Jenna Sargent

An overview of how software development contributes to climate change, as well as actionable steps companies can take to make their development teams more sustainable.

Microsoft announces new mixed reality offering Microsoft Mesh.

Low-code app development platforms have been around for years, but for a long time, they were often looked down upon by developers as something not powerful enough to be used to create actual applications. Whether this was because of a fear of low code making their jobs obsolete or a true belief that these platforms couldn’t deliver on their promises, they were often viewed as just a toy for business users, not something that should actually be used in production environments instead of apps ...

Updating systems on a regular basis is one of the best lines of defense against cyberattacks, but many companies are still struggling to effectively do patch management.
According to a study conducted by ServiceNow and the Ponemon Institute, of the nearly half of respondents who had a data breach in the past two years, 60% believe that those breaches could have been the result of a system with a known vulnerability not having been patched. In addition, 62% weren’t aware prior to the breach th...

After over two months of lockdowns due to the novel coronavirus, many states have started or are about to start the process of reopening. While some things will be opening up, many companies, especially those in the tech industry where remote work can be easily achieved, will continue to keep their employees out of the office.

A recent Bitglass report indicated widespread support for continued remote work. They found that 84% of survey respondents would continue to support remote work even af...

Microsoft and the OpenDP Initiative at Harvard have collaborated on a new platform that will offer differential privacy for large datasets. Differential privacy allows researchers to analyze datasets without having important data withheld, while also preserving the privacy of that data, according to Microsoft.
“Differential privacy, the heart of today’s landmark milestone, was invented at Microsoft Research a mere 15 years ago. In the life cycle of transformative research, the field is still ...

Digital.ai’s 2020 State of Agile report revealed that over half of its survey respondents either had implemented or were planning to implement value stream management (VSM). But despite its popularity, in many organizations it has fallen into the same trap as many new development methodologies — it’s not being implemented 100% correctly. Often, VSM is looked at solely from a DevOps perspective, and it leaves out the business-aligned teams. True value stream management should encompass both si...

As the world tries to fight the coronavirus pandemic, contact tracing is a key practice for preventing outbreaks. Contact tracing is the method of contacting every person an infected person might have had close contact with and getting them tested so they don’t go out and unknowingly spread the virus. While much of this tracing is done manually by calling those potentially infected people, several countries have turned to mobile contact tracing apps to do the work.
Because your phone likely g...

In 2013, customer experience firm Walker released a report in which it predicted that by 2020, user experience would be the key differentiator for brands, and price and product would become less important to users when choosing among different digital services.
Well, 2020 is here, and that prediction seems to have been pretty accurate. In today’s highly competitive digital economy, offering your customers a product they actually like to use is key. Unless you have a highly specific, one-of-a-...

Over the past few years, the world has seen the introduction of two major data protection regulations: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The GDPR, which affects the European Union, has been in effect since May 2018, which is nearly two and a half years. The CCPA went into effect on Jan. 1, 2020. But what impacts have these major privacy regulations had on the industry?

One year after the GDPR had gone into effect, we took a look at what ...

Kubernetes has matured to the point where users need to not only consider how to get Kubernetes clusters spun up and deployed, but how to maintain and scale them for the long term.

Kubernetes was the first project to graduate from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and according to its Project Journey Report, which was released last August, the project has grown from having just 15 contributing companies to over 350 active contributors, which is about a 2,233% increase. Since its i...

Microsoft has long been calling for stricter regulation of facial recognition technology, and now is revealing the progress it has made since its 2018 call for the government to publicly regulate the technology.
Since their public call in 2018, a number of countries have banned or put moratoriums on the use of the technology, but none have “enacted specific legal controls that permit facial recognition to be used while regulating the risks inherent in the technology.” Things are changing, and...

Today, a majority of internet users are browsing the web not from their computers, but from a mobile device. According to a 2018 study by Oberlo, 52.2% of global web traffic came from mobile phones, up from just 0.7% in 2009. In the United States, that number is even higher, with 58% of total web visits coming from mobile devices.
Traditionally, web development focused first on designing a great desktop experience, and then formatting sites for other screen sizes. But with the decline of desk...

Over the past few years, as work/life balance has become more of a priority for developers, the notion of a “crunch culture” has been the subject of much discussion. Crunch has been especially prevalent in the game development industry, where game developers have come to accept that crunch is just a part of the job.
According to a 2019 study by Take This, 53% of game developers reported that “crunch” is an expected component of their employment. According to the survey, crunch is defined as w...