solutions. 


We keep investing in security and we are excited to share exciting updates this week at Hannover Messe 2019. We are excited to announce that Dedicated Hardware Security Module Service (HMS) in UK, Canada, and Australia, Azure disk encryption support for Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) are generally available. Also Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Storage, the Regulatory Compliance Dashboard, and support for virtual machine sets are now generally available as part of Azure Security Center.



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New feature in Git 3: closures

Reading time3 min
Views19K

Git is a popular version control system. In Git, an atomic change of one or several files is called a commit, and several consecutive commits are combined into a branch. Branches are used to implement new ideas (features).



It happens that the idea is a dead end and the developer has turned the wrong way, so he needs to roll back to the original version. He should forget about the new branch, switch to the main dev or master branch and continue working. In this case, the "scion" will hang forever, as well as the desire to remove it. But how to remove the part of the history? This branch shows the efforts of the hard-working programmer, even if in vain. So it will be easier to report to the boss, because an unsuccessful result is also a result!


I hasten to rejoice that Git developers are going to introduce a new command to close such "homeless" branches in the third version. The current version is 2.21.0.


How to use this command, what benefits does it give and what do IT companies think? The article answers these and other questions.

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Congratulations Imagine Cup EMEA Regional Final Champions: Team Finderr from the United Kingdom! Russian team is third

Reading time3 min
Views606

Imagine EMEA group photo blog.jpg


The Imagine Cup 2019 competition is well underway with our second Regional Final wrapping up in Amsterdam, the Netherlands this week. Team Finderr from the United Kingdom took home the first-place title and a spot in the World Championship for their app solution to find lost objects with a smartphone. Congratulations!

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Indexes in PostgreSQL — 4 (Btree)

Reading time17 min
Views22K
We've already discussed PostgreSQL indexing engine and interface of access methods, as well as hash index, one of access methods. We will now consider B-tree, the most traditional and widely used index. This article is large, so be patient.

Btree


Structure


B-tree index type, implemented as «btree» access method, is suitable for data that can be sorted. In other words, «greater», «greater or equal», «less», «less or equal», and «equal» operators must be defined for the data type. Note that the same data can sometimes be sorted differently, which takes us back to the concept of operator family.
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.NET Core Container Images now Published to Microsoft Container Registry

Reading time7 min
Views2.4K

We are now publishing .NET Core container images to Microsoft Container Registry (MCR). We have also made other changes to the images we publish, described in this post.


Important: You will need to change FROM statements in Dockerfile files and docker pull commands as a result of these changes. 3.0 references need to be changed now. Most 1.x and 2.x usages can be changed over time. The new tag scheme is decribed in this post and are provided at the microsoft-dotnet-core repo, our new home on Docker Hub.


Summary of changes:


  • .NET Core images are now published to Microsoft Container Registry.
  • Updates will continue to be published to Docker Hub, for .NET Core 1.x and 2.x.
  • .NET Core 3.0 will only be published to MCR.
  • Nano Server 2016 images are no longer supported or published.

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Info desk: global Internet initiatives

Reading time6 min
Views1.4K


Fiber-optic cables are a great way to bring high-speed Internet right to your home or office. But even in large cities not everyone can enjoy the benefits of it, since apartments far away from everyone, or low-population districts far from downtown, are very reluctantly served by ISPs.

And then there’s small towns and villages, far away from the main Internet “highways”. In poorer countries, Internet is often slow and expensive even in large population centers, while villages are often left without a connection for years. To connect them to the World Wide Web takes the resources of not just normal ISPs, but telecom giants. Solar-powered drones with networking equipment, weather balloons, satellites and other similar projects are not just science fiction, but a reality today (or in the near future). But who’s closer to launch and who’s lagging behind? Let’s find out.
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React Code Splitting in 2019

Reading time6 min
Views4.2K

It's 2019! Everybody thinks they know code splitting. So - let's double check!



What does code splitting stand for?


In short – code splitting is just about not loading a whole thing. Then you are reading this page you don't have to load a whole site. When you are selecting a single row from a database – you don't have to take all.
Obvious? Code splitting is also quite obvious, just not about your data, but your code.

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