It was 35 years ago this month that envisioned the rise of the portfolio worker. This increasingly popular lifestyle choice favoured by many has given rise to a thriving creative class. Personified by treadmill-standing workstations, office-optional upstarts and a plethora of co-working spaces — flexibility has now become the norm. Charles Handy What might our workplace look like in 2020? Today and progressively more in the future — work may be less about occupying a physical place, than it is concerned with a practice. The shift in our working behaviour takes many forms: whether it is the trendy technique of with a strong WI-FI connection and even stronger coffee, a routine of being present through an or a method of employing an ever expanding array of to enable and foster collaboration. working remotely annual retreat , powerful technologies This shift is not limited to technology or software companies — the development spans all industries. A recent report by claims that more than 60 percent of senior professionals from across sectors believe that their work is shifting more towards an experience than a physical place. And nearly 80 percent said that a rise of the anytime-anywhere work trend powered by mobile technologies is expected. In this new world of — — there can be a host of repercussions to both your professional and your personal life. Raconteur it’s not where you are, it’s what you’re doing Reinventing the Economy Many large organisations with outdated operating systems and coinciding corporate work cultures are playing catch up — trying desperately to transform and stay relevant. In stark contrast, are the nimble networks characteristic of the entrepreneurial revolution that is now taking place. In the UK alone there has been an , from just 700,000 in 1980 to 5.1 million today. The limelight for the small business is finally here — according to the European Commission almost half of the UK economy can be attributed to small and medium sized businesses. explosion of micro businesses The new cohort of entrepreneurs, or , is defined not by their chronological age but by their willingness and ability to adapt. Being the maverick is no longer the name of the game — it’s belonging to a distinct group of people best poised to thrive in today’s world of high velocity change. Generation Flux The emergence and popularity of corporate accelerators whether for big banks, mobile operators or mega brands, demonstrates the appetite to bridge the divide between startups and large corporations. In its simplest form these programs aim to nurture innovation mindsets and practices that might yield new and valuable products and services. The jury is still out on whether these attempts to change the corporate status quo are weakened in trying to reserve risky activities for the sideline, or strengthened by creating an environment where anyone in an industry feels welcome to participate in its development. If it is the latter, then new and progressive ways of operating could flourish, become embedded into the heart of an organization and actually help to democratize innovation. Reviving Our Spaces The landlords of the new economy — Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey of WeWork (Forbes, November 2014) — have concocted the magic sauce for optimum creative and collaborative workspace. While less than two years ago it had only 9 locations it now has 60, making WeWork the fastest growing lessee of new space in America. This is not an isolated phenomenon. Nearly 6,000 shared office operations dot the globe today — compared with just 300 five years ago. Startup veteran Gary Mendell captures the current sentiment well: “The old model of office space is dead.” Where office spaces like WeWork cater to creative, tech and professionals alike, others are more pigeonholed and tailored to a given demographic. This covers the spectrum- , , and more. Others are premised around utility ( , or through ). musicians artists females virtual spaces by the hour drop-ins There is also evidence of the changing nature of workspace in established organisations. New research from Cornell University’s Ergonomics Laboratory found that small investments in can boost a company’s productivity by an average of 12%. Other experts explain that office temperature, lighting and even artwork on the wall can all contribute to increased productivity and feelings wellbeing. A word of caution however warns Sam Sahni, a senior associate at office interior design Morgan Lovell: ergonomic features “Although the intention, almost always, is for a workspace to be physically appealing for the end-users, a ‘cool’ workplace for one organisation may appear as ‘gimmicky’ for another.” Reclaiming Our Time Leading thinker and media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff, sums up our current relationship to time when he writes: “We may not know where we’re going anymore, but we’re going to get there a whole lot faster. Yes, we may be in the midst of some great existential crisis, but we’re simply too busy to notice.” As the standard 9–5 office hours become a thing of the past so too do the work cultures that accompany them. This presents both a host of challenges as well as exciting new opportunities. In one instance we jeopardise losing the social connections, the office banter, the free coffee, the toiling away of hours at a workstation amusing oneself with cat videos. In another case we encounter a blurring between work and leisure through the promise of hyper-productivity of an always-on lifestyle enabled by mobile technologies. Busyness is the new cool. Entrepreneurs by necessity have a different work ethic all together, as writer Ali Mese sums up eloquently: “Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week.” What is evident is that ever since the clock was introduced to coordinate labor, and in effect to store time — we have adopted the mindset that . Our hours, days and workweeks are quantified in terms of profitability and hence related to value. A recent article in captures yet another layer associated with city dwellers: time is money The Economist “Larger, wealthy cities, with their higher wage rates and soaring costs of living, raise the value of people’s time further still. New Yorkers are thriftier with their minutes — and more harried — than residents of Nairobi. London’s pedestrians are swifter than those in Lima.” As we see our working practices develop into the future we face a decisive fork in the road concerning our domineering behaviour. On one path, we allow technology to dictate our working life and the complementary feeling that being busy is benevolent. On the other trail, our experience of the present precedes the clock, and the ability to always be connected. Here, we truly engage with and enjoy both work and play. Better Ways Enter the new purpose driven economy. Value-led organisations putting purpose before profit (think Patagonia) and long term visions (think Cisco). The will focus on 5 P’s: Purpose, People, Product, Profit and Process. These forward thinking organisations with evolutionary businesses models understand the need, more so than ever, to constantly transform. As Mark McDonald from puts it best when he says: design of future businesses Gartner “The nature of change is changing because the flow and control of information has become turbulent, no longer flowing top-down, but flowing in every direction at all times. This means that the ability to manage and lead change is no longer based on messaging, communication and traditional sponsorship. Rather it is based on processes of informing, enrolling and adapting that are significantly more disruptive and difficult to manage for executives and leaders.” Shifting established business practices that allow for more doubt and enquiry requires a shift in our policies and approaches. The old businesses that fuel them no longer lend themselves well to a market that favours speed and collaboration. What’s required for a future of healthy businesses and the working environments that spawn from them is a challenge to the established culture of : covering your ass “The industrial economy was all about knowing the answer and expressing confidence. If you did your homework you were . If you had unanswered questions that meant you did a bad job and wouldn’t’ get rewarded.” — Eric Reiss, Author of The Lean Startup supposed to know According to Vygeny Kaganer, Javier Zamora and Sandra Stieber in — the designing, deploying, and managing of businesses models is more important today than at another time in business history. They explain that an organisation’s is measured by the capacity to enable workers to exercise their freedom, creativity and initiative: Rotman Management digital density “The digital revolution has [forced many companies] into unfamiliar territory. A company that has figured out the basic questions of digital density and purpose is in a better position to handle unsettling new questions such as “What business are we in now?” A Word of Caution With the rise of digital personal assistants, or Siri on steroids, and the popularity of outsourcing our work and personal affairs — for the attraction increased productivity we risk losing a part of our humanity. Being connected is different than feeling it. The psychological contract between employer and employee is under threat as loyalty based contracts and the security they provide are replaced by less formal contracts and potentially less commitment to a given organization. For some, the uncertainty around income levels will be tantamount while the more transactional oriented will welcome the bonuses, stock options and flexible working that accompany the new paradigm. With more highly skilled — hyper specialized — portfolio workers sitting at the top of the employment pyramid, an unevenly distributed economy also may emerge. This translates into restricted opportunities for middle workers, moving them down to roles that require lesser skills and fail to utilize their full potential. As to the insurgence of artificial intelligence and a digital future powered by smart algorithms — in contrast to human choice — we may lose the need for some highly capable jobs altogether. What is certain are the 3 pillars in our working life that Generation X and now Y will continue to champion. According to authority on the subject, Daniel Pink, these are 1) Purpose; 2) Autonomy and; 3) Mastery. As we aim to align these characteristics in the work that we do, we stand to also find work that holds enduring meaning. Join Social Fabric on October 6th, 2016 for an open an intimate debate on the Future of Work with leaders from UsTwo, Second Home, Barclays, and more. Further information and booking here . If you enjoyed, please hit the 💚 below Originally published at creator.wework.com

Flow

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Progressive

Routine

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Will Our Future of Work, Work?

I’m one of the of StackOverflow. Back in 2011, I asked a -related question there. Five years, fifty-three upvotes and nine stars later, today, I noticed that it got closed as “primarily opinion-based” and got nominated for deletion too. I was never notified for what had been happening to the content I created. I believed that it would have existed on the web accessible forever. That’s so naive of me of course. earlier users programming I like a lot, I find it invaluable. I like contributing to it too. I don’t like the moderation culture there but I accept it as it is. I would have appreciated a heads-up though. Giving away my work with a Creative-Commons license for free doesn’t mean that I give no value to it. If it doesn’t adhere to StackOverflow rules, it doesn’t mean that it has no value either. Anyway. StackOverflow I don’t want that question to be lost. Although it is going to be discarded as “primarily opinion-based” I think there is value in those opinions. I’m moving the question here in case it gets lost. I’m not going to move the answers, because I don’t know if their authors would be okay with it. They might have CC-licensed it, but that doesn’t imply that they are fine with whatever’s happening to their work. Rather, I’m going to mention some of the ideas. The question was, as you guessed, “ ”. Here is the full text: Are empty interfaces code smell? I have a function that returns same kind of objects (query results) but with no properties or methods in common. In order to have a common type I resorted using an empty interface as a return type and “implemented” that on both. That doesn’t sound right of course. I can only console myself by clinging to hope that someday those classes will have something in common and I will move that common logic to my empty interface. Yet I’m not satisfied and thinking about whether I should have two different methods and conditionally call next. Would that be a better approach? I’ve been also told that .NET Framework uses empty interfaces for tagging purposes. My question is: is an empty interface a strong sign of a design problem or is it widely used? : For those interested, I later found out that discriminated unions in functional languages are the perfect solution for what I was trying to achieve. C# doesn’t seem friendly to that concept yet. EDIT The question was not worded the best way to say the least. It was ambiguous. I needed to answer a couple of follow-up questions to clarify my problem. I received valuable comments and answers. I accepted an answer too which mentions “ ” because it was the most elaborate opinion about the subject, with quotes from articles and links. Marker Interfaces I have been okay with empty interface for a long time, because “Marker Interface” man, yeah, until a couple weeks ago. Something clicked with me and I found out the problem with my code in a euphoric eureka moment. Yes, it turned out that that interface was in fact a code smell, and I finally figured out the correct design for it. that Let me clarify the problem first. I’m going to try to give a very simplified example: Twitter. We are writing Twitter from scratch, in C#! (I like C#). We have Web and DB layers in separate projects. We have a search query function in the DB layer: IQueryResult Query(string input); Depending on what user types in the search box, the query function returns a different IQueryResult instance. If it starts with “@” it returns a UserProfileResult. If it is a regular text it returns SearchQueryResult. If it is empty it returns ValidationErrorResult. Depending on the result object type our controller in the Web layer does different things. If it’s a ValidationErrorResult it just renders a standard validation error, does nothing else. If it’s a UserProfileResult it redirects to the user’s profile. If it’s a SearchQueryResult it redirects to the search page. The problem was that neither of the types had a common property or functionality with each other. ValidationErrorResult had ErrorMessage, UserProfileResult had UserId, SearchQueryResult had Keyword. So I ended up with this: interface IQueryResult{} That’s it. It was just a guilt-ridden hack I came up with, because I didn’t dare to have this abomination: object Query(string keyword); I had a teeny-weeny bit of type safety. I could be sure that Query could not return anything other than an object that implemented IQueryResult. But in the end the web layer code turned out like this: var result = db.Query(input);if (result is ValidationErrorResult){var validationResult = (ValidationErrorResult)result;return RenderError();}if (result is SearchQueryResult){var searchResult = (SearchQueryResult)result;return Redirect("Search", new { q = searchResult.Keyword });}if (result is UserProfileResult){var profileResult = (UserProfileResult)result;return Redirect("Profile", new { user = profileResult.UserId });} But you see, they were all lies. Of course Query method could start returning a IQueryResult type and I wouldn’t have handled it. I did not have any type-safety but the illusion of it. new I was bothered by those sequential type checks and casts too. You could optimize them slightly with an “as” operator and a null check but it’s a sequential check regardless. Every time a Twitter user requests, you would be doing that extra work, unnecessarily. That’s not proper object-oriented programming, that’s not efficient, not fast, not flexible yet prone to errors. What was wrong? I wanted to have that illusion back then because DB and Web layers were isolated from each other. I couldn’t have implemented a “RenderError” in ValidationErrorResult in a DB layer. It didn’t have access to anything Web had. I couldn’t have implemented a Redirection either. DB didn’t know about those things. I had to stick with those ugly “is” checks. Terrible. Object-oriented programming is mostly about virtual dispatch. We shouldn’t be looking up stuff to reach to the correct code. That’s why we have nifty features like inheritance and polymorphism. Otherwise why bother, right? An interface is like an outlet. It runs whatever you plug into it as long as that thing supported the outlet’s standard. So what I needed was, in fact, an outlet in the DB layer which I can plug in later with whatever functionality I wanted. Something like this: interface IQueryResult{void Visit(IQueryResultVisitor visitor);} interface IQueryResultVisitor{void VisitValidationError(ValidationErrorResult result);void VisitUserProfile(UserProfileResult result);void VisitSearchQuery(SearchQueryResult result);} class UserProfileResult : IQueryResult{void Visit(IQueryResultVisitor visitor){visitor.VisitUserProfile(this);}} class ValidationErrorResult : IQueryResult{void Visit(IQueryResultVisitor visitor){visitor.VisitValidationError(this);}} class SearchQueryResult : IQueryResult{void Visit(IQueryResultVisitor visitor){visitor.VisitSearchQuery(this);}} Finally I re-invented the “ ”. Eureka! Visitor Pattern Of course I knew about the visitor pattern. I had used it in other places. But I never subconsciously linked it to the type of problem I had here. One reason was that I somehow didn’t think that I could get a return value from those void functions. Then I remembered that objects contained state too. So my controller code would be like this: var result = db.Query(input);var visitor = new QueryResultVisitor(this.Context);result.Visit(visitor);return visitor.Result; I didn’t need the result in the interface signature. I just needed it in the implementation: class QueryResultVisitor: IQueryResultVisitor{ActionResult { get; private set; } Result private IControllerContext context;

QueryResultVisitor(IControllerContext context)  
{  
    this.context = context;  
}

void VisitValidationError(ValidationErrorResult result)  
{  
     this.Result = context.RenderError(result.Message);  
}

void VisitUserProfile(UserProfileResult result)  
{  
     this.Result = context.Redirect("Profile", new { user = result.UserId });  
}

void VisitSearchQuery(SearchQueryResult result)  
{  
     this.Result = context.Redirect("Search", new { q = result.Keyword });  
} } It is much less cumbersome than it looks. Well, it is as much as it looks obviously. But it’s not a mood-killing mundane work. Especially when you think of benefits while implementing: Your DB classes suddenly start to support different clients with different behavior patterns. You get the benefit of compile-time checks that force you to implement missing parts when you add a new result type. Your controller code gets simplified down to a couple of lines. It is a fast, scalable mapping operation. More importantly, your awkward empty interface suddenly becomes functional. Yay! The elephant in the room has gone for good. For the sake of completeness, we could have solved the same problem with discriminated unions in a functional programming language, like Haskell or F#. I’m rusty on the syntax but it would come down to this F#-looking-code: type QueryResult =| ValidationError of string| SearchQuery of string| UserProfile of int let Query text : QueryResult = ... query code ... And our controller code becomes something like this: let result = db.Query inputmatch result with| ValidationError v -> RenderError v| SearchQuery s -> Redirect "Search" dict["q", s]| UserProfile p -> Redirect "Profile" dict["user", p] It involves much less boilerplate, is trivial to understand and provides better compile-time checks. Differently from “switch” statements in imperative languages, if you added a new result type, the compilation would fail because of the unhandled case. Not sure if it would be as fast, but would involve much less wiring for sure. I couldn’t bring myself to use functional languages in production yet, except XSLT which doesn’t count. Such switch is quite a big leap with lots of gotchas. I’m at least glad that I now have a satisfactory solution to those empty interfaces in the domain of imperative languages. I can finally bring closure to my question and keep it away from the reach of the hammer of moderation. If you enjoyed it too, even better! TL;DR: If you end up with an empty interface or generic return types, see if it’s an opportunity to use the visitor pattern. P.S. Although I got triggered by moderators this time, I’m considering moving other material I wrote on programming from other platforms with similar extended commentary to Medium. Let me know of if that sounds like a good idea! is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

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“Are empty interfaces code smell?”

The third post about Flutter will focus on explaining how to build a list of items. A scrollable Contacts View containing widgets representing each contact will be implemented along the article. Updated to Flutter 1.0 — December 2018 Index — [Flutter 1.0] Flutter I: Intro And Install — [Flutter 1.0] Flutter II: Material Design Flutter III: Lists and Items — [Flutter 1.0] — [Flutter 1.0] Flutter IV: MPV Architecture — [Flutter 1.0] Flutter V: Material Design II TIP: The whole Flutter series code is available in this . repository Overview Before reviewing the code, let´s talk about is going to be done and . First of all, to get a Contacts View done, the view will contain three different kind of widgets as you can see in the image below. what how Shows each contact information. ContactListItem To build a contacts list, this widget will be used containing a list of ContactListItem widgets. ContactList This Widget holds the whole page and is made from an AppBar Widget and the ContactListItem list. ContactsPage Main & MaterialApp As seen in previous posts, main() calls runApp method containing a MaterialApp Widget. The home attribute will take a ContactsPage Widget instance as a parameter. Contact Data To make the example as simple as possible, ContactsList constructor will take data created directly in the code (hardcoded). How to fetch data using services will be explained in the next article. First thing to be done is creating a file called at the same level the file is, inside lib folder. contact_data.dart main.dart Next step is defining a class to specify the contact data, i.e: name, email, phone number, address, etc… inside file. contact_data.dart It is a simple class where a contact data is defined. Using to make the parameters the constructor takes as optional allows to reference them by name. What is more, constructor is defined as a const in order to create . {} instance constants in compilation time Next step is creating a sample contacts list, the example below represents a list populated with two contacts. Take a look to the first sentence, the left side defines a constant which can´t be reassigned. In the right side, defines an immutable list. Inside this list a Contact instance must be created for each existing contact. By the time we want a new contact to be created we use instead of so it becomes a constant at compilation time. As you can see, marking Contact class attributes as optional allows to assign them by name. const kContacts, const <Contact> [] const Contact new Contact ContactListItem Let´s talk about the three widgets from in to out. The inner one is ContactListItem. In previous posts, it was explained that Flutter provides two different type of widgets, StatelessWidget and StatefulWidget. The ContactListItem will be a StatelessWidget and the reason why it´s because this Widget will show information that won´t change at all, a contact will always have the same data. The example below shows how this Widget should look like. Same way it was done with the contacts data, create a file for the contact widgets, name it and place it inside lib folder where main.dart and where stored. contact_view.dart contact_data.dart The constructor takes a contact as a parameter and a ListItem Widget instant must be returned by the build method. This is a Widget provided by Flutter and keeps Material Design specifications, it would be possible to return other widgets (Text, Image…) but using ListItem Widget will save much work. Some ListItem attributes are: It is a Widget that is placed before the title, it is usually an image representing the user or a letter inside a circle or CircleAvatar in Flutter. leading Widget defining the first text line title Widget defining the second text line, it is placed under the title. subtitle Here an example of a ListItem structure. In this example, the ListItem built has a Text representing the first letter in the contact name nested to a CircleAvatar as leading. It also has a Text showing contact fullName as title and its email as subtitle. A shorter way to define the ContactListItem is making it to extend ListItem because is what is already being returned from the build method. ContactList Once the items are done, let´s go for the list. A MaterialList Widget will be used. This Widget internally returns a ScrollableList Widget which allows to build a scrollable list. Both ContactListItem and ContactList widgets are StatelessWidgets, in this case the contacts list is declared as final. In order to use Contact class, its file ( ) must be imported at the top of the file in which is going to be used the following way. contact_data.dart import ‘contact_data.dart’; In the example above a MaterialList Widget is returned in the build method, some of the specified attributes are that describes ítems with title and subtitle, vertical and that carries a list of ContactListItem. type padding children The function will be in charge of creating the list, it will iterate the contact data list and map it into a ContactListItem, at last create a list containing all those ContacListItems using method. _buildContacList toList If you are not familiar with funcional programming, the Next function would be equivalent. List<_ContactListItem> _buildContactList() { var items = new List<\_ContactListItem>();

for (var contact in \_contacts){  
    items.add(new \_ContactListItem(contact));  
}

return items; } Contacts Page The last Widget needed must contain an AppBar and a ContactList. ContactsPage extends StatlessWidget because it won´t change its state. This Widget will be created using an Scaffold instance so it provides a layout in which an AppBar and a List could be located inside. In this example an AppBar is added to the Scaffold and the attribute body takes a contacts list instance (ContactList Widget). ContactList was created using kContacts which was created inside . contact_data.dart To finish, just set a new ContactPage inside MaterialApp home attribute. home: new ContactsPage() Run the application and see the contacts list. To sum up After creating a contacts list using Flutter, let´s think about how this same work could be achieved the native way using Android. We could use two different .xml files, one of them to define an AppBar and a RecyclerView and another one to define the contact´s layout. An Activity (or both an Activity and a Fragment), and Adapter and a ViewHolder are also needed. The difference between the amount of code and time are quite big. This post shows how powerful is Flutter in terms of specification. Next article will focus in how to create a MVP (Model-View-Presenter) architecture using Flutter. All the code shown in this tutorial is available if you missed something. here

Fetch

Flutter III - Lists and Items — [Flutter 1.0]

From the first time I did an estimate, it seemed evident to me that . For instance, if you’ve installed a library a bunch of times, you should at this point have a good idea about how long that usually takes you, right? previous experience with a task is tremendously helpful in estimating it accurately particular What the current methodologies do Each person on a team has different levels of familiarity with each task, so it doesn’t matter if one person estimates all tasks, or if you take an average from estimates done by several people. In both cases, there is loss of valuable information. Strangely, this familiarity factor has been largely ignored by teams I’ve worked in. My current one does “planning poker” for example, which tries to have a few people agree on an estimate. Problem is, what if only one of them has actually implemented such a task before? The weight is on that guy to get everyone else to agree with him. Averaging estimates can lead to completely useless results. Waterfall had a similar, if not worse, problem. Usually in that kind of environment, the team leader would do the estimating, or he would defer that to another team member. Again, experience was ignored. programmer Never have a single person do all the estimating. Peer pressure sweeps the problem under the carpet Another relevant factor that is usually ignored during estimates is: Certainly, the estimate cannot be accurate if you label a task as low complexity and then assign it to someone with zero previous experience with such a task. This problem cannot be avoided by any system that separates estimating from implementation. who is actually going to implement it? Some teams try to mitigate this by having the implementer re-estimate it, but then you are wasting time estimating it twice and, in my experience, to try to get him to agree with the previous estimate. if the estimates differ greatly, there is going to be peer pressure on the implementer The benefits of focusing on task familiarity An interesting thing about paying attention to task familiarity, is that it seems like people have no interest at all in gaming this metric. They know that they either do or do not know something, so there is naturally going to be less guesswork. If you love numbers, you can run a survey in your team to measure how familiar each person is with each task. By starting from more accurate data, your conclusions should be more valuable. Start by building a table with team members and tasks, and have each cell be a number from 0 to 10 measuring how familiar each member is with that task. Having done that, you can use that table to help you make decisions and to calculate valuable things. Measuring how familiar each person is with a task can give you valuable insight on your team To , simply assign each task to the person most familiar with it. maximize implementation speed To , have people learn more by assigning somewhat unfamiliar tasks to each one. Keep them in a challenging but not pharaonic effort level. maximize the potential of your team by teaming up new members with those that are already familiar with the tasks you’ve assigned to the new guys. Get people up to speed quickly Build a general technology familiarity table for your team, measuring each tech (React, Angular, etc.) against how familiar each member is with it, which will let you . know how much of an impact you’ll have by introducing the new tech into your stack

BUNCH

Agile and waterfall ignore a huge element of task estimation

Digital is eating the traditional model, forcing organizations of all kinds to reshape their value propositions and operating models to maintain a competitive advantage over others. To adapt to this change, digital transformation is quickly becoming a key focus area for enterprise businesses. technology business Digital transformation enables organizations to adapt to new technologies faster to improve customer experience and establish competitive edge.  Digital transformation success depends on an enterprise’s ability to implement and integrate digital channels into their ecosystem. It involves not just the right technology, but also the right people, processes, and engagement. To drive , a diverse set of roles — creative specialists, enterprise architects, software engineers, analysts, operational excellence experts — are involved. Developing the necessary expertise in-house or attracting such diverse recruits is a hard thing to do. When you factor in the budget constraints of a CIO, it becomes even more difficult. This is where a strategic partner can help; it can fill the gaps required to drive your digital transformation initiatives. A trusted partner will also guide you through the complex product vendor landscape while helping you make the informed decision about the right products and tools.  Majority of B2C companies prefer to use a third-party solution provider for digital transformation consulting and implementation rather than building technical capabilities in-house. Working hand in hand with the right partner can help you implement a digital transformation strategy at a faster rate and lower cost. It also gives you a competitive edge by providing: Trained business and IT teams to advise on disruptive technologies and provide a digital transformation road-map Agile development and DevOps approach for agility and innovation; which often result in a competitive advantage Demos and case studies to start your transformational journey confidently Experience to manage both your traditional IT environment and cloud infrastructure A robust planning & execution strategy and the necessary technology building blocks to speed up the implementation process Close partnerships with technology vendors who are disrupting the digital transformation space New channel enablement with mobile, social interactions, and big data analytics Leverage open source for digital transformation to reduce TCO digital transformation Expertise: Best Practices: Proof of Concept: Flexibility: Faster Time-to-Market: Best-of-breed Solutions: New Technology Capabilities: Cost Reduction Opportunity: Many organization leaders are learning to extend their reach through strategic partnerships. Now is the right time to find and engage with a partner to define and execute your digital transformation strategy. The original post is published on . OSSCube Blog

Why Choosing a Strategic Partner Is Your Best Bet for Digital Transformation Success

There’s a fun thing I do with folks I meet who want to write a book or build a startup or put up a blog post. I say I’ll help them. I give them a few pointers — for book folks I recommend they prepare an outline and we can tag-team the chapters. In this way they could finish a book in a few months. It would be their book, I’d give up all rights. Maybe they could pay me if they get paid but I basically say “Yes.” This tactic works .0001% of the time but for the the times that it works — when I brought people on to write for CrunchGear, when I wrote with Charlie White, when my buddy Rich said we should build a business together — it’s amazing. And it doesn’t work not because the idea fails. It’s because the “Yes” wasn’t enough to jog them to action. Bloggers Boot Camp We don’t want to say “Yes.” We guard our time like a dog guards a rotten bone in the yard, oblivious to the meal inside. We guard our attention and then hit Facebook for hours. We sit on our best ideas and then whine when someone “steals” them. We don’t say “Yes.” Make yourself the hero of that dumb Jim Carrey movie. If someone mentions a startup, offer to help. If someone mentions a garden they want to plant you offer a shovel. You’ll learn as much from the person who asked as they will from you. “I wish I had friends who indulged me,” said a friend once. She was trying to build a business and her friends balked. She was stuck. All she needed was a “Yes.” She didn’t get it. It seemed to daunting. You think you’ll give up too much if you say “Yes.” You think you’ll be taken advantage of. You think you’ll be duped. You think they’ll use you. Fine. Fear that. But in every “Yes” there blooms a thousand possibilities. In every “Yes” there is an ocean of opportunity. In every “Yes” we are reconceived and reborn. Besides, most of the people you say “Yes” to won’t be ready to hear it. But when they are ready you’ll be the first person they’ll call… and you’ll say it again. is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

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Try “Yes.”

Have you ever rotate an ImageView before? It’s quite simple to rotate an ImageView, as that could simply be done by even in the layout xml code with the attribute. android:rotation A simple example of code as below <CustomImageView
    android:id="@+id/image_on"
    android:layout_width="60dp"
    android:layout_height="60dp"
    android:rotation="-6"
    android:scaleType="centerCrop"
    android:src="@drawable/simpleimage"/> The image generated is rotated to the left as expected. It’s all good until it got inspected by sharp eyes (of a good designer), will bring to light that it is not good, especially on lower resolution devices. (Shhhh … this would make a good “interview test material” for designer :P) An enlarged image of the rotated ImageView is as below … Jagged all over the edges You would notice the rough jagged edges. Can’t we just apply anti-alias on it? Applying anti-alias should help the smoother the edges between different color within the image. But unfortunately for the edges of the image will not be anti-alias, as Android doesn’t anti-alias across it’s view. Trying to be smart, we could add padding, margin, or even use background image to , hopefully Android would be smart to blend them to smooth out the rough jagged edges. Sorry, they don’t help. There are several that recommend turning off Hardware Acceleration for the particular view, but it doesn’t help in my case as well. stackoverflow So how did you do it? What I did was to experiment adding some transparent border on all the sides of my image and save as PNG, then use that image to rotate. Bingo! … the edge got anti-aliased, and as smooth as I like. Check out below, smooth smooth edges! Jagged cleared in all edges But wait… we don’t always have the image readily that we could manually change by adding transparent border to it. Even if we do, it’s so much trouble to do so. This is not feasible! Adding transparent border programmatically Given that we are sure that transparent border does help, perhaps we could do it programmatically. So, I try to expand a Canvas by 1 px on all sides but it turn out that this is not as simple as I thought, as stated in this ,. stackoverflow So given that we can’t add 1 px, so now I cheat…. I shrink the image by 1 px for all sides, by painting the bitmap through a shader. That will leave the side of the image as a transparent padding of 1px each. The code as below (it is added into the function of my that inherit from . void onDraw(Canvas canvas) CustomImageView ImageView if (getDrawable() instanceof BitmapDrawable) {

    Paint paint = new Paint();
    paint.setAntiAlias(true);
    Bitmap bitmap = ((BitmapDrawable) getDrawable()).getBitmap();
    BitmapShader shader = 
       new BitmapShader(bitmap, 
            Shader.TileMode.CLAMP, Shader.TileMode.CLAMP);

    Matrix matrix = new Matrix();
    float scale;

   /* Note: this piece of code handling like Centre-Crop scaling */   
   if (bitmap.getWidth() > bitmap.getHeight()) {
        scale = (float)canvas.getHeight() 
                    / (float) bitmap.getHeight();
        matrix.setScale(scale, scale);
        matrix.postTranslate(
         (canvas.getWidth() - bitmap.getWidth() * scale) * 0.5f, 0);
    
    } else {
        scale = (float)canvas.getWidth() 
                    / (float) bitmap.getWidth();
        matrix.setScale(scale, scale);
        matrix.postTranslate(0, 
         (canvas.getHeight() - bitmap.getHeight() * scale) * 0.5f);
    }

    shader.setLocalMatrix(matrix);
    paint.setShader(shader);

    /* this is where I shrink the image by 1px each side, 
       move it to the center */
    canvas.translate(1, 1);
    canvas.drawRect(
     0.0f, 0.0f, canvas.getWidth()-2, canvas.getHeight()-2, paint);
} With the above code, you’ll get the exact jagged-clear image that I show above. The actual image although shrink by 1 px on each side, but due to the anti-aliasing effect, it makes it seems expanded 1 px as well, hence canceling the shrink look of 1 px. Some Caveat on the Code It only handle the Center-Crop scaling. It didn’t take into consideration the padding added to the . CustomImageView It could be optimized by moving some object creation outside the function. For simplicity, I put them all in a function here. onDraw My hope is Android would automatically by default handle anti-aliasing for all the View’s edges when it is rotated. To me the above is still a ‘hacky’ way of achieving it. If you have a better ‘hack’ to it, do share. Elye Project (@elye_project) | Twitter

Smoothen jagged edges of rotated image view

is a self-taught front end engineer, an active member of the NodeBots Community and a cat connoisseur! She is currently at Microsoft, working on projects to get developers excited about new technologies. Rachel For her first project using Node.js, socket.io, microcontrollers, and johnny-five, she built a web-based feeder that delivers tasty cat chow on a configurable schedule or when triggered remotely. This year, at Rachel will take us through an engaging experience that allows us to discover the many different modules that integrate with an Arduino. Arduino (if you are not familiar) is an open-source platform used for building project that consists of both a physical programmable circuit board and an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). It runs on your computer, and can write and upload computer code to the physical board. Node. js Interactive Europe, Rachel aims to shed some perspective on what is possible in the world of Node.js hardware, creative coding, interactive robots, and more. Through diagrams and detailed code examples, her presentation, “ ” will render us with an inside look into accelerometers, capacitive touch, light, and sound. She will show us how certain modules easily integrate with an Arduino, what they can be used for in everyday life, and how these applications are driving evolution in the IoT world. There will be also demos with various sensor modules, such as copper touch sensors to control a video game and yelling to control brightness of LEDs. Alt-Ctrl : Scream into this Arduino takes place September 15–18 in Amsterdam. We look forward to learning more about thinking outside of the box when it comes to limitations with coding. Node.js Interactive Europe Be sure to register today!

Microsoft

Only at Node.js Interactive: The Evolution of IoT with Arduino from Rachel White

Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of has just come on stage in San Francisco to announce the arrival of a Mario game to later this year (for holiday season, apparently). And while they were low on details on the release date, Nintendo has already announced a little something for the launch of iOS: Mario iOS for iMessage. What’s that going to be like? A Mario sticker pack Again, Miyamoto hasn’t revealed any details, but if you are anywhere from Korea or Japan you might be aware of the fact that Nintendo has already released some Mario Stickers on Line. So here’s something to look forward to while we wait for Mario for iOS to drop: Everything about this makes sense, Nintendo gets to secretly advertise their upcoming rebirth on iOS while Apple makes sure its iMessage sticker platform gets some real visibility within just the right target group. I’m hopeful and curious for the changes coming to this neglected platform. For everyone not able to wait for the release of the game, Nintendo added a notify button to its . For everyone curious about some more details of the actual gameplay, here’s an conducted with Miyamoto by Time after the show. We can’t wait to see you on any iPhones near you, Mario. Super Mario Run landing page insightful interview All img credits/copyrights are either to Line/Nintendo and Apple on the Apple Special Event live stream on September 7, 2016. If you liked this post, I’m sure you’ll like my owner sticker pack called kaomotion. See how it works below, find it on the App Store here: Kaomotion for iMessage. Kaomotion stickers for iMessage

Apple

Nintendo

Super

Target

Super Mario Stickers coming to iMessage on iOS 10

Apple’s 2-hour Nerd Talk Compressed into What You Actually Care About Gamers — Cool Super Mario App Apple Watch — Waterproof iOS 10 Release(that’s the update for your phone dummies) — Cool new Features Messaging iPhone — Water Resistant Sweet New Camera(well duhhh) Stereo Speakers(one at bottom one at top) No Headphone Jack — Lightning connector for headphones(adapter included for old headphone jacks) Wireless ‘AirPods’ The end.

iPhone 7 and the Apple Event for Dummies

and why aural augmented reality is coming. Now that after a long wait the new iPhone 7 is out of the bag many of us were surprised to see that Apple really ditched the headphone jack. Chaos ensued. Blog posts were written. Apple has a great track record in dropping obsolete technologies just at the right time. This time, it might have been the right step, but a bit premature. Why. In my opinion, we see now clearly the vision that Apple is working on with the next generations of mobile devices in the Apple Watch, iPhone, headset ecosystem. Even though they might not just be there yet. Axing the jack paves the way for discreet, bean-sized earbuds that can simultaneously translate, filter out unwanted noise or let us control other devices by voice. That is really really awesome! Let there be voice That is really really awesome, because hearables are the new frontier in mobile U/X design. The market of these so-called hearables is estimated to be around $16 billion in until 2021. Naturally is becoming a crowded space. Samsung launched the IconX wireless earbuds, while Sony is actively working on Project N in their Futurelab with the following vision: “With N, ears are uncovered so we are able to listen to music while being open to feel the lively soundscape around us. If we can access local information without having to constantly scan the display on a mobile device” Obviously we need to link drop!in (http://www.idrop.in) “Nearby Events Happening Now” with the “N”. Further, Sony is soon releasing the much heralded Xperia Ear which promises to deliver weather and message notifications via voice, and to recognise input either by voice or head movements. To complete the Asian drive for aural entertainment. Korea’s LG Electronics announced that it was planning to include Amazon’s Alexa in its SmartThinQ Hub, a device used to connect home appliances over the Internet. Great UX design is invisible. The user intuitively knows what to do. And for humans the most intuitive form of communication is….. you guessed right. Voice! Now how should that work in practice. Siri work ok-ish on the mobile phone but speech recognition absolutely sucks on the iMac and MacBooks. So I am not getting it. If the quality of speech recognition still sucks, why is Apple doing it. Because it is not the recognition part they are after, but the speech synthesis. Already now having your iPhone read a web article to you “ just works”. How now would that translate into other forms of mobile features, namely navigations and or games. Let me give you an example. The “In Shadows” effect The first iteration of “In Shadows” (http://www.inshadows.asia) was an iBeacon enabled running game. A game of tag to be precise. During the many many test runs we noticed that it is very disruptive for the overall game experience to constantly re-open the app that is strategically places on your upper arm. Since it is much easier to give the game messages to the player using earphones, it is possible to overall reduce the artwork in the game and move most of the fun-relevant elements to an aural only experience. And actually, that worked really well. When the iBeacon registers a Shadow Player, the app would trigger the command “ A Shadow is near”, once you start running towards the Shadow it would say “Shadow is getting closer”, and if you are in real danger the app would say “Danger! Shadow is closing in”. So that does sound a lot of fun. But now this is where the real fun begins. If in the near future the apps respond properly to voice recognition the functionality, which is a way to temporarily stun a Shadow player could be triggered via the voice command ‘ ’. And that would be AMAZING! burst burst ….well now I would love to play a Harry Potter game with that functionality. We are on the verge of an aural augmented reality revolution and don’t even know it. What a time to be alive. is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

Samsung

Sony

The Verge

The mystery of the missing iPhone jack

Scaling a home-services hiring platform. At , one of our biggest challenges is to select the best professional to execute a cleaning job. This is key to the success of our service, as there are many intricacies that must be considered, ranging from customer and tasker preference, geolocation, previous feedbacks, weekly or monthly fixed jobs, tasker abilities with certain job types. Parafuzo Every few months we sit back and consider upgrades to our tasker (professional) search engine. Back in 2015, when we had an SMS-based job offering system, we realized there was an optimal time distance from the offers to the job date. If it was too short notice, we wouldn’t be able to fulfill all jobs automatically and our ops team had to assign taskers manually to a number of the jobs. If it was too distant from the job, about 6 to 10 days, the no-show rate would skyrocket especially for jobs on Tuesday that were accepted the previous Wednesday. This was all covered by our engine. Our previous setup We used to have a very simple and unoptimized engine that took a few tens of seconds to generate a list of the 20 best pros for a job, considering all above rules. At first, we would run multiple queries to determine exclusions from the list, then a geolocation query with the job position as a base would get the available taskers, limited to a 20km radius, sorting the taskers by average score, and filtering for bad feedbacks, service requirements (does the tasker knows how to iron clothes?), tas_ker availability, etc._ We would then run a weighted ranking considering the tasker average score and the tasker location in a way that we prefer better scored taskers, and really nearby taskers. If the job is walking distance from the tasker home, it would get the maximum distance score, but the tasker average score would still be the more important decisor. We then generate offers for the 5 best positioned taskers, and this offers would be notified (firstly by SMS, then later in 2015 by Parafuzo App), and the best pros would have up to 4 hours to accept or reject the offer (as long as the offer is still available). As we approach closer to the job date, we would send offers more often to more taskers, always preferring the best pros. Enter Elasticsearch When we decided to upgrade the engine again, we had a new issue to solve. As our platform is growing, we have to provide better taskers with more value (meaning more jobs), and the cumbersome and slow Mongodb-based engine would not be able to comply with our multiple requirements for matching the best pros to the best jobs. As we try to aways build cutting edge tech, even with our small 4-person engineering team, we evaluated the possibilities we had to enhance this engine, and we found elasticsearch to be the best fit for the job. Elasticsearch with their powerful query language allows us to filter specific criteria that must be fulfilled, and to sort and rank the dimensional criteria like score, tasker preference and distance. It’s doing almost the same as our engine did previously (filtering and sorting), but in a very specialized and efficient way. Microservices Architecture As part of our infraestructure, every change to our models are asynchronously posted to an SNS topic that is enqueued in SQS, which is consumed by Chiron, our small but powerful app that syncs ou data across systems. Chiron is a small service that consumes an SQS message like this: And posts this resource to wherever we want, in this case, elasticsearch. So, instead of looking up the best tasker for a job, we ended up looking up the best job for a tasker. This way, we would have more control of which taskers would get which jobs, and we would be able to offer better, closer jobs, or even 2 or more jobs in a row for the taskers, one near the other, optimizing our marketplace. We guarantee that our elasticsearch is hot by syncing available jobs to it in very few seconds, and we replaced our multiple queries for a single, really optimized query that does all the matching work for us. mongodb Elasticsearch has information of all available jobs, like this: And matches the best jobs for each tasker every time it’s needed. :) In the next few months I’ll try to tell the story of how I built a home services marketplace in Brazil with a amazing team. As of July/2017 I left Parafuzo and I’m feeling I should share with the community the knowledge I gathered. Keep in touch via Twitter @jturolla.

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive September 7th, 2016

Will Our Future of Work, Work?

@sfagency
Jonas Altman

“Are empty interfaces code smell?”

@ssg
Sedat Kapanoglu

Flutter III - Lists and Items — [Flutter 1.0]

@develodroid
Chema Rubio

Agile and waterfall ignore a huge element of task estimation

@christianmaioli
Christian Maioli

Why Choosing a Strategic Partner Is Your Best Bet for Digital Transformation Success

@rgujrati
Ritesh Gujrati

Try “Yes.”

@johnbiggs
John Biggs

Smoothen jagged edges of rotated image view

@elye.project
Elye

Only at Node.js Interactive: The Evolution of IoT with Arduino from Rachel White

@nodejs
Node.js Foundation

Super Mario Stickers coming to iMessage on iOS 10

@s2imon
Simon Schmid

iPhone 7 and the Apple Event for Dummies

@pmanning
Phil Manning

The mystery of the missing iPhone jack

@jsemrau
J. Daniel Semrau

How we migrated our tasker search engine from MongoDB to Elasticsearch

@jturolla
Júlio Turolla

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive September 7th, 2016

@sfagencyJonas Altman

@ssgSedat Kapanoglu

@develodroidChema Rubio

@christianmaioliChristian Maioli

@rgujratiRitesh Gujrati

@johnbiggsJohn Biggs

@elye.projectElye

@nodejsNode.js Foundation

@s2imonSimon Schmid

@pmanningPhil Manning

@jsemrauJ. Daniel Semrau

@jturollaJúlio Turolla