Our team at DigiMantra Labs consists of many developers, but it has been dominated by frontend developers after the rising popularity of various JavaScript libraries like AngularJS, React.js, and others. We have moved to Microsoft Visual Studio Code and have long forgotten Sublime Text, but it’s a little secret that we still have developers that like "Dreamweaver." Yes, they do exist!

During one of our workshops, “Learn & Rise,” we discusses the various extensions that we use every day to make our lives easier. I collated them all and I’m going to share the top five VSC extensions that our developers use.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

Lizzie is a dynamically compiled scripting language for .NET, allowing you to incorporate dynamically loaded pieces of code into your C# and F# projects. One of its defining traits, is that, first of all, out of the box, it is literally theoretically impossible to execute malicious code, simply since out of the box, it doesn’t contain a single piece of functionality that changes the state of your computer in any way. If you need such functions, which I assume most would, then creating such functions is as easy as marking your method with an attribute, and making sure it has the correct signature. Below is an example.

using System;
using lizzie; class MainClass
{ [Bind(Name = "write")] object Write(Binder<MainClass> binder, Arguments arguments) { Console.WriteLine(arguments.Get(0)); return null; } public static void Main(string[] args) { // Some inline Lizzie code var code = @" var(@foo, function({ +(bar, ""world"")
}, @bar)) write(foo(""Hello "")) "; // Creating a Lizzie lambda object from the above code, and evaluating it var lambda = LambdaCompiler.Compile<MainClass>(new MainClass(), code); lambda(); // Waiting for user input Console.Read(); }
}

Notice how we "bind" a C# method in the above code to our Lizzie lambda object. This makes the C# method available as a "function" internally within our Lizzie code. This trait allows you to easily extend the language, with whatever domain specific extensions you need to solve your particular problem. This makes the language particularly well suited for "Domain Specific Languages."

Source de l’article sur DZONE

Analytics forms a major part of the conceptual design of an app. Data tracking and collection for the purpose of analytics allows us to better update our app for consumer use. Data tracking is akin to the idea of feedback from a user. By collecting the data in a way that makes sense to us, we can add features or upgrade the existing elements of our app to meet the demand of the consumer. While this allows for a certain level of automatic feedback it does not mean that we can outright ignore our app users’ comments either. A firm balance of both is the middle ground that we should be chasing.

Relevant Data Tracking

As a developer, data tracking is simply one more SDK that needs to be built into our existing application framework. We obviously don’t need every bit of information the app can collect – most of this is useless to our determination of whether the app functions as expected or not. We can, however, produce separate use cases to test whether users find a certain button layout more conducive to their app use. We can also collect information such as uninstall/reinstall information, the orientation of the device, loading time of the application and, by extension, its performance on a number of different handsets (very useful in benchmarking the processing friendliness of the application), account information, and, of course, crashes and exception data that can help improve our user experience. David Cearley from Gartner Inc. is noted as saying that every app now needs to be an analytics app and we can only do this through tracking the data relevant to our app.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

Have you ever played the video game Super Mario Bros.?

There is a good chance a majority of the DZone audience have played or watched someone play the flagship game from Nintendo, that was originally released in 1985 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

I finished my first full marathon in Richmond, VA a couple of weeks back which was a huge accomplishment and a fulfilling experience. While I have run a couple of 10Ks and did a half-marathon last year, I was a bit intimidated thinking about the uphill task to run a full marathon until one of my leaders (who has run many!) asked me to think about it and join a marathon training team.

Instead, I downloaded a training plan and started following it religiously like “weekly Sprints.” As a part of this journey, I also included my team of newbie runners and inspired them to run a half-marathon. Although they were a bit wary in the beginning and frustrated at times when their runs were in 80+ degrees and extremely humid weather in the summer, they finished strong by completing 2 half-marathons this year!

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)


"I travel around the world constantly promoting my projects and endorsing products." — Paris Hilton

Agile coaching is a journey into irony. One of the chief discoveries you can make on this voyage is that the more experienced you become, the worse at the job others often think you get.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

I’ve learned a lot by reflecting on how I responded to and resisted my father’s parenting. My father used to keep a note in the pocket of his blue work shirt, with two columns: one of plus signs, one of minuses. He used the columns to score my behavior and determine whether I had earned privileges and rewards. This did not have the intended effect.

I had a long history of tension with my father over unfair punishments, but I put aside my misgivings and tried hard to make it work. As I expected, it became clear quickly that my father’s scoring would be imbalanced. A negative mark was easy to gain and difficult to prevent, and on some days I received many of them. If my spoon made a noise against my teeth, I got a negative. If I looked unhappy about that, I got another; if I protested, yet another. I couldn’t avoid negatives, no matter how hard I tried.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)


Finally! With the "embargo" lifted by Scrum.org, we can now share with you the incredible journey that Barry Overeem and I have been on for the past months.

The bottom-line is that Scrum.org has acquired our "Scrum Master Advanced" class. We’ve been spending the past eight months turning it into the official, brand new Professional Scrum Master II class (PSM-II) for Scrum.org. As newly-minted course stewards, we are now responsible (with Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl) for the entire Professional Scrum Master curriculum (both PSM-I and PSM-II). If you’d like to know more about the class and how we designed it, click here for a detailed write-up.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

When I’m chatting with customers, prospects and journalists around high productivity application development, I sometimes perceive some confusion in their minds around the difference between the terms "low-code" and "no-code." It’s not surprising, since, in the high-productivity application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) space, there are many vendors all jockeying for position. So let’s clear the matter up and examine what’s really meant by each of the two terms, flag the differences and suggest which platform type is right for which types of projects.

Similar at A Glance…

Both low-code and no-code development platforms provide the means to develop software applications without the need to write code. Instead of requiring a developer to have any knowledge of traditional programming languages, they both provide a visual development approach to Rapid Application Development (RAD). This visual approach makes app development accessible to a greater number of people, specifically tech-savvy individuals working in the business lines. With the nature of an application in mind, developers select the functional components they need from an on-screen library and drag and drop them into a visual workflow.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

Hello, great people of the world. In the previous article, we have discussed how Scrum Masters need to master many things. In this article, we are going to discuss one of the stances that the Scrum Master need to master, the facilitation stance. A great Scrum Master is a great facilitator, otherwise, the Scrum Master will be seen as no more than a master of ceremonies or even an event organizer. A great Scrum Master is able to facilitate an event that leads to a high-quality decision that is owned by the whole group attending that event.

By default, the Scrum Master facilitates the Scrum events: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospectives, and Product Backlog refinement sessions. Throughout this article, I am going to use the term "facilitated event" as it may refer to more than just the built-in Scrum events. Throughout this article, I am also going to refer to a group rather than Scrum Team, because there are many instances where the Scrum Master needs to facilitate an event between a group of people outside of the Scrum Team or between the Scrum Team and those outside of the Scrum Team.

So What Is Facilitation?

In many cultures, I have seen how a facilitator is undermined and seen as the master of ceremony or an event organizer. I’ve even witnessed a program manager tell me that Sprint Retrospectives are less important than Sprint Planning because Sprint Retrospectives are just about having that touchy feeling. That is quite sad. Facilitation is not a passive activity. In fact, facilitation requires skills and facilitating an engaging event itself is an art. The outcome of the facilitated event is a high-quality decision. So we can also say that the Scrum Master is partly responsible for poor decision generated by the group of people.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)