Across all of Microsoft, we are focusing on empowering developers to build better apps, faster. One way we are accomplishing that is by providing a range of products and services covering all stages of the software development lifecycle. This includes IDEs and DevOps tools, application and data platforms on the cloud, operating systems, Artificial Intelligence and IoT solutions, and more. All of these are centered around developers, both as individuals working in teams and organizations, and as members of developer communities.

GitHub is one of the largest developer communities, and for millions of developers around the world their GitHub identity has become a critical aspect of their digital life. Recognizing that, we’re excited to announce improvements that will help GitHub users get started more easily with our developer services, including Azure DevOps and Azure.

Hi guys,

Before you is an article guide to open data sets for machine learning. In it, I, for a start, will collect a selection of interesting and fresh (relatively) datasets. And as a bonus, at the end of the article, I will attach useful links on independent search of datasets.

Less words, more data.

A selection of datasets for machine learning:

• Data deaths and battles from the game of thrones — This data set combines three data sources, each based on information from a series of books.
• Global Terrorism Database — Over 180,000 terrorist attacks worldwide, 1970-2017.
• Bitcoin, historical data — Bitcoin data with an interval of 1 minute from selected exchanges, January 2012 — March 2019

This week I spent coding my very first public pet-app based on Telegram chat bot which acts as a Bitcoin wallet and allows to send and receive tips between Telegram users and other so-called “Lightning Apps”. I assume that you are familiar with Bitcoin & Telegram in general, i’ll try to post short and without deep jump into details. More resources about Bitcoin can be found here and Telegram is simply an instant messenger that allows you to create your custom apps (chat-bots) using their platform.

What are the key points of such app?

• Allows to rate other users ideas and answers with real value instead of
  ‘virtual likes’. This brings online conversation to completely new level
• Real example of working micro-payment app which can act with other entities
  over internet using open protocol
• All the modules are open-source projects and can be easy re-used and adjusted
  for your own project. App does not relay on third-party commercial services.
  Even it falls under e-commerce field, which is currently almost closed, the app
  is based on open solutions.

What are the use-cases?

something like this…

We have already discussed PostgreSQL indexing engine, the interface of access methods, and main access methods, such as: hash indexes, B-trees, GiST, SP-GiST, and GIN. In this article, we will watch how gin turns into rum.

RUM

Although the authors claim that gin is a powerful genie, the theme of drinks has eventually won: next-generation GIN has been called RUM.

This access method expands the concept that underlies GIN and enables us to perform full-text search even faster. In this series of articles, this is the only method that is not included in a standard PostgreSQL delivery and is an external extension. Several installation options are available for it:

• Take «yum» or «apt» package from the PGDG repository. For example, if you installed PostgreSQL from «postgresql-10» package, also install «postgresql-10-rum».
• Build from source code on github and install on your own (the instruction is there as well).
• Use as a part of Postgres Pro Enterprise (or at least read the documentation from there).

Limitations of GIN

What limitations of GIN does RUM enable us to transcend?

First, «tsvector» data type contains not only lexemes, but also information on their positions inside the document. As we observed last time, GIN index does not store this information. For this reason, operations to search for phrases, which appeared in version 9.6, are supported by GIN index inefficiently and have to access the original data for recheck.

Second, search systems usually return the results sorted by relevance (whatever that means). We can use ranking functions «ts_rank» and «ts_rank_cd» to this end, but they have to be computed for each row of the result, which is certainly slow.

To a first approximation, RUM access method can be considered as GIN that additionally stores position information and can return the results in a needed order (like GiST can return nearest neighbors). Let's move step by step.

Here at Visual Studio App Center, we try to incorporate customer obsession in our day to day. Earlier this year we started an effort for widespread customer outreach to understand our users and guide product prioritization. The effort helped us gain a lot of insight and helped our prioritization last quarter. However, as we continue to grow, we unfortunately don’t have the capacity to reach out to as many customers as we would like.

To continue to engage with as many customers are possible, we created a GitHub repo specifically for this purpose. We’ve been using the repo to track monthly iterations from the team, feature requests, and community interest for certain features. We are making changes to align our priorities for the upcoming quarters based on what our customers are requesting.

I wanted to highlight some of the changes we’ve made to the Distribution service based off what we learned from customer outreach and feedback. All of these changes are available now:

• Distributing releases to multiple destinations
• Distribution releases to individual testers
• Turning off email notification for releases
• Disabling a release
• Make releases sortable

Originally article was posted here — 7 tips & tricks on how to deal with remote teams

A number of both large corporations and small companies having almost no staff is increasing. This is the impulse of new times that many call “uberization”. The phenomenon was named after Uber — one of the largest public-transportation companies whose drivers all are independent entrepreneurs aka freelancers. Such a structure allows Uber to work all over the planet through operating remote teams of drivers in dozens of cities simultaneously.

This week we issue a really huge selection of all the essential news you might have missed on Front-end development. Make sure to check the latest updates on CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

A coding bootcamp is a program of technical training teaching the programming skills that employers are looking for. Coding bootcamps allow students with low skills to concentrate on the most significant coding aspects and apply their new coding skills to solve real-world problems.

The goal of many bootcamp coding attendants is to move into a web development career. They do this by learning to build applications at a professional level – providing the foundation they need to build applications that are ready for production and demonstrating the skills they have to add real value to a potential employer.

Some companies have many managers and team leaders in their staff, because they need people with management skills. What characteristics should an ordinary employee have in order to become a good manager? Much depends on the purpose of the company, its scope and market characteristics.

AARRR stand for:

• Acquisition.
• Activation.
• Retention.
• Revenue.
• Referral.

AARRR (also called the Pirate Metrics) describes the sales funnel. At the top of the funnel are visitors who only saw your application, or just downloaded it and still do not know how they will interact with it. Next, visitors are registered — of course, if it is provided by the functionality of the application.

Now they (you can start calling them users) reach the moment when they have to understand the value of the product and decide to remain its user, i.e. start buying some services, recommend the application to your friends and, in general, constantly return to the application for any purpose, or delete it from mobile device.

You will not have another chance to impress the user!

The AARRR framework forces developers to measure their sales funnel numerically. At every stage.

This week we issue a really huge selection of all the essential news you might have missed on Front-end development. Make sure to check the latest updates on CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

Multithreading

Now let’s talk about thin ice. In the previous sections about IDisposable we touched one very important concept that underlies not only the design principles of Disposable types but any type in general. This is the object’s integrity concept. It means that at any given moment of time an object is in a strictly determined state and any action with this object turns its state into one of the variants that were pre-determined while designing a type of this object. In other words, no action with the object should turn it into an undefined state. This results in a problem with the types designed in the above examples. They are not thread-safe. There is a chance the public methods of these types will be called when the destruction of an object is in progress. Let’s solve this problem and decide whether we should solve it at all.

This chapter was translated from Russian jointly by author and by professional translators. You can help us with translation from Russian or English into any other language, primarily into Chinese or German.

Also, if you want thank us, the best way you can do that is to give us a star on github or to fork repository github/sidristij/dotnetbook.

The “winner takes all” principle seems to be less relevant to a startup business model than to a corporate business. Why so? The thing is that a cumulative advantage inherent in a contemporary globalized economy when the bigger you are the more chances you have for a further growth works beyond poorly regulated environments to which startups belong. The startup phenomenon in general and the IoT startups in particular are too immature in terms of a business-model history. In contrast to corporations, startups feel good in a Black-Swan-friendly uncertainty of emerging innovations. They operate in risky fields, they gamble oftentimes. But an immense focus on their own topics is what helps them survive. Indeed, dedication is an antidote to risks.

Originally article was posted here — 5 IoT startups in Logistic

Span<T> usage examples

A human by nature cannot fully understand the purpose of a certain instrument until he or she gets some experience. So, let’s turn to some examples.

ValueStringBuilder

One of the most interesting examples in respect to algorithms is the ValueStringBuilder type. However, it is buried deep inside mscorlib and marked with the internal modifier as many other very interesting data types. This means we would not find this remarkable instrument for optimization if we haven’t researched the mscorlib source code.

What is the main disadvantage of the StringBuilder system type? Its main drawback is the type and its basis — it is a reference type and is based on char[], i.e. a character array. At least, this means two things: we use the heap (though not much) anyway and increase the chances to miss the CPU cash.

Another issue with StringBuilder that I faced is the construction of small strings, that is when the resulting string must be short e.g. less than 100 characters. Short formatting raises issues on performance.

This chapter was translated from Russian jointly by author and by professional translators. You can help us with translation from Russian or English into any other language, primarily into Chinese or German.

Also, if you want thank us, the best way you can do that is to give us a star on github or to fork repository github/sidristij/dotnetbook.

As a platform, many enterprises are leveraging iOS to realize the amazing benefits of cloud computing. This is one aspect of digital transformation that has been rocking the entire industry in recent times. Generally, there is only a few internet-based development and deployment service performed on the platform that is not concerned with cloud application development. Nowadays, there is a growing population of iOS developers and app development companies that are steadily adopting cloud computing.

In 2013, while working at GFRANQ photo service, I participated in the development of an eponymous web service for publishing and processing photos. Filters and transformations were defined in the file with parameters, and all processing was carried out on the server. During service development, there was a need to support these transformations on the client side for the preview. According to Larry Wall, one of the virtues of a programmer is laziness. Therefore, as truly lazy programmers, we thought about the possibility of using the same code on both the server and client sides. The entire development was conducted in C#. After researching the libraries and a couple of attempts, we proudly concluded that this was possible and began to write the universal code.

Why is this article needed? Indeed, 6 years have passed since 2013, and many technologies have lost their relevance, for example, Script#. On the other hand, new ones have appeared. For example, Bridge.NET or Blazor based on the fancy WebAssembly.

Nevertheless, some ideas can still be used. In this article I tried to describe them as detailed as possible. I hope that the mention of Silverlight and Flash will cause a smile with a hint of nostalgia, and not a desire to criticize the old solutions. Anyway, they have contributed to the development of the web industry.

I made the “electric” designer of… cardboard. Alas, the project still remains at the prototype stage, not developing into an industrial “physical” look and is waiting for its time (and investor).

But I decided to go further — once we started making cardboard, we’ll bring the situation to its logical conclusion — we’ll make a complete cardboard board game, but with an electric setting and a learning effect. There were a lot of options — starting from a simple “walker” and ending with Ameritrash from a zombie with electron movement and vicious short circuits and swollen capacitors.

As a result, I decided to dwell on a logical abstract, since the schematics of electrical circuits are very suitable for it. Said and done — as a result of the first iteration, the game “Circuit” was born.

When you are sitting in your comfy chair in your cool modern office, anything distracting you from your favorite routine is really annoying. Some may call it a sign of sloth, but in fact, it relates to optimization of workflows. Our computers and smartphones provide us with many opportunities to do a lot without leaving our place. Software as such cares about our control over the physical world by just clicking and tapping. Indeed, the digitization advances: what people have had to do with their muscles for centuries in the past, could be done with either a voice command or a text message today thanks to numerous remotely controlled gizmos. And the IoT plays a crucial role in all this for a reason.

The very paradigm of automation where IoT solutions play a key role is based on a presumption that machines can act in both autonomous and intelligent manners. And what enables them doing so is a capability of handling tremendous flows of collected data.

The collectible data includes those various signals that both animate and inanimate object can send to the IoT systems. Hence, the objects should have some highly specific signal-generating devices to share information within the IoT.

You can always count product manager’s strategy skills like innovative thinking, blue ocean approach and others. But on daily basis we use more practical tools and approaches. This article is about working with feature requests and product requirements.

The main axiom of managing requests is that feature requests from customers, partners and internal teams are not requirements to the product. This is because every request can be split into several requirements or, otherwise, several requests can be combined to a single requirement.