Author: Bruce Elgort

You’ll find this technology professor – an award-winning instructor at Clark College – working hard to inspire and challenge his students with meaningful web development and programming experiences. With a skinny vanilla latte (no foam) in hand, Bruce loves to tinker and test the boundaries of existing and emerging technologies, to then guide hungry minds through memorable, educational journeys to showcase with passion the ever-evolving innovations of society. An industry leader, Bruce is known for co-developing Elguji’s IdeaJam software, and is recognized by IBM as an ‘IBM Champion’ for being an innovative thought leader in cloud technologies.

Ars Technica: What’s the difference between college-level and corporate programming?

This article strikes home as I am now completing my first year as a college instructor who teaches computer programming:

When they graduate and get their first job, a lot of students feel like they don’t really know how to program even though they may have been good programmers in college.

What are some of the differences between programming in an academic setting and programming in the ‘real world’?

…

In a traditional undergraduate computer science program you learn just programming. But the real world doesn’t want people who are just programmers. The real world wants real software engineers. I know many job descriptions don’t seem to express this distinction, which only confuses the matter.

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Thank you Joyce Davis

I wanted to take this opportunity to personally thank IBM’s Joyce Davis for her tenure as the IBM Collaboration Solutions Community Manager. I have learned so many things from Joyce over the years that it would be impossible to list them all however, the one thing that I have learned from her more than anything is to always look at the bright side of an issue or a person. Always focus on the overall good, rather than a moment of dissatisfaction.

Being a community manager can’t be an easy job. We the ICS Community have gone through several transitional times, both good, bad and even unfortunately ugly. Joyce has been there to ensure that the community as a whole remained even keeled. She provided us with the occasional “sanity check” that was sometimes needed. Joyce is “real” and she sometimes tells you things you didn’t want to hear.

All the best to Joyce in her new role in the IBM CIO’s office. You and the leadership you gave us will be missed.

I want it NOW!

amazonprimeair

We’re excited to share Prime Air — something the team has been working on in our next generation R&D lab.

The goal of this new delivery system is to get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles.

Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations.

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CIO.com: IBM Will Beat Amazon Web Services Because Process Beats Product

With all of the AWS projects I have been involved with lately, I found this article quite interesting:

IBM will eventually beat Amazon Web Services, writes CIO.com columnist Rob Enderle, but not because AWS has an inferior product. In many ways, AWS is better than IBM’s cloud offering. But Big Blue’s experience with enterprise customers, not to mention the federal government, shows that great businesses processes often beat great products.

What are your thoughts on the IBM acquisition of SoftLayer and do you think IBM will win the “battle”?

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Our community mourns the loss of Jens-B. Augustiny

Today I received the following email from Jens-B. Augustiny’s son Herbert:

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Last Saturday my father, Jens Augustiny died. You are entered in his
address database and because of this you are receiving this sad news. For
details please refer to the attachment.

Since we are not sure whether we can address all friends, business partners
and customers, we ask you to forward this message to other people which had
contact with Jens.

Best regards

Herbert Augustiny

I was deeply saddened by the news of Jen’s passing. My heart felt condolences to the Augustiny family.

jens1

jens2

Cool trick for parsing URLs without JavaScript libraries

 

Ryan Baxter tweeted this out earlier and I wanted to share it with all you JavaScript developers out there as it is a nice and elegant way to not have to use a library such as URI.js:

var parser = document.createElement('a');
parser.href = "http://example.com:3000/pathname/?search=test#hash";

parser.protocol; // => "http:"
parser.hostname; // => "example.com"
parser.port;     // => "3000"
parser.pathname; // => "/pathname/"
parser.search;   // => "?search=test"
parser.hash;     // => "#hash"
parser.host;     // => "example.com:3000"

Enjoy and thanks Ryan!