News Aggregator

Lessons Learned in Test-Driven Development

Aggregated on: 2025-06-20 16:28:20

When I began my career as a test engineer about a decade ago, fresh out of school, I was not aware of formal approaches to testing. Then, as I worked with developers on teams of various sizes, I learned about several different approaches, including test-driven development (TDD). I hope to share some insights into when I’ve found TDD to be effective. I’ll also share my experience with situations where traditional testing or a hybrid approach worked better than using TDD alone.

Building Smarter Chatbots: Using AI to Generate Reflective and Personalized Responses

Aggregated on: 2025-06-20 15:28:20

With the advent of artificial intelligence-based tools, chatbots have been integral for user interactions. However, in most cases, chatbots provide users with a generic response to their queries. This lack of personalization does not capture any behavioral signals from the user. This not only leads to a suboptimal user experience but also a lot of missed opportunities for the organizations to convert these users from being return customers. This is a critical bottleneck for a lot of organizations to solve, as this prevents free users from becoming paid customers. The first interaction these users have with these chatbots is more often than not the only opportunity to capture the user’s attention. For example, for a user visiting a mental health support application and interacting with its chatbot, it's vital to capture the user’s emotional state and potential needs and provide an empathetic response to make the user feel heard. Missing this window of opportunity is not only impacting the organization’s customer acquisition but also, leading to users not being led to a care pathway that could help improve their lives significantly.

MCP Client Agent: Architecture and Implementation

Aggregated on: 2025-06-20 14:28:20

In this post, we’ll go deeper into the overall MCP architecture and client flow, and we’ll also implement an MCP client agent. The goal is to provide some clarity on “What happens when you submit your request to MCP powered with LLMs”—breaking down what’s actually going on behind the scenes.

Exploring Cloud-Based Testing With the Elastic Execution Grid

Aggregated on: 2025-06-20 13:13:20

You know those regression packs that used to finish while you grabbed coffee? Are they now taking hours? And that testing box you requisitioned six months ago? Is it already maxed out? And do you find yourself complaining about how resources are idling 90% of the day? Yes, it’s time to look at cloud-based testing, which is exactly what I recently started doing. I wanted to find a testing solution that was fast, easy, and gave me flexible capacity. And one that took minimal effort for me to maintain.

DevOps Backup: Top Reasons for DevOps and Management

Aggregated on: 2025-06-20 12:13:20

Traditional backup of endpoints, servers, or databases has become almost synonymous with cybersecurity. However, there is increasing discussion about the need to secure data stored in SaaS or DevOps solutions, such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, or Azure DevOps. Why are we questioning additional security for DevOps or SaaS data? And what implications might this have on the intellectual property, source code, metadata, and projects stored within these tools?

How to Marry MDC With Spring Integration

Aggregated on: 2025-06-20 11:13:20

In modern enterprise applications, effective logging and traceability are critical for debugging and monitoring business processes. Mapped Diagnostic Context (MDC) provides a mechanism to enrich logging statements with contextual information, making it easier to trace requests across different components. This article explores the challenges of MDC propagation in Spring integration and presents strategies to ensure that the diagnostic context remains intact as messages traverse these channels. Let's start with a very brief overview of both technologies. If you are already familiar with them, you can go straight to the 'Marry Spring Integration with MDC' section.

Integrating OpenAI/GPT Models Into Your Web and Mobile Apps

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 20:13:20

The rapid growth of generative AI is shifting the user’s expectations for next-gen applications. In this context, OpenAI/GPT models are gaining prominence. Being one of the booming customer apps of the decade, OpenAI/GPT has crossed the 100 million mark of having weekly active users by the year 2024. Behind the scenes, businesses are eager to integrate the same GPT functionalities into their own products by utilizing the OpenAI API. Improving business workflows through automation, transforming chatbots, and optimizing user interactions through human-like abilities.

Integrating Selenium With Amazon S3 for Test Artifact Management

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 19:13:20

Test automation is a core part of the software testing life cycle today, and effective test artifact management is the most important aspect of maintaining a stable testing environment. For most software projects using Selenium for automated testing, integrating with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides a scalable and secure solution for storing test data, reports, screenshots, videos, and logs. In this article, we will explain how to improve your test automation framework by integrating Selenium and Amazon S3. You'll be able to learn how to deploy a scalable solution to manage test artifacts that addresses your testing needs.

The Scrum Guide Expansion Pack

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 18:13:20

TL; DR: Is There a Need for the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack? The Scrum Guide Expansion Pack represents a fascinating contradiction in the agile world. While attempting to cure Scrum’s reputation crisis, it may actually amplify the very problems it seeks to solve. Let me explain what this means for practitioners dealing with the aftermath of failed Scrum implementations. The Philosophical Shift: From Lightweight to Academic The 2020 Scrum Guide deliberately embraced minimalism. Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland designed it as a “lightweight framework” that was “purposefully incomplete,” thus forcing teams to fill in the gaps with their intelligence and context. This approach was brilliant in its simplicity compared to competitors such as SAFe.

Monitoring Server Health in Private Cloud Data Centers: A Scalable Approach

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 17:28:20

With the increasing costs of public cloud services such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, many companies opt to establish their private cloud infrastructure. This transition necessitates the development of an adequate Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) team to manage and maintain the data center. A key challenge in this domain is monitoring the health of the bare metals (also called servers) to ensure high availability and reliability. This paper presents a comprehensive approach to bare metal health monitoring in private data centers. We will discuss the problem statement literature review, outline an industry-standard solution, propose a high-level system design to ensure real-time monitoring, fault detection, and automated remediation, and provide experimental results to show how our approach is better than existing industry solutions. Introduction With the rise in operational expenses associated with public cloud providers, enterprises are increasingly shifting toward building their data centers. This shift necessitates a dedicated Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) team responsible for maintaining and managing these data centers. A fundamental aspect of infrastructure maintenance is ensuring all servers operate efficiently and reliably. Any failures or performance degradation in these bare metals can result in significant downtime and revenue loss. Therefore, an effective bare metal health monitoring system is crucial for maintaining operational continuity. This article will first define the problem statement and then propose the industry standard scalable solution to tackle the problem.

Beyond Automation: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Software Development

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 16:28:20

Not too long ago, AI felt like something out of the future. Now, it’s everywhere. What once was a niche topic tucked away in academic circles has rapidly become a driving force reshaping how we live, work, and connect with the world. Today, AI touches nearly every part of daily life, from handling small, repetitive tasks to helping solve problems once thought out of reach. Think about how chatbots powered by AI now answer millions of customer service questions daily, doing the work that used to take large teams of people [1]. On a completely different front, DeepMind’s AlphaFold cracked a challenge that puzzled scientists for decades: figuring out protein structures. This advance is now speeding up drug discovery and helping researchers understand diseases in new ways [2]. These examples show how broad and meaningful AI’s role has become, from everyday conveniences to huge scientific breakthroughs. AI has moved well beyond being just an extra tool in the toolbox in software development. It’s become something that clears obstacles so developers can focus on what they do best. Whether automating repetitive chores, untangling complex workflows, or making it easier to build and test software, AI lets developers concentrate more on creativity and innovation. At this point, it doesn’t just offer assistance, it works side by side with developers to tackle challenges that once seemed too tough to crack.

Essential Cybersecurity Practices for Non-Profits

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 15:13:20

With an ever connected and globalized world, it is not surprising that cybersecurity attacks are on the rise. The repercussions of persistent cybersecurity attacks touch all types of organizations regardless of scale, from huge international companies to small local non-profits or charities. These organizations are heavily reliant on technology as forming the core backbone of their IT systems and infrastructure, as well as enabling the means of managing donations, communicating with supporters, tracking volunteer work. Cyber criminals have been pursuing infiltrating such institutions by utilizing both advanced and common techniques that might appear benign on the surface. Specifically, non-profit organizations that do not have adequate cybersecurity measures in place are at risk of attacks that expose private data, tarnish their image, and, in the long term, bring about legal and financial repercussions. Start With Staff Awareness and Training People are generally considered to be the weakest links in a cybersecurity attack. Non-profits are no different. In the digital world that is expanding very rapidly today, it is past time that people are aware of the looming cybersecurity risks affecting the organization. A traditional technique exploited by cybercriminals and hackers, for example, includes phishing emails, which may initially seem to be absolutely harmless, but can often be one of the primary ways through which a system gets infected. The objective of this kind of attack is to mislead users into disclosing their personal credentials.

Preventing Downtime in Public Safety Systems: DevOps Lessons from Production

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 14:13:20

Public safety systems can’t afford to fail silently. An unnoticed deployment bug, delayed API response, or logging blind spot can derail operations across city agencies. In environments like these, DevOps isn’t a workflow; it’s operational survival. With over two decades in software engineering and more than a decade leading municipal cloud platforms, I’ve built systems for cities that can't afford latency or silence. This article shares lessons we’ve gathered over years of working in high-stakes environments, where preparation, not luck, determines stability. The technical decisions described here emerged not from theory but from repeated trials, long nights, and the obligation to keep city services functional under load.

Complete Guide: Managing Multiple GitHub Accounts on One System

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 13:13:20

This comprehensive guide helps developers configure and manage multiple GitHub accounts on the same system, enabling seamless switching between personal, work, and client accounts without authentication conflicts. Overview Managing multiple GitHub accounts on a single development machine is a common requirement for modern developers. Whether you're maintaining separate personal and professional identities, working with multiple clients, or contributing to different organizations, proper account management ensures secure access control and maintains clear commit attribution.

How Docker Desktop Enhances Developer Workflows and Observability

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 12:13:20

Docker made it easier to build, ship, and run applications consistently using lightweight containers. While Docker Engine handles the core functionality, Docker Desktop brings those capabilities into a more accessible environment for everyday development tasks. Though it may not attract as much attention as container orchestration tools or microservices frameworks, Docker Desktop serves a practical purpose in local development. It offers a straightforward interface for managing containers directly on a developer’s machine.

TIOBE Index for June 2025: Top 10 Most Popular Programming Languages

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 11:58:20

SQL has dropped to its lowest position in the history of the TIOBE Programming Community Index, according to the June leaderboard. Between May and June, SQL lost its place in the top 10, descending to 12th place. This created space for Fortran, the classic but still useful programming language that has moved in and out of the top 10 over the last year. Fortran took the opportunity to take 10th place.

How to Add a Jenkins Agent With Docker Compose

Aggregated on: 2025-06-19 11:13:19

In the previous article on installing Jenkins with Docker Compose, we learned how to install and set up Jenkins using Docker Compose. It is now time to learn how to add a Jenkins agent using Docker Compose. With the installation of Jenkins using Docker Compose, we are familiar with Docker Compose and its related file contents. Before we talk about adding the Jenkins agent using Docker Compose, let’s first understand what Jenkins agents are and what they are used for.

TIOBE Programming Index News June 2025: SQL Falls to Record Low Popularity

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 20:58:16

The programming language SQL hit 12th place in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, its lowest position since the rankings began in 2001. Although SQL remains a critical language for working with databases, the increased use of NoSQL databases for AI applications has begun to take its market share. The TIOBE Programming Community Index shows trends in programming languages based on search engine volume.

Top Trends for Data Streaming with Apache Kafka and Flink

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 20:13:16

The evolution of data streaming has transformed modern business infrastructure, establishing real-time data processing as a critical asset across industries. At the forefront of this transformation, Apache Kafka and Apache Flink stand out as leading open-source frameworks that serve as the foundation for cloud services, enabling organizations to unlock the potential of real-time data. Over recent years, trends have shifted from batch-based data processing to real-time analytics, scalable cloud-native architectures, and improved data governance powered by these technologies. Looking ahead, the data streaming ecosystem is set to undergo even greater changes. Here are the top trends shaping the future of data streaming for businesses. The Top Data Streaming Trends I recently explored the past, present, and future of data streaming tools and strategies from the past decades. Data streaming is becoming more and more mature and standardized, but also innovative.

A New Era of Unified Lakehouse: Who Will Reign? A Deep Dive into Apache Doris vs. ClickHouse

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 19:28:16

With the explosive growth of data, the demand for real-time analytics across industries is more urgent than ever. High-performance data warehouses are the backbone of real-time analysis, enabling enterprises to quickly gain insights and drive decision-making. Among many open-source solutions, Apache Doris and ClickHouse stand out as two of the most noteworthy contenders. This article provides an in-depth comparison between Apache Doris and ClickHouse, aiming to offer valuable insights for technical professionals and decision-makers when selecting real-time analytics solutions. Apache Doris Apache Doris is a modern open-source data warehouse based on a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, renowned for its exceptionally high query performance. Designed to provide sub-second query responses, Doris can effortlessly handle both high-concurrency point queries and complex, high-throughput analytical workloads. Its architecture consists of two main components: the Frontend (FE) and the Backend (BE). The FE handles user requests, query parsing, metadata management, and node management, while the BE is responsible for data storage and query execution—with data partitioned and stored in multiple replicas across different nodes. This design supports horizontal scaling, allowing a single Doris cluster to manage hundreds of machines and petabytes of data, all while supporting compute-storage separation for elastic scaling and efficient resource utilization.

How to Master a DevSecOps Pipeline that Devs and AppSec Love

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 18:28:16

When you became a developer, you didn’t imagine you’d be spending a big chunk of your time parsing vulnerability reports, getting stuck in security review cycles, or rerunning CI jobs because the pipeline flagged a dozen “critical issues,” half of which are false positives. You didn’t sign up for this. You weren’t even given a choice, but here you are:

It’s Not Magic. It’s AI. And It’s Brilliant.

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 17:28:16

A few weeks ago, I floated a Google Form with a simple, almost laughable question: "Post your silliest AI-related doubts, as silly as: What even is AI?"

SBOM Essentials

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 16:43:16

As organizations rely more on open-source and third-party components, software supply chain security has become more crucial than ever before. Software bills of materials (SBOMs) are a practical solution for gaining visibility into software components, identifying vulnerabilities, and ensuring license compliance. This Refcard covers the essential elements of SBOMs, their key formats, open-source tools for automating SBOM generation and attestation, and how to integrate SBOMs into development workflows.

The Shift of DevOps From Automation to Intelligence

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 16:13:16

When you think about human evolution, it's astonishing how far we have come. From hunters and gatherers to a world where we can now order food with a tap, get one-day delivery, and call a taxi instantly. Part of the story here is how cognitive evolution led to the invention of tools and technology that transformed the way we live today. As humans evolved, Technology has evolved through different eras as well, each redefining what engineers build and how they build it. From the first personal computing experiments at Xerox PARC in the 1970s to today’s wave of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), the pace of innovation has continually reshaped software engineering practices. By the 1980s, foundational protocols for global connectivity emerged. On January 1, 1983, the ARPANET permanently switched to the TCP/IP protocol suite, marking the moment TCP/IP became the standard for internetworking. This gave birth to the modern Internet.

Secure DevOps in Serverless Architecture

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 15:13:16

Serverless computing, app development, and deployment have been completely revolutionized by its unparalleled scalability and cost efficiency. Infrastructure management abstraction, which is provided by serverless platforms like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions, allows developers to concentrate on building their functionality while the cloud provider takes care of scaling, patching, and maintenance. However, as you might imagine, with something as convenient as this, there are unique security challenges introduced, especially for event-driven workflows where triggers and integrations run rampant at creating complex attack surfaces.

Building Scalable and Resilient UI/UX With Angular and Node.js

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 14:13:16

In large-scale applications, the synergy of a robust frontend and a high-performance backend is essential. By leveraging Angular for rich, maintainable UIs and Node.js (often with frameworks like Express or NestJS) on the backend, teams can ensure both high throughput and responsive user experiences. Modern SPAs (Single-Page Applications) by default offload much rendering to the browser, which can slow initial load and SEO. Therefore, tech leaders increasingly adopt hybrid rendering strategies – for example, using Angular Universal for server-side rendering (SSR) – to pre-render pages on Node.js servers. This approach boosts Core Web Vitals (e.g. FCP, LCP) by delivering HTML content to the browser immediately. In turn, heavy client-side JavaScript can “hydrate” that HTML into a fully interactive app. Careful choice of rendering model (CSR vs SSR vs SSG vs ISR) is a foundational performance strategy. A typical Single-Page Application (SPA) rendering flow.

Why Whole-Document Sentiment Analysis Fails and How Section-Level Scoring Fixes It

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 13:13:16

Have you ever tried to analyze the sentiment of a long-form document like a financial report, technical whitepaper or regulatory filing? You probably noticed that the sentiment score often feels way off. That’s because most sentiment analysis tools return a single, aggregated sentiment score—usually positive, negative, or neutral—for the entire document. This approach completely misses the complexity and nuance embedded in long-form content. I encountered this challenge while analyzing annual reports in the finance industry. These documents are rarely uniform in tone. The CEO’s message may sound upbeat, while the “Risk Factors” section could be steeped in caution. A single sentiment score doesn’t do justice to this mix.

Debunking LLM Intelligence: What's Really Happening Under the Hood?

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 12:13:16

Large language models (LLMs) possess an impressive ability to generate text, poetry, code, and even hold complex conversations. Yet, a fundamental question arises: do these systems truly understand what they are saying, or do they merely imitate a form of thought? Is it a simple illusion, an elaborate statistical performance, or are LLMs developing a form of understanding, or even reasoning? This question is at the heart of current debates on artificial intelligence. On one hand, the achievements of LLMs are undeniable: they can translate languages, summarize articles, draft emails, and even answer complex questions with surprising accuracy. This ability to manipulate language with such ease could suggest genuine understanding.

From OCR Bottlenecks to Structured Understanding

Aggregated on: 2025-06-18 11:13:16

Abstract When we talk about making AI systems better at finding and using information from documents, we often focus on fancy algorithms and cutting-edge language models. But here's the thing: if your text extraction is garbage, everything else falls apart. This paper looks at how OCR quality impacts retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, particularly when dealing with scanned documents and PDFs. We explore the cascading effects of OCR errors through the RAG pipeline and present a modern solution using SmolDocling, an ultra-compact vision-language model that processes documents end-to-end. The recent OHRBench study (Zhang et al., 2024) provides compelling evidence that even modern OCR solutions struggle with real-world documents. We demonstrate how SmolDocling (Nassar et al., 2025), with just 256M parameters, offers a practical path forward by understanding documents holistically rather than character-by-character, outputting structured data that dramatically improves downstream RAG performance.

Effective Exception Handling in Java and Spring Boot Applications

Aggregated on: 2025-06-17 20:13:15

When you're building Java applications, especially with frameworks like Spring Boot, it’s easy to overlook proper exception handling. However, poorly managed exceptions can make your application harder to debug, more difficult to maintain, and a nightmare for anyone dealing with production issues. In this post, we’ll explore how to handle exceptions effectively by avoiding generic catch blocks, using custom exceptions, and centralizing exception handling with Spring Boot’s @ControllerAdvice.

Understanding the 5 Levels of LeetCode to Crack Coding Interview

Aggregated on: 2025-06-17 19:13:15

There are five levels of LeetCode, and most people are stuck at levels one and two. Many of you can solve LeetCode problems but still cannot get a job. Why is that? Whether you like it or not, coding interviews are a competition. There are other people who are interviewing for the exact same position as you. At the end of the day, it's all about what your level is compared to them.

Apache Doris and DeepSeek: Redefining Intelligent Data Analytics

Aggregated on: 2025-06-17 18:13:15

Apache Doris, a high-performance real-time data warehouse, has been gaining significant attention in the OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) space in recent years. With its strong query performance, real-time data processing capabilities, and flexible data models, it is widely used in scenarios such as business intelligence, user behavior analysis, and real-time monitoring. The rise of DeepSeek, on the other hand, has injected new vitality into data analysis. Through DeepSeek’s natural language processing capabilities, users can directly query data using everyday language, greatly reducing the threshold for data analysis.

Elevating LLMs With Tool Use: A Simple Agentic Framework Using LangChain

Aggregated on: 2025-06-17 17:13:15

Large Language Models (LLMs) are significantly changing the way we interact with data and generate insights. But their real superpower lies in the ability to connect with external tools. Tool calling turns LLMs into agents capable of browsing the web, querying databases, and generating content — all from a simple natural language prompt. In this article, we go one step beyond single-tool agents and show how to build a multi-tool LangChain agent. We’ll walk through a use case where the agent:

A Decade of Transformation: The Evolution of Web Development

Aggregated on: 2025-06-17 16:28:15

Over the past decade, web development has undergone a silent revolution, quietly reshaping the digital world landscape. The browser compatibility issues that once kept developers awake at night have become relics of the past, thanks to the wave of standardization led by Chrome. The era of jQuery, characterized by its rudimentary approach, has long been illuminated by component-based frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, making complex interactions as effortless as building with blocks. We have witnessed the transformation of front-end development into the core engine driving trillion-dollar applications, extending the boundaries of code from the browser to the realms of the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence in a symphony of cloud and microservices. In this article, I will explore this transformation from various dimensions, inviting you to witness its greatness together. Conditions Driving the Transformation of Web Development The changes in web development are not singular; they are intertwined with historical contexts and the evolution of the internet. To understand the transformation of web development, we must also grasp the reasons and environments that drive these changes, and which factors are closely related to this change.

Build Your Private Cloud at Home

Aggregated on: 2025-06-17 15:28:15

OpenStack is a popular open-source cloud platform. Through this article, I plan to provide a guide for creating a basic OpenStack cloud at home! The OpenStack cloud nodes can be generally divided into two categories:

Kung Fu Commands: Shifu Teaches Po the Command Pattern with Java Functional Interfaces

Aggregated on: 2025-06-17 14:13:15

Po was supposed to be practicing the Dragon Scrolls. Instead, he was… well, eating. Shifu (arms crossed): "Po! Again? Training time, not dumpling time."

How to Achieve SOC 2 Compliance in AWS Cloud Environments

Aggregated on: 2025-06-17 13:13:15

Did you know cloud security was one of the most evident challenges of using cloud solutions in 2023? As businesses increasingly depend on Cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host their applications, securing sensitive data in the Cloud becomes non-negotiable. Organizations must ensure their technology infrastructure meets the highest security standards. One such standard is SOC 2 (Systems and Organization Controls 2) compliance.

AI's Cognitive Cost: How Over-Reliance on AI Tools Impacts Critical Thinking

Aggregated on: 2025-06-17 12:13:15

Tools driven by artificial intelligence (AI) are improving our learning, working, and decision-making processes. There is a cost involved in this change, though. With an eye toward cognitive offloading—the process by which we assign mental tasks to outside aids like digital assistants, search engines, or recommendation systems. In this article, I examine a 2025 study by Michael Gerlich. It provides a thorough and sophisticated investigation into how artificial intelligence tools influence critical thinking. The study offers a data-rich perspective on a rising issue: depending more on AI to think for us reduces our own cognitive capacity.

Driving Streaming Intelligence On-Premises: Real-Time ML With Apache Kafka and Flink

Aggregated on: 2025-06-17 11:13:15

Lately, companies, in their efforts to engage in real-time decision-making by exploiting big data, have been inclined to find a suitable architecture for this data as quickly as possible. With many companies, including SaaS users, choosing to deploy their own infrastructures entirely on their own, the combination of Apache Flink and Kafka offers low-latency data pipelines that are built for complete reliability. Particularly due to the financial and technical constraints it brings, small and medium-sized enterprises often have a number of challenges to overcome when using cloud service providers. One major issue is the complexity of cloud pricing models, which can lead to unexpected costs and budget overruns. This article explores how to design, build, and deploy a predictive machine learning (ML) model using Flink and Kafka in an on-premises environment to power real-time analytics.

Why 99% Accuracy Isn't Good Enough: The Reality of ML Malware Detection

Aggregated on: 2025-06-16 20:13:15

The threat of malware in enterprises is evolving each year. As enterprises expand their digital footprint through remote work and cloud adoption, their attack surface increases, making them more vulnerable to targeted malware campaigns. FBI’s 2023 Internet Crime Report showed that Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams alone caused over USD 2.9 billion in losses. Investment fraud losses also rose by 38% to USD 4.57 billion, and ransomware caused USD 59.6 million in losses. Other reports paint similarly bleak pictures of the state of enterprise security today. The 2024 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report shows that the average cost of a data breach jumped 10% to USD 4.88 million. It also shows that organizations using AI in incident prevention saved USD 2.2 million on average. More than half of breached organizations are experiencing severe security staffing shortages, a 26.2% increase from last year. AI tools can help fill the gap.

Before You Microservice Everything, Read This

Aggregated on: 2025-06-16 19:13:15

The way we build software systems is always evolving, and right now, everyone's talking about microservices. They've become popular because of cloud computing, containerization, and tools like Kubernetes. Lots of new projects use this approach, and even older systems are trying to switch over. But this discussion is about something else: the modular monolith, especially in comparison to microservices. But, why focus on this?

Scrum Smarter, Not Louder: AI Prompts Every Developer Should Steal

Aggregated on: 2025-06-16 18:13:15

Most developers think AI’s only job is writing code, debugging tests, or generating documentation. But Scrum? That’s still a human mess, full of vague stories, chaotic meetings, and awkward silences. Here’s the truth: prompt engineering can turn AI into your secret Agile assistant—if you know how to talk to it. In this guide, we share field-tested, research-backed prompts that developers can use in real time to make Agile rituals smoother, smarter, and actually useful. Based on findings from Alamu et al. (2024), Verma et al. (2025), and Mitra & Lewis (2025), we show how prompt structures can turn your next standup, sprint planning, or retro into something that works for you, not just for your Scrum Master.

How to Use Testcontainers With ScyllaDB

Aggregated on: 2025-06-16 17:13:15

Setting up a full database environment for every round of integration testing can be time-consuming and complex. This post walks through how to use the Testcontainers library to spin up lightweight, throwaway ScyllaDB instances for testing purposes. We’ll explore a practical example that covers initializing the database and running tests against it. Testcontainers: A Tool for Integration Testing You automatically unit test your code and (hopefully) integration test your system…but what about your database? To ensure that the application works as expected, you need to extend beyond unit testing. You also need to automatically test how the units interact with one another and how they interact with external services and systems (message brokers, data stores, and so on). But running those integration tests requires the infrastructure to be configured correctly, with all the components set to the proper state. You also need to confirm that the tests are isolated and don’t produce any side effects or “test pollution.” How do you reduce the pain…and get it all running in your CI/CD process?

Safeguarding Cloud Databases: Best Practices and Risks Engineers Must Avoid

Aggregated on: 2025-06-16 16:13:15

As enterprises increasingly adopt digital transformation strategies, the cloud has emerged as a foundational component of modern IT infrastructure. Organizations are rapidly shifting workloads, including critical databases, to cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to harness benefits like on-demand scalability, high availability, and reduced operational overhead. Cloud-based databases, in particular, have revolutionized how businesses store, access, and manage data, offering improved performance and flexibility across industries. However, while the shift to cloud-native databases brings significant advantages, it also introduces a complex set of security challenges. In traditional on-premises environments, organizations manage and secure their own hardware and network boundaries. In the cloud, however, security follows a shared responsibility model where both the provider and the customer play a role in protecting systems and data. This model holds both cloud providers and their customers accountable for different aspects of system and data security. Failure to clearly define and act upon these responsibilities can expose organizations to serious data breaches, compliance failures, and reputational harm.

AI Agents in PHP with Model Context Protocol

Aggregated on: 2025-06-16 15:28:15

If you are building AI agents you’ve probably heard about MCP (Model Context Protocol). Actually, really everyone is talking about MCP right now. From what I’ve read online, it seems many people don’t seem to have the slightest idea what we’re talking about, and the new product development opportunities associated with that. I want to break down a couple of key concepts to help establish the foundational understanding you might need as a software developer exploring new ideas for agent implementations. This will also help clarify the role of MCP servers when directly connected to an AI agent, such as a Neuron AI Agent, as one example.

Monitoring and Managing the Growth of the MSDB System Database in SQL Server

Aggregated on: 2025-06-16 14:13:15

In SQL Server environments, system databases play crucial roles in ensuring smooth and reliable database operations. Among these, the msdb database is critical as it handles a variety of operational tasks, including job scheduling via SQL Server Agent, alert management, database mail configuration, and backup and restore history tracking. These functions are essential for automating routine maintenance, monitoring system health, and managing administrative workflows. However, the msdb database can sometimes grow unexpectedly large, especially in busy or long-running environments. This growth, if left unchecked, can lead to performance degradation, longer response times for job execution, and potential issues with SQL Server Agent functionality. Therefore, understanding how to monitor and manage the size of the msdb database is critical for database administrators aiming to maintain optimal SQL Server performance.

Mastering Kubernetes Observability: Boost Performance, Security, and Stability With Tracestore, OPA, Flagger, and Custom Metrics

Aggregated on: 2025-06-16 13:13:15

In modern microservices architectures, achieving comprehensive observability is not just an option—it's a necessity. As applications scale dynamically within Kubernetes environments, tracking performance issues, enforcing security policies, and ensuring smooth deployments become complex challenges. Traditional monitoring solutions alone cannot fully address these challenges. This guide explores four powerful tools that significantly improve observability and control in microservices environments:

Code of Shadows: Master Shifu and Po Use Functional Java to Solve the Decorator Pattern Mystery

Aggregated on: 2025-06-16 12:13:15

It was a cold, misty morning at the Jade Palace. The silence was broken not by combat… but by a mysterious glitch in the logs. Po (rushing in): "Shifu! The logs… they're missing timestamps!"

Create POM With LLM (GitHub Copilot) and Playwright MCP

Aggregated on: 2025-06-13 21:13:13

Test automation is a critical part of modern software development, but maintaining test scripts for dynamic web applications can be a challenge. The Page Object Model (POM) is a proven design pattern that makes test suites maintainable and scalable. When paired with GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered coding assistant, and Playwright’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), you can supercharge your automation workflow with intelligent code generation and seamless tool integration. In this blog, we’ll walk through how to create a POM-based test automation framework using Playwright, leverage GitHub Copilot to write and optimize code, and integrate Playwright MCP to enable AI-driven browser interactions. Whether you’re a QA engineer or a developer, this guide will help you build a robust, AI-enhanced testing solution.

Smarter IoT Systems With Edge Computing and AI

Aggregated on: 2025-06-13 20:13:13

The Internet of Things (IoT) is no longer just about connectivity. Today, IoT systems are becoming intelligent ecosystems that make real-time decisions. The convergence of edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI) is driving this transformation, meaning that IoT devices can now locally process their own data, then act autonomously. This revolutionizes industries, from healthcare and agriculture to smart cities and autonomous vehicles. When Edge Computing Meets AI Traditional IoT has a central cloud architecture used for data processing and analysis. While effective, this model struggles to meet the demands of real-time applications due to: