Articles

Spark in Action Book Review & Interview

In the "Spark in Action" book, authors Petar Zecevic and Marko Bonaci discuss the Apache Spark framework for data processing (batch and streaming data use cases). They introduce the architecture of Spark and core concepts such as Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs). InfoQ spoke with them about Apache Spark, developer tools, and the upcoming features and enhancements in the future releases.

Living Values: A Company Imbued with Spirit

Helen Walton interviews Places for People, this year’s winner of the Spark Award. By putting people at the heart of how the company operates, Places for People creates a highly innovative culture with an inspirational purpose that delivers outstanding business results.

Change from Within: Developers and Managers Working Together

InfoQ interviewed Bryan Dove from Skyscanner about the major technology developments from the last 10 years and the impact these have had on the way that we are creating software products. InfoQ also asked him what managers and developers can do to explore and find better ways of working together and how they can support each other, making themselves and the company more successful.

Beyond Page Objects: Next Generation Test Automation with Serenity and the Screenplay Pattern

Automated acceptance testing reduces time wasted in manual testing and bug fixing, and when combined with Behaviour-Driven Development, can guide development effort. But it requires skill, practice and discipline. The Screenplay Pattern helps teams address these difficulties and is where you may end up by mercilessly refactoring Page Objects using SOLID design principles.

Will WebSocket survive HTTP/2?

HTTP/2 is poised to eliminate much of the waste that developers deal with. Multiplexed connections will eliminate the need to bundle JavaScript libraries together. But is HTTP/2 a panacea to all our problems? What about WebSocket? Allan Denis tells us what HTTP/2 is good at and debunks some myths about what it can do.

David Chilcott on Growing Agile Leaders

At the Agile New Zealand Conference David Chilcott from Outformations gave a talk on Growing Agile Leaders (The Inconvenient Truths). Afterwards he spoke to InfoQ about the challenges leaders face and why the truth he points out are both inconvenient and uncomfortable in many organizations.

One API, Many Facades?

An interesting trend is emerging in the world of Web APIs, with various engineers and companies advocating for dedicated APIs for each consumer with particular needs. Beyond any ideal design of your API, reality strikes back with the concrete and differing concerns of varied API consumers. You might need to optimize your API accordingly.

The Way to No-Hotfix Deployment

Hot-fix redeployment is a waste of time and effort at best, and often a source of further regression, Adam discusses some ready-to-use techniques that helped he and his team reduce the frequency of hot-fix deployments to almost zero.

Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence? Interview with Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber on Deep Learning

Book Review: All About Java 8 Lambdas

Billed as a Weekend Read, the All About Java 8 Lambdas book covers much more than just lambdas; it covers default and static methods in interfaces, method references, optional values and primitive/object streams. It’s the book to read if you know Java and need to get up to speed on Java 8. Read on for InfoQ’s review.

Testers in TDD teams

In a team doing TDD (Test Driven Development) there is no need for testers that do manual checking. For testers this means that much of their traditional work disappears. Meanwhile modern testing solutions have become so technical that implementation requires specialists. For testers this presents a very interesting opportunity, but it requires solid technical skills.

What Keyboards Do Programmers Prefer?

As developers, we all have preferences in the tools we use for work: a powerful machine, one (or two) large screens, having the freedom to choose our OS, our IDE, etc Yet in most companies, we rarely pay the the same level of attention to keyboards.