no more cubes

Tag: english

  • #GoogleCloudSummit 2017 in Munich

    While Amazon Web Services reported another record quarter with $4,53B in October 2017, and Microsoft reporting 93% growth of their cloud business, Google is the third major player in the market for cloud services.

    At the same time, Google is not (yet) explicitly reporting numbers on their cloud offering. However, “all other” businesses, including Play Store,  also showed impressive 42% growth recently.

    To demonstrate how serious the company is about their cloud products, Google demonstrated their commitment in roadshows, the Google Cloud Summit. Among others, like in Paris or Singapore, the Summit was held in Munich On December 6th in the MOC Munich.

    Following a keynote between 9am an 11am, Google prepared 4 tracks covering diverse, cloud oriented topics in the areas of Application Development, Big Data & Machine Learning, Infrastructure & Operations, Startup. These tracks had continuous talks between 11am and 6pm, touching all topics from the field you could think of, starting with containers, docker and Kubernetes, going over IoT and Industry 4.0, touching Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, to Data Loss Protection and GDPR. All that along with Innovation and Agility in the context of security and privacy.

    To round up the event,  outside the track rooms had an exhibition of selected cloud partners, from consultancy to implementation service, but also SaaS offerings leveraging the Google Cloud Platform.

    While the market news seem that Google is late to the game, their commitment and quality of offering surely put them in an interesting spot and an alternative to the other two cloud vendors. The cloud summit definitely answered questions on Googles capabilities.

  • Mix and Mingle

    The past weekend I traveled internationally to work with colleagues on another continent. I’m a lucky volunteering member of IEEE, and so I reached out to the community before I jumped on my flight.

    Turns out I have friends in this city, and so I spent a whole afternoon learning about the city and the eventualities it brings along.

    Both my old friend and me agreed throughout our conversation that networking is an important activity, and having built an extensive network is an enormous asset.

    While IEEE is only one opportunity to meet people, it is a solid recommendation for engineers to actually pick up this activity in first place, even though it may not seem obvious at the beginning of the individual career. Working with and knowing many people is all too often underestimated and need strong soft skills. But even those can be trained, just like engineering can be tought.

  • The code I’m still ashamed of

    The following came through my timelines a few days back. A guy feels guilty for what he did – as a programmer – when he was young. Basically he built a promotional website for a questionable medicaments. Apparently the drug has side effects of depression and suicidal thoughts. Only after his sister was prescribed the same medicaments, his conscience made him quit what he was doing.

    If you write code for a living, there’s a chance that at some point in your career, someone will ask you to code something a little…

    Source: The code I’m still ashamed of

    Also, the author writes the following:

    As developers, we are often one of the last lines of defense against potentially dangerous and unethical practices.

    It’s a pretty sure bet everybody long enough in the Internet Business has had moments like this before. For myself, there were a few moments, where I saw an ethical border that I didn’t want to cross. As a student, this was porn. As a professional, it was weapons manufacturers.

    Interestingly enough, I even quit two companies for their ambition in IT security. The first pushed datacenter-grade firewalls to small businesses that basically only needed a DSL modem. Through a sales method borrowed from insurance brokers.

    The other one at least had a solid technology, but developed a solid sales pitch relying on the same FUD, that crosses that ethical border.

    Just like with medication, people shouldn’t buy security out of fear, or any other product for that matter. And any technical person should strive for educating customers and not helping sales people create that fear.

  • RC4 NOMORE

    Better get rid of RC4.

  • Facebooks To Kill Flash

    Facebook’s new chief security officer, Alex Stamos, has stated publicly that he wants to see Adobe end Flash.

    Most of the internet will consider this a good idea. Not too sure about the Facebook bunch yet.

    via: Slashdot

  • The women whom science forgot

    Many female scientists in the past were not given credit for their achievements – here are just a few of them.

    via: The women whom science forgot – BBC News

  • Who Has Your Back? 

    Who has your back? Electronic Frontier Foundation updated their scorecard of practices of major Internet companies, with regards to their publicly available policies for 2015.

    via: Who Has Your Back? Government Data Requests 2015 | Electronic Frontier Foundation

  • Don't aim for disruptive

    DisruptiveThe tech industry is optimizing everything around us, disrupting every aspect of social, business or whatsoever. The thought everything will be easier is just so tempting to everybody remotely involved in anything remotely digital. And that’s why so many app-developers, start-ups, evangelists feel inspired by the opportunity. Every new idea needs to be ground breaking, revolutionizing. And that’s why that concept of “disruptive” became so popular, even while interpreted fundamentally wrong by this group of technologists.  Clayton M. Christensen who coined the term, explored development of disk drives and described generational change in the technology, each disrupting the market of the previous generation.Winter Wonder Land However, none of the following generations of disk drives was designed as “disruptive“, but to have advantages over the previous one. (more…)

  • Samsung Android Mobile Device Backdoor

    You better keep your Samsung Android Device in your fridge, going forward.

  • email ain't work.

    email is one of my favorite topics when it comes to modern ways of working. There were a few articles on this blog concerning email to be abolished by major organizations in favour of social media (which won’t solve the underlying problem…)

    Communication is essential to most jobs, but so is productivity. Claire Diaz Ortiz wrote a nice comment on why it is both work and why it ain’t at the same time.

    email ain’t work.

    This is the opinion that I tend to prefer, coming from an engineering education. email will distract anybody trying to focus on some real problem, will create an obligation to do something non-productive. email can be considered something additional, that should not become the majority of the actual work. To send designs, architecture, plans or status updates, but it is for sure outside the scope of engineering centric job descriptions.

    unless you’re paid for it.

    The situation is much different should you work in customer support, service, sales or even product marketing or management. These roles live off the conversation with customers, clients, partners and peers, sometimes even competitors. These roles need to know what others, the market, wants to see as a product or a service, and this is something you can get off a drawing board.

    So it depends (a bit)

    After all, email has a very different meaning, depending on the role someone is in. Still the medium itself is very difficult to handle and too time consuming, even for roles depending on communications. Just imagine all the (obvious) spam, newsletters, notifications and so on. Not to say about the increasing practice to CC everybody and his brother. This is what makes email an ultimate productivity killer for everybody.

    In response to: Why Email Isn’t Work. (And Why It Is.).