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The article from the pen of HireYourTalent on topic of human capital. The concept of human capital and, by extension, its measurement is becoming increasingly popular.

Human capital is the set of accumulated talents, skills, competencies and experience that partly determine the ability to work or produce for oneself or for others and therefore affect economic activity.

The concept of capital, and therefore of human capital, therefore opens the door to the concept of measuring human capital, return on investment and capital development.

Some tips for better human capital management in the article:

• The right person in the right place!
• People leave their bosses, not their employer
• Coaching, Coaching, Coaching, Coaching
• I trust you, you trust me
• What am I doing all this for?

Develop trust and transparency to offer employees the security of being real (need for esteem and security) and communicate an overall goal to motivate people to surpass themselves towards achieving goals. Great read!

Ram Dagar is author of this overview on the time series topic. The components of time-series are as complex and sophisticated as the data itself. With increasing time, the data obtained increases and it doesn’t always mean that more data means more information but, larger sample avoids the error that due to random sampling.

According to Twitter’s software engineering team, the networking giant stores 1.5 petabytes of logical time series data, and handles 25K query requests per minute.

For social media platforms, the data handling chores get worse with their increasing popularity. The scale at which these firms operate requires customised in-built techniques. Twitter has done the same to solve their database challenges with MetricsDB.

In article you will learn:

• What does MetricsDB offer
• Key Takeaways

MetricsDB is multi-zone compliant. For storing mappings from partitions to servers, MetricsDB’s cluster manager uses HDFS. The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a distributed file system designed to run on commodity hardware. To learn more, read the rest of the article!

An article by Harsh Shandilya on hot topic of security for Android software. SELinux is an acronym for Security-enhanced Linux. It is a security feature built into the Linux kernel that enforces access control for programs via a predefined security policy put in place by the system administrators.

SELinux is an implementation of a MAC security mechanism. MAC stands for Mandatory Access Control, a paradigm that allows restricting multiple aspects of a process.

It is split in following:

• What is SELinux?
• How to detect and resolve SELinux denials on Android
• Labelling in SELinux

SELinux builds upon DAC-based restrictions and adds additional layers of restrictions above UID and GID to ensure a compromised user can still be restricted from doing things it normally wouldn’t need to do. Great short article!

Sandra Gittlen wrote this piece about challenges hybrid cloud pose for IT departments. IT leaders share their advice for getting network and infrastructure teams ready for hybrid cloud environments.

The typical challenge can be described like this: How to restructure the firm’s 50-person global IT organization to meet the needs of the hybrid cloud? The task is to reimagine IT, drawing on time – and cost-savings of hybrid cloud, to add greater benefit to the business.

The best thing about redesigning and optimizing your staff for a hybrid environment, is encouraging an environment of curiosity and innovation.

The advice in the article:

• Consider the end game: full cloud or hybrid cloud?
• Communicate enterprise cloud strategy
• Assess cloud skills and identify gaps
• Hybrid cloud training and support

A a lot of the budget for training can come from money saved by going to the cloud. IT leaders should also not overlook the need for softer skills in this hybrid environment… Nice one!

An article by By Herb Krasner on interesting topic of the cost of software quality. Meeting the customer’s expectations at a high degree of conformance is no longer expected to come at a premium –- it is just expected.

Author turns his attention to what you, as a leader in your organization, can do about it. Calculating the cost of software quality is an important first step in identifying areas of opportunity to add value from IT while reducing costs, accelerating deliveries and remaining efficient/competitive.

The sections in this article:

• Cost of good software quality
  • Prevention
  • Appraisals
  • Management control costs
• Cost of poor quality
  • Internal failure costs
  • External failure costs
  • Technical debt
  • Management failures
• Strategies for COSQ measurement and improvements
• Example of what can be accomplished

Understanding Cost of Poor Software Quality in your organization is the first step toward gaining executive buy-in for quality-led operations. You will also find Cost of Software Quality Model in the article. Excellent read!

Dominic Perini article about his view on digital asset ownership, provenance and handling. In order to understand how the notion of ownership is currently perceived in society, author proposes to briefly analyse the journey that has brought us to the present stage and the factors which have contributed to the evolution of our perceptions.

Historically people have been predominantly inclined to own and trade physical objects. This is probably best explained by the fact that physical objects stimulate our senses and don’t require the capacity to abstract, as opposed to services for instance. Ownership was usually synonymous with possession.

The article covers:

• How we value digital vs. physical assets
• The evolution of services and their automation
• Sustainability and access to resources
• The generative approach
• What prevents mass adoption of digital goods

Good post on major emerging innovation that blockchain technology has influenced dramatically over the last two years – the ownership of digital assets.

Privacy and sharing are also areas heavily debated. Owners of digital assets often prefer their identity to remain anonymous, while the benefit of socially shared information is widely recognised. Well done!

Study done by Pascal Costanza, Charlotte Herzeel and Wilfried Verachtert for new implementation language for elPrep. elPrep is an established multi-threaded framework for preparing SAM and BAM files in sequencing pipelines. To achieve good performance, its software architecture makes only a single pass through a SAM/BAM file for multiple preparation steps, and keeps sequencing data as much as possible in main memory.

The sequence alignment/map format (SAM/BAM) is the de facto standard in the bioinformatics community for storing mapped sequencing data.

In most programming languages, there exist more or less similar ways to explicitly or implicitly allocate memory for heap objects which, unlike stack values, are not bound to the lifetimes of function or method invocations. However, programming languages strongly differ in how memory for heap objects is subsequently deallocated.

The article then describes typical preparation pipeline steps using elPrep’s software architecture in the three selected programming languages:

• Sorting reads for coordinate order.
• Removing unmapped reads
• Marking duplicate reads
• Replacing read groups
• Reordering and filtering the sequence dictionary

The Go implementation performs best, yielding the best balance between runtime performance and memory use. While the Java benchmarks report a somewhat faster runtime than the Go benchmarks, the memory use of the Java runs is significantly higher. The C++17 benchmarks run significantly slower than both Go and Java, while using somewhat more memory than the Go runs.

Result charts and detailed benchmark process also described. How exciting!

In this article we’re going to talk about the benefits of distributed systems and how to move to distributed systems using RabbitMQ. Then we will learn the fundamentals of RabbitMQ and how to interact with it using Python. Written by Denis Orehovsky.

The article has this sections:

• Distributed systems
• RabbitMQ essentials
• Working with RabbitMQ using Python

Extensive code examples provided. Also schemas explaining following exchange types: Fanout, Direct, Topic, Header.

Using RabbitMQ as a message broker is a great choice. We’ve learnt the fundamentals of RabbitMQ and how to interact with it using Pika library but in real world you will probably use a library like Celery instead of Pika. Nice work!

Jendrik Poloczek from TokenAnalyst published this article about their experience building the core infrastructure to integrate, clean, and analyze blockchain data.

Apache Kafka® is the central data hub of TokenAnalyst. They’re using Kafka for ingestion of blockchain data. The Confluent Platform is a stream data platform that enables you to organize and manage data from many different sources with one reliable, high performance system.

A public ledger could potentially serve not only as a publicly accessible ledger for money or asset transactions but also as a ledger of interactions on a shared decentralized data infrastructure.

The blockchain as a data structure is, in essence, a giant, shared immutable log, lending itself perfectly for event sourcing and (replayed) stream processing. The required trust comes from transparency. And transparency is realized by surfacing and decoding the data that is stored on the blockchain.

In the article you learn:

• Why does on-chain data matter?
• Cluster of Ethereum nodes, Ethereum-to-Kafka bridge
• Block confirmer based on Kafka Streams
• API and software development kit (SDK)

To find out how they use templates written in Terraform, which allow them easily deploy and bootstrap nodes across the planet in different AWS regions. Together with use the Geth and Parity clients.

To bridge the gap between different Ethereum clients and Kafka, they developed an in-house solution named Ethsync, written in Scala. Good read!

Vladimir Iakovlev is the author of this tutorial about finding cheapest flights for a multi-leg trip with Amadeus API and Python. Amadeus Travel APIs connect you to the richest information in the travel industry.

The tutorial is split into:

• Restrictions
• Airports
• Prices and dates
• Itinerary

To understand the complexity of the problem better author draw a graph of possible flights routes.

To find out how author was able to get cheapest flights with the minimal duration and the resulting prices were almost the same as on Google Flights click on the link to original source. Jupyter notebook is also available with the whole adventure. Well done!