Coding – Impact Lab

Coding

Gartner: Citizen developers will soon outnumber professional coders 4 to 1

November 3, 2021

Spike in business-driven automation paves the way for citizen developer careers, Gartner says.

To meet a coming wave of hyper-automation, IT organizations need to do a better job of partnering with professionals outside of IT to automate business processes and data integration, according to research firm Gartner.

Instead of complaining about “shadow IT” efforts outside the control of the CIO, IT should engage with business unit developers to make sure they have what they need to get their work done.

This group includes “business technologists,” or trained, full-time developers who are embedded in a department like marketing. But it also includes “citizen developers” who know how to use no-code, low-code, or data management and analytics tools to automate processes for themselves and their teams. Gartner’s prediction: “By 2023, the number of active citizen developers at large enterprises will be at least four times the number of professional developers.”

IT organizations must break out of the mindset that the work done by these groups is trivial or insignificant, Wong said. “In fact, they are doing serious work. They create algorithms. They create user interfaces that make it easier for their teams to do their work,” he said. Often, they are creating new capabilities, not just making tweaks, he said. “They see the power of workflow and business logic.”

Coding, Science & Technology News

80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools

June 18, 2021

By Sage Lazzaro

It looks like no-code and low-code toolsare here to stay. Today, Gartner released new predictions about technology products and services, specifically who will build them and the impact of AI and the pandemic. The research firm found that by 2024, 80% of tech products and services will be built by people who are not technology professionals. Gartner also expects to see more high-profile announcements of technology launches from nontech companies over the next year.

“The barrier to become a technology producer is falling due to low-code and no-code development tools,” Gartner VP Rajesh Kandaswamy told VentureBeat. When asked what kinds of tech products and services these findings apply to, he said “all of them.” Overall, Kandaswamy sees enterprises increasingly treating digital business as a team sport, rather than the sole domain of the IT department.

For this research, Gartner defined technology professionals as those whose primary job function is to help build technology products and services, using specific skills like software development testing and infrastructure management. This includes IT professionals and workers with specialized expertise such as CRM, AI, blockchain, and DevOps.

But instead of tech professionals driving what’s next, Gartner predicts a democratization of technology development that includes citizen developers, data scientists, and “business technologists,” a term that encompasses a wide range of employees who modify, customize, or configure their own analytics, process automation, or solutions as part of their day-to-day work. Aside from non-IT humans, AI systems that generate software will also play a significant role, according to Gartner.

Coding, communication, Engineering, Internet, Science & Technology News

The quantum internet will blow your mind. Here’s what it will look like

October 12, 2020

The next generation of the Internet will rely on revolutionary new tech — allowing for unhackable networks and information that travels faster than the speed of light.

Call it the quantum Garden of Eden. Fifty or so miles east of New York City, on the campus of Brookhaven National Laboratory, Eden Figueroa is one of the world’s pioneering gardeners planting the seeds of a quantum internet. Capable of sending enormous amounts of data over vast distances, it would work not just faster than the current internet but faster than the speed of light — instantaneously, in fact, like the teleportation of Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk in Star Trek.

Continue reading… “The quantum internet will blow your mind. Here’s what it will look like”

Coding, Computer Security, quantum computing, Science & Technology News

The quest for quantum-proof encryption just made a leap forward

August 10, 2020

Quantum computers could make encryption a thing of the past, but 15 contenders are trying to prove they have what it takes to safeguard your data.

Many of the things you do online every day are protected by encryption so that no one else can spy on it. Your online banking and messages to your friends are likely encrypted, for example—as are government secrets. But that protection is under threat from the development of quantum computers, which threaten to render modern encryption methods useless.

Quantum machines work in a fundamentally different way from the classical computers we use today. Instead of using traditional binary code, which represents information with 0s and 1s, they use quantum bits, or qubits. The unusual properties of qubits make quantum computers far more powerful for some kinds of calculations, including the mathematical problems that underpin much of modern encryption.

Continue reading… “The quest for quantum-proof encryption just made a leap forward”

Coding, new technology, quantum computing, Science & Technology News

Meet Silq: The first intuitive programming language for quantum computers

July 1, 2020

The creation of the C programming language was a massive milestone for classical computing. Developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s, C was an easy programming language for would-be computer coders to learn. At the time, most computer programs were written in what is called assembly language, which communicates directly with the computer’s hardware. But while assembly programs gave users unparalleled control over their machines, they were long, complex, and difficult to debug. C was different. It was easy, intuitive, and helped open up computer programming to an entirely new audience. It was nothing short of a revolution in computing.

Now, nearly 50 years after C was created, computer scientists have reached a similar milestone: A new programming language that brings the same level of coding simplicity to quantum computing.

Drawing parallels between the development of classical computers and the state of quantum computing today is difficult. Quantum computers, for those unfamiliar with them, represent the future of computing as we know it. Unlike a classical computer, which encodes information as a series of ones and zeroes, the “qubits” in a quantum computer can be either a one, a zero, or both at the same time. Quantum computers operate under different, quantum rules to classical computers — and promise to eventually be almost unimaginably fast when it comes to crunching data and carrying out calculations.

Continue reading… “Meet Silq: The first intuitive programming language for quantum computers”

App, Automation, Coding, mobile apps, Science & Technology News

Bryter raises $16M for a no-code platform for non-technical people to build enterprise automation apps

June 19, 2020

Automation is the name of the game in enterprise IT at the moment: We now have a plethora of solutions on the market to speed up your workflow, simplify a process and perform more repetitive tasks without humans getting involved. Now, a startup that is helping non-technical people get more directly involved in how to make automation work better for their tasks is announcing some funding to seize the opportunity

Bryter — a no-code platform based in Berlin that lets workers in departments like accounting, legal, compliance and marketing who do not have any special technical or developer skills build tools like chatbots, trigger automated database and document actions and risk assessors — is today announcing that it has raised $16 million. This is a Series A round being co-led by Accel and Dawn Capital, with Notion Capital and Chalfen Ventures also participating.

The funding comes less than a year after Bryter raised a seed round — $6 million in November 2019 — and it was oversubscribed, with term sheets coming in from many of the bigger VCs in Europe and the U.S. With this funding, the company has now raised around $25 million, and while the valuation is considerably up on the last round, Bryter is not disclosing what it is.

Continue reading… “Bryter raises $16M for a no-code platform for non-technical people to build enterprise automation apps”

Coding, Employment, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Up to half of developers work remotely; here’s who’s hiring them

January 7, 2020

Forty-five percent of developers work remotely at least part of the time – why not? Glassdoor and Remotive have compiled lists of employers actively hiring remote IT workers.

One of the great things about technology work is that it doesn’t really matter where it’s performed. You’re on the network, with minimum latency, regardless if you’re down the hall or on another continent. For employees, working from home — or from a remote office — means greater flexibility and reduced stress from commutes. For employers — and this is extremely important in the IT field — it means being able to draw from a vast, global pool of talent, with no concerns about relocation. In addition, work could even be handed off from time zone to time zone for more rapid turnarounds.

It is estimated that there are between 18 to 21 million developers across the globe. Of this, only about one million — or five percent — are in the United States, so you can see how an employer in the US, or anywhere else for that matter, needs to spread its recruiting and staffing wings.

It’s in the best interest for tech-oriented employers, then, to be open to this global pool of talent. There are a number of companies leading the way, actively hiring globally distributed tech workforces. Glassdoor recently published a list of leading companies that encourage remote work, which includes some prominent tech companies, and Remotive has been compiling a comprehensive list of more than 2,500 companies of all sizes that hire remote IT workers.

Survey data from Stack Overflow, analyzed by Itoro Ikon, finds that out of almost 89,000 developers participating in its most recent survey, 45% work remotely at least part of the time, and 10% indicated they are full-time remote workers. A majority of remote workers, 58%, are regular full-time employees.

Continue reading… “Up to half of developers work remotely; here’s who’s hiring them”

AI, Coding, Employment, Science & Technology News

The No.1 job of 2019 pays $140,000 – and its hiring growth has exploded 74%

December 16, 2019

Call it hire power.

On Tuesday, career and job site LinkedIn released its annual “Emerging Jobs” list, which identifies the roles that have seen the largest rate of hiring growth from 2015 through this year. No. 1 on the list: Artificial Intelligence Specialist—typically an engineer, researcher or other specialty that focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence, figuring out things like where it makes sense to implement AI or building AI systems.

Hiring for this role has been tremendous, growing 74% annually in the past 4 years alone. “AI has infiltrated every industry, and right now the demand for people skilled in AI is outpacing the supply for it,” Guy Berger, the principal economist at LinkedIn, tells MarketWatch. “This is the third year in a row a role related to machine learning or artificial intelligence has topped the list, and we can only expect demand to increase.”

The pay is impressive too, with AI roles often commanding six figures. Jobs site Indeed notes that artificial intelligence engineers in San Francisco, for example, rake in $120,000 to upwards of $160,000. Sometimes AI roles can garner pay of $250,000 or more.

Continue reading… “The No.1 job of 2019 pays $140,000 – and its hiring growth has exploded 74%”

Coding, Culture, privacy, Science & Technology News

Socially aware algorithms are ready to help

December 3, 2019

Better coding, not just laws and regulations, is the solution for tech’s failure to address the needs of actual humans

Calls for stronger government regulation of large technology companies have become increasingly urgent and ubiquitous. But many of the technology failures we hear about every day—including fake news; privacy violations; discrimination; and filter bubbles that amplify online isolation and confrontation—have algorithmic failures at their core.

For problems that are primarily algorithmic in nature, human oversight of outcomes is insufficient. We cannot expect, for example, armies of regulators to check for discriminatory online advertising in real time. Fortunately, there are algorithmic improvements that companies can and should adopt now, without waiting for regulation to catch up.

Given their frequent media portrayal as mysterious black boxes, we might be worried that rogue algorithms have escaped the abilities of their creators to understand and rein in their behaviors. The reality is thankfully not so dire. In recent years hundreds of scientists in machine learning, artificial intelligence and related fields have been working hard at what we call socially aware algorithm design. Many of the most prominent and damaging algorithmic failures are well understood (at least in hindsight), and, furthermore, have algorithmic solutions.

Continue reading… “Socially aware algorithms are ready to help”

Amazon.com, Coding, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

New Amazon capabilities put machine learning in reach of more developers

December 2, 2019

Today, Amazon announced a new approach that it says will put machine learning technology in reach of more developers and line of business users. Amazon has been making a flurry of announcements ahead of its re:Invent customer conference next week in Las Vegas.

While the company offers plenty of tools for data scientists to build machine learning models and to process, store and visualize data, it wants to put that capability directly in the hands of developers with the help of the popular database query language, SQL.

By taking advantage of tools like Amazon QuickSight, Aurora and Athena in combination with SQL queries, developers can have much more direct access to machine learning models and underlying data without any additional coding, says VP of artificial intelligence at AWS, Matt Wood.

“This announcement is all about making it easier for developers to add machine learning predictions to their products and their processes by integrating those predictions directly with their databases,” Wood told TechCrunch.

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Coding, Education, Higher Education, Internet, New Viewpoints

How to get a world-class education for free on the internet

January 26, 2019

As crucial as a university degree has become for working in the modern economy, it is not the only route forward into a wildly lucrative and satisfying career—just ask famous dropouts Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg.

In the future, a single bachelor’s degree in a particular subject will no longer suffice for many of us anyway. As robots and automation sweep the global workforce, hundreds of millions of people—the majority of whom do not have the time or money to go pick up a brand-new four-year degree—will have to “re-skill” in order to land new jobs. The question that employees and employers alike face is how to get that done quickly, efficiently, and, most importantly to many, cheaply.

The internet, luckily, is already a booming resource. Whether you find yourself seeking new employment mid-career, curious about alternatives to a college education, or simply are interested in learning for learning’s sake, Quartz At Work has compiled some of the most dependable, high-quality materials you can access to learn anything on the internet.

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Coding, Historical Perspectives, Military, Science & Technology News, women

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: The Untold Story of Cryptography Pioneer Elizebeth Friedman

September 25, 2018

How an unsung heroine established a new field of science and helped defeat the Nazis with pencil, paper, and perseverance.

While computing pioneer Alan Turing was breaking Nazi communication in England, eleven thousand women, unbeknownst to their contemporaries and to most of us who constitute their posterity, were breaking enemy code in America — unsung heroines who helped defeat the Nazis and win WWII.

Among them was American cryptography pioneer Elizebeth Friedman (August 26, 1892–October 31, 1980). The subject of Jason Fagone’s excellent biography The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies (public library), Friedman triumphed over at least three Enigma machines and cracked dozens of different radio circuits to decipher more than four thousand Nazi messages that saved innumerable lives, only to have J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI take credit for her invisible, instrumental work.

Continue reading… “The Woman Who Smashed Codes: The Untold Story of Cryptography Pioneer Elizebeth Friedman”