John Basso

Shocking Similarities Between School Lunch & Software Development The need to add more features on shorter release cycles is ubiquitous. At some point we will reach the threshold of gaining efficiencies and quality will begin to degrade. There is some evidence that we've reached and crossed that threshold already. In the late 1960's the National School Lunch Program was struggling to keep up with the growing number of children needing assistance. To combat the issue The Child Nutrition Act was passed in 1966, but eventually privatization of school lunches was seen as the only affordable option for continuing the service. By the late 1970's, private companies were supplying schools with fast food to serve in their cafeterias. Source. These actions decreased the cost of feeding children in need during the school day; however, the quality and nutritional value of the fo... (more)

Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater | @CloudExpo #Cloud

It's a well-known adage, ‘Don't throw the baby out with the bath water'. These days we generally don't toss our bathwater out the window, nor do we make a baby take the last bath - but we should probably still heed this advice. Especially when we consider adopting and transitioning to new technologies. Benefits of Moving to the Cloud For companies moving their services or their infrastructure to the Cloud there are some obvious benefits: often the costs are lower, data can be accessed from desperate locations, and less maintenance is required. Features ‘Thrown Out' in the Move to... (more)

Azure Is King of the Hill | @CloudExpo @Azure #BigData #IoT #DataCenter

As I wrote earlier this year over at InfoWorld, Microsoft took another step toward being king of the cloud hill when it announced in January that it was releasing its Azure stack to the public. There are many technical reasons why this is cool, but more importantly, it's the psychological advantage this gives Microsoft. Google has always had the ability for developers using its stack to develop locally on the same tools that run in Google App Engine. It recently forked its environments, so now the local and cloud environments are slightly different for some of the configuration... (more)

Redundancy Doesn't Equal Backup | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Currently, the preferred method of data protection of cloud giants, such as Google, is to replicate the data across different locations (i.e., data centers), rather than performing a true back up. This is done because a true back up seems logistically too complicated given the amount of data these giants store. These companies have turned to replicated data because, the assumed risk of all replications crashing simultaneously are extremely slim. This risk assumption may be accurate but it does not take into account unintentional data destruction. From firsthand experience, we k... (more)

Machine Learning and Google Car | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #ML #API

Google self-driving car finally causes an accident - a lesson in AI. According to The Verge, Google had recently performed a software update that changed the behavior to be more human like. "So several weeks ago we began giving the self-driving car the capabilities it needs to do what human drivers do: hug the rightmost side of the lane." The truth is that one of the complaints about self-driving cars is that they are too cautious so Google adapted the software so the car would move to the far right of the lane so two cars could fit in the single wide lane.  This is what a regular... (more)