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The psychology behind why some leaders are resisting a hybrid work model

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Tags miscellaneous management cio startups

Because of strong employee resistance and turnover, Google recently backtracked from its plan to make all employees return to the office and allowed many to work remotely. By Gleb Tsipursky.

Apple’s plan to force its staff back to the office has caused many to leave the company and led to substantial internal opposition.

All of the surveys revealed strong preferences for working from home post-pandemic at least half the time for over three-quarters of all respondents. A quarter to a third of all respondents desired full-time remote work permanently. Between 40% and 55% of respondents said they’d quit without permanent remote options for at least half the workweek; of these, many would leave if not permitted fully remote work. Minority employees expressed an especially strong preference for remote work to escape in-office discrimination.

Leaders frequently proclaim that people are their most important resource. Yet the leaders resistant to permitting telework are not living by that principle. Instead, they’re doing what they feel comfortable with, even if it devastates employee morale, engagement, and productivity; seriously undercuts retention and recruitment; and harms diversity and inclusion. In the end, their behavior is a major threat to the bottom line.

Many people feel a desire to go back to the world before the pandemic. They fall for status quo bias, a desire to maintain or get back to what they see as the appropriate situation and way of doing things. Read the rest of this interesting article to understand cognitive biases and taking research-based steps to address them, so you can make the best decisions. Nice one!

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Implementing an end-to-end machine learning workflow with azure data factory

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Tags big-data machine-learning data-science cloud azure

From collecting data to sending results, ADF constructs the right MLOps Lifecycle on one screen. By Rahulraj Singh.

Flow Diagram of the complete Machine Learning System

Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/implementing-an-end-to-end-machine-learning-workflow-with-azure-data-factory-f16cbeeffd94/

Author will walk through an entire Machine Learning Operation Cycle and show how to establish every step of the way using Azure Data Factory (ADF). Yes, it is possible, easy, and extremely reliable. As a bonus, it also automatically sets you up to receive alerts for any sort of data anomalies occurring throughout the process, so you do not have to worry about monitoring the workflow manually.

The article content is split into:

  • How would you define an End-to-End (E2E) ML Workflow?
  • What is Azure Machine Learning?
  • Walking through the workflow step-by-step
  • Azure Function to create a trigger for the pipeline
  • Azure Databricks for data preprocessing and storing to Data Lakes
  • Build and train models from the stored data using Azure Machine Learning
  • Push the final output into Azure Blob Storage
  • Access the blob storage from Power BI to build reporting dashboards

… and more. And we liked: “Storytelling is the most important part of any analytics process”. You will also find links to further reading on the topic in the article. Good job!

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Writing better regular expressions in PHP

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Tags php web-development app-development programming

Regular Expressions are powerful, PHP but they are not known to be readable, and more often than not, maintaining a regular expression is not a straight-forward task. By Ayesh Karunaratne.

Further, using these improvements also means the regular expressions might be less portable to other languages. For example, named captures are supported even in older PHP versions, but in JavaScript, named captures feature was only added in ECMAScript 2018.

The choice of the delimiter is important because all occurrences of the delimiter character within the expression must be escaped. The fewer escaped characters inside a regular expression, the more readable it will be. Not choosing meta characters (such as ^, $, braces, and other characters that carry special meaning in regular expressions) can reduce the number of characters escaped.

The article brings information on the following:

  • Choice of delimiter
  • Reducing escape characters
  • Non-capture groups
  • Named captures
  • Using comments
  • Named character classes

Regular expressions support character classes, and they can help take the scrutiny off a regular expression while making them more readable at the same time. Good read!

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How to run Selenium tests in Docker?

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Tags docker devops containers java tdd

Automation testing and Continuous Integration (CI) are integral parts of the development and test activity. Selenium test automation is one such approach that helps in the end-to-end testing of the web product. By Himanshu Sheth.

The article deals with:

  • Introduction to Docker
  • How to install and setup the Docker on Windows
  • Why use Selenium with Docker for web application testing
  • Creating Selenium test in Docker
  • Debugging Docker Container with RealVNC Viewer
  • Running Selenium tests on LambdaTest with Docker

Container in Docker is a stand unit of software that packages the code and all the required dependencies so that the application can run more quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.

In this tutorial on how to run Selenium tests in Docker, we have seen how Docker lets you run tests in containers and isolate the tests in development and deployment. Docker with Selenium provides a light-weight solution to run UI tests, that too in an isolated environment. Good read!

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Real-world CSS vs. CSS-in-JS performance comparison

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Tags css frontend javascript web-development ux performance

CSS-in-JS has taken a solid place in front-end tooling, and it seems this trend will continue in the near future. Especially in the React world. By Tomas Pustelnik.

For example, out of 11492 people who participate in State of CSS survey in 2020 only 14.3% didn’t hear of Styled Components (a dominant CSS-in-JS library). And more than 40% of participants have used the library.

Author wanted to see an in-depth performance comparison of CSS-in-JS libraries like Styled Components and a good old CSS for a long time. Sadly he was unable to found a comparison on a real-world project and not some simple test scenario, so he did it himself.

Don’t use runtime CSS-in-JS if you care about the load performance of your site. Simply less JS = Faster Site. There isn’t much we can do about it. But if you want to see some numbers, continue reading.

The article content:

  • What I measured and how
  • Network comparison
  • Coverage
  • Lighthouse performance audit
  • Performance profiling
  • Comparing user interaction

Runtime CSS-in-JS can have a noticeable impact on your webpage. Mainly for low-end devices and regions with a slower internet connection or more expensive data. Good read!

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How to ask for a raise or promotion

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Tags cio management miscellaneous ux

Preparing for important conversations in your UX career. Notes from mentoring session in which author was discussing how to approach UX career conversations and specifically how to ask for a raise or promotion. By H Locke.

There are a number of routes into UX. There is also a massive skill set that could be considered part of our remit so it’s really easy, over time, to find yourself taking on more roles and greater responsibility day-to-day.

The article focuses on:

  • Things to think about before having that career conversation
  • Have you earned it?
  • Do you know how your company manages career development?
  • Are you prepared?
  • Prepare … your (rational) argument
  • Prepare … for the awkwardness
  • Prepare … for the human stress response
  • Now ask for the meeting
  • How to manage the conversation

We liked: Make sure it’s at least 30 mins so that you have their full attention. If your manager is a flake who always arrives 20 minutes late, book them for an hour. If the person asks what its about in advance, say you’re looking for some career guidance. Nice one!

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How to stay confident when pitching to intimidating investors

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Tags cio startups fintech miscellaneous

You can prepare yourself to pitch to potential investors. You want to impress them and eventually receive funding. The problem is that they’re picky. By erikchristianjohnson.com.

They’re cautious since they want their money to grow. It’s an investment, after all, and investing means risk. While pitching to investors, you might feel a bit intimidated. There are times when they look scary since they rarely smile. Others don’t even seem to care. If faced with these investors, here are some tips for surviving the pitch:

  • Don’t conclude based on what you see
  • Prepare what to say
  • Be at the venue early
  • Talk to your employees
  • Forget about the results for a while
  • Fill the room with optimism

You can’t change how the investors look. If they seem scary, it’s beyond your control. However, you can control what you feel. If you want to be positive, fill the room with optimism. Smile and feel confident. It doesn’t matter if the investors don’t have the same response. Some good advice here!

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SRE fundamentals 2021: SLIs vs SLAs vs SLOs

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Tags app-development devops cio google programming infosec

A big part of ensuring the availability of your applications is establishing and monitoring service-level metrics—something that our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team does every day here at Google Cloud. By Adrian Hilton, Customer Reliability Engineer, SRE.

The concept of SRE starts with the idea that metrics should be closely tied to business objectives. In addition to business-level SLAs, we also use SLOs and SLIs in SRE planning and practice. The main parts of this article:

  • Defining the terms of site reliability engineering
  • Service-Level Objective (SLO)
  • Service-Level Agreement (SLA)
  • Service-Level Indicator (SLI)

SRE begins with the idea that availability is a prerequisite for success. An unavailable system can’t perform its function and will fail by default. Availability, in SRE terms, defines whether a system is able to fulfill its intended function at a point in time. In addition to its use as a reporting tool, the historical availability measurement can also describe the probability that your system will perform as expected in the future. Nice one!

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Debugging Elixir code: The definitive guide

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Tags app-development elixir web-development functional-programming

Every application contains bugs, and even if it doesn’t, it will. And even if you’re not a notorious bug producer and your code quality is generally good, the conditions programmers work in are often suboptimal - you will often find yourself pulling your hair out over code written years ago by someone no longer involved in your project. By Michał Buszkiewicz.

In this article, you will find out what approaches and tools are efficient in debugging Elixir applications - often contrary to popular beliefs within the community:

  • Debugging is an art
  • Being naive: IO.inspect/2
  • Being professional: IEx
  • Pry
  • Break
  • Debugging pipelines
  • Debugging Phoenix apps: Battling timeouts
  • Erlang debugging: Real debugger, clumsy usage
  • Visual Studio Code & ElixirLS

Elixir isn’t the easiest language to debug, and there are several tools you can use - it’s good to spend some time trying out them all to ensure you’ll choose the right tool for a particular job in the future. Very good article!

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Building effective DevOps culture

Categories

Tags app-development devops cio learning agile management

In the world of digital transformation, keeping the focus on the customer experience is paramount. Systems are complex and increasingly distributed, which makes it difficult to stay on top of things when something goes wrong. By Julie Gunderson.

Customer service teams are the gateway to the customer, and more often than not they are the first line of defense when something goes wrong. The role of customer service teams is critical to maintaining and exceeding customer expectations.

The article then focuses on:

  • Full-case ownership
  • Metrics that matter
  • The missing link in DevOps
  • Shared goals and values

The article also provide sthe links to further reading, e.g. to their to learn more about customer service ops and full-case ownership, check out PagerDuty’s newest Ops Guide. Good read!

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