CodeIsGo.com

From listening better to citizens, to making operations more efficient, AI brings multiple benefits to governments to make better decisions. By Hugo Cen.

The continuous progress of technology has led to different government organizations having to modify their structures, as well as the way in which they execute their processes.

Nowadays, applying tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI ) in government is essential, since AI makes all operations more efficient, allows citizens to listen better, have greater sensitivity about what they are asking for, what they need, and know the general feeling you have.

According to Christian Peñaloza , doctor in Cognitive Neuroscience, there are three categories into which the main current benefits of Artificial Intelligence in government can be grouped. These are:

• Perfect existing processes: it is based on automating many of the tasks that are carried out, particularly those that consist of data collection and procedures that are carried out for the government
• Improve decision-making with data : here AI can be used to analyze all the data collected and, from it, make better decisions
• Crime prevention: it is more focused on using this technology to be able to detect certain frauds, for example, many use it in the part of the Tax Administration Service (SAT) in collaboration with banks, to be able to detect strange movements and to be able to identify transactions that are not legitimate. It is also implemented in security departments to prevent crime

What’s more, data should be the mainstay of current public policies since, as mentioned above, they generate enormous value. Good read!

Day by day the number of machine learning models is increasing at a pace. With this increasing rate, it is hard for beginners to choose an effective model to perform Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) mechanisms. By Purnasai Gudikandula.

The wide availability of other sequence-to-sequence learning models like RNNs, LSTMs, and GRU always raises a challenge for beginners when they think about transformers. And it is important to a beginner to have basic knowledge of these models before they get to know more about transformers. If you still struggle why not RNNs, LSTMs, and GRUs, here we listed a few important points that can help you out.

The article does a good job of explaining:

• Why Transformers?
• Transformer architecture
• Transformer architecture flow
• Code for language translation
• Transformers for tomorrow

Source: ARXIV via https://deeplobe.ai/machine-learning-for-transformers-explained-with-language-translation/

Transformers are pretty versatile and can be used in a variety of NLP tasks, such as; Machine Translation, Text Summarization, Speech Recognition, Question-Answering systems, and so on. Well worth your time!

Flutter is great for making beautiful cross-platform UIs with its everything is a widget concepts. But how do you actually move data around your application. By Jay Hackett.

A huge paradigm shift when working in Flutter is thinking declaratively. The way most of our brains work make it easy to understand imperative programming concepts. When our code is organized as sequential steps we can follow the code for one branch of code to the next. When programming declaratively we describe what needs to be done and our system responds based on the action we describe.

The article’s content is split into:

• Shift your design thinking to be declarative
• Don’t be afraid to re-draw
• A look at Flutter Ephemeral State
• But what about when I need to keep track of some global state? Lets talk App State

In conclusion, state is one of those things that are at the core of any application we build. It doesn’t matter what method of state management that you use. What really matters is that you understand the decision behind when to use the types of state within you app. It will help you app become more maintainable as your state management design builds consistency. Excellent info here!

Scrum Programs represent a collection of related projects. The objective of a program is to produce business results as they have been identified in the Program Vision Statement. By 59secondsagile.com.

The Prioritized Program Backlog includes Product Backlogs for every project within the program. Scrum at the Program level includes five (5) high-level processes.

The article then describes how to:

• Create program or portfolio components
• Review and update Scrum guidance body
• Create and prioritize program or portfolio backlog
• Coordinate program or portfolio components
• Scrum programs: Retrospect program or portfolio releases

Whenever Scrum is used to manage projects within a Scrum Program or Portfolio, the recommendation is the Agile principles are followed. It is a well-known fact that in order to be successful at the program level with Scrum, small adjustments may be made to the tools and the organizational structure.

The authors also added links to further reading. Nice one!

The Japanese manufacturing industry is renowned for their methods of process improvement. It’s introduced us to methods such as Kanban and Lean. Another approach that’s proven to be popular amongst businesses who want to achieve business improvement is Kaizen. By Dinnie Muslihat.

Kaizen is an approach that encourages an entire company to work together to achieve continuous improvement. It believes that change happens iteratively instead of in big, drastic moments.

In this article, we’ll discuss what Kaizen is, and how it can steer your business towards continuous improvement. The article describes:

• What is Kaizen?
• The history of Kaizen
• Key elements of Kaizen
• Understanding the benefits of continuous improvement
• Creating a culture of continuous improvement
• PDCA (Plan → Do → Check → Act)
• 5 Whys
• Kaizen event

A Kaizen event, also known as a Kaizen blitz or Kaizen burst, is a workshop-like event that focuses on process improvement. Often facilitated by someone in the implementation team, it includes training, analysis, and design of an area of business that requires enhancement. An event can take up to 10 days and tools such as process mapping are involved. Nice one!

Data modeling in NoSQL is trickier than normal SQL. Sometimes, it goes against our intuition. Especially coming from an SQL background, I found it hard to comprehend the various reasons behind the data modeling in NoSQL databases like AWS DynamoDB or Firebase. By Mohammad Faisal.

The article explains three strategies for modeling one-to-many relationships and the scenarios in which you can use them:

• Denormalization + Complex Attribute
• Denormalizaton + Duplication
• Composite Primary Key + Query

Denormalization is a dirty word for SQL developers. But in the NoSQL world, it has its use cases. Designing a NoSQL database is no joke. You have to put a lot of effort into designing one and think about all the possible access policies beforehand. Otherwise, you can’t revert or change the data modeling very easily down the road. Good read!

Did you know that pricing could be the most powerful profit lever for your business right now? The trick to unlocking your pricing power, however, is knowing what common pricing strategies to execute in your business. By Taylor Wells.

With pricing knowledge comes an additional 2–4 per cent for your business each year – even for businesses operating within margin constrained industries. That being said, only businesses that have the right strategy, culture, and execution plan succeed these days. This means you need the right people, making the right decisions at the right time.

The article discusses:

• Common pricing strategies: How to raise prices without losing volume
• What we can learn about price increase strategies from Netflix
• Pricing approaches: 7 things to avoid when setting up a new pricing function
• Strategies of pricing: 10 ways pricing builds a revenue generating machine
• Pricing Models: The secret to how great businesses make more money
• Pricing strategies: Have you heard of BDCs – (Big Dumb Companies)?
• Different pricing strategies: Win pricing jobs in B2B industrial companies
• Pricing strategies for travel agencies: Adapting pricing to digital world
• The problem With different pricing policies in multichannel pricing
• Price marketing strategy: 4 obstacles to quality pricing hires
• Price rise implementation: Are Coles & Woolworths losing their power over suppliers?
• Pricing tactics: Win deals & influence with B2B pricing management
• Implementation plan: How to triple the roi on your next price rise
• Top recommended books on pricing strategies and concepts

Developing a strategy is undoubtedly difficult and an essential piece of work. However, getting the right people to deliver your well-crafted strategy is 10X harder. Good read!

A guide on how to write documentation in Rust. By Guillaume Gomez.

Don’t write documentation for others but for yourself!

Before explaining how to write nice documentation and everything, we need to cover the basics on how to actually write documentation with Rust. First thing to note, you can generate it using rustdoc.

The article then dives straight into:

• Basics
• Doc comments
• Documenting a crate
• Writing a good documentation block
• Code examples
• More control over code examples testing
• Hiding lines
• Using rustdoc lints

Always document all public items. Always have at least one code example in every documentation block. Better small than nothing. Good read!

The new index types in Neo4j 4.3 work in much the same way as Node and Node Property indexes do – they enable you to quickly look up where there are references to a particular Relationship Type in the graph (i.e. which Nodes are connected by the relationship). By Stu Moore, Product Manager.

The article takes a look at:

• What are Relationship / Property indexes, and when do you use them?
• Side note on the use of indexes
• Ok, that’s great! give me an example?
• The query
• How do you create the index on the role?
• Now that you mention it, how much faster is PIPELINED?
• Troubleshooting with EXPLAIN plan logging

Adding Indexes does need to be done with some thought because they increase the write workload – creates and updates on the index when new data is written to the database. Indexes may not benefit your queries when the majority of nodes have the same relationship type or there is only a single relationship type – same goes for relationship properties. Good read!

Static code analysis is the practice of examining application’s source, bytecode, or binary code without ever executing the program code itself. Instead, the code under review is analyzed to identify any defects, flaws, or vulnerabilities which may compromise the integrity or security of the application itself. By John Vester, Sr. Architect, CleanSlate Technology Group.

The article discusses following:

• What is static code analysis?
• Types of application security testing
• Comparison to Dynamic Analysis (DAST)
• Benefits of Static Code Analysis (SAST)
• Challenges of static code analysis
• Modern static code analysis
• Getting started with static code analysis
• Advanced static code analysis

Source: @dzone.com https://dzone.com/refcardz/getting-started-with-static-code-analysis

Static code analysis is a vital requirement for all teams producing features and functionality for customer-facing products, services, and APIs. At the minimum, SAST solutions should be part of the development lifecycle, participating in the CI/CD pipeline and utilized as part of the peer review process. Great read!