Ideas & Insights

Lean TECHniques coordinated a student project with the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University (ISU) during the Fall 2020 semester to create an augmented reality application.

Adding management and processes to an organization can have lasting affects that you don’t see for years.

As a coder, the builder pattern is my go-to. It makes data setup extremely easy – instantiate a class, chain some methods together, and finish by executing a build method. However, every time I write a builder class, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a more functional approach that completely removes state.

In today’s IT landscape, a lot of people see the quick wins of cloud offerings and miss what they’re giving up. Cloud platforms make it easy to stand up new workloads in particular configurations, but they are severely limited scope, lack of developer agency, and closed implementation leave much to be desired. While some applications run well this way, containers and Kubernetes are a competitive alternative for many mid and large sized organizations.

Globals are bad. Data should be encapsulated and only available when needed. These are some of the first things you learn when you start to program. If there are multiple actors that can write to shared data, side affects can occur.

During the 1990s object-oriented programming was beginning to take the software world by storm. C++ and Java were some of the most popular programming languages. Walking into a bookstore and browsing to the computer section you would find books of all sorts on object-oriented development and design.

The latest COVID-19 casualty was announced this week as Agile2020, the world’s premier Agile conference was officially canceled in its physical form. This news, while disappointing, provides us with a new opportunity. An opportunity to completely rethink the conference experience as we take it virtual.

Protecting the safety and welfare of livestock has never been a more pressing issue. As the human population deals with the coronavirus outbreak, agricultural leaders are placing renewed attention on their biosecurity protocols.

Plumbing is software is any code related to wiring things together. This could be code that listens to queue messages. The code that listens for queue messages is plumbing code that is often written over and over again in applications.

I am old. Yes, you heard that right, I am old, well over 40. I can remember the wild west of software development when developers could do anything to a production database and deploy their own code by copying files from their computer. Developers were able to break and deploy production systems with ease.