Google Cloud Functions on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) brings an event-driven serverless code option into the retinue of developer options. Targeted at similar use cases as Amazon’s Lambdas, Functions are not only stand-alone ways to run raw code against event triggers, they’re also now tied into Firebase, giving mobile application developers direct access to these lightweight processes.

Cloud Functions is in beta release, but is already integrated with Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Pub/Sub, both of which can throw event triggers on actions, such as file uploads, reception of a message, and even an entry in a logging system.

RELATED CONTENT: Google shifts to a slower pace to woo enterprises

While discussing consulting and implementation partnerships in her first-day keynote, Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google Cloud, pointed out that Google has partnered with Pivotal and Rackspace to help companies implement their GCP plans.

Following that up today on the third day of the conference, Pivotal and Google announced Project Kubo, a combination of BOSH and Kubernetes. BOSH is an open-source tool for handling release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management for distributed systems, while Kubernetes handles the management of containers. Project Kubo offers a more polished Kubernetes management experience built on top of BOSH.

One announcement at Google Next that got Internet commenters excited was the release Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. This allows developers to host their PostgreSQL databases within the Google Cloud, and to use the cloud-based management tools to keep that database available and performant. This service launches on Monday,  March 13, and most availability and cloning features are still not yet supported, as the service will launch in beta form.

At the start of Google Next, Google acquired Kaggle, a machine learning education and competition site. Developers competed on Kaggle to solve data science problems. An example is their introduction project, which tasks users with calculating an individual passenger’s chance of surviving the sinking of the Titanic.

Google was, evidently, so enamored with Kaggle’s success as a startup that it had developed its own internal copy of the service called Gaggle. Kaggle’s co-founder and CEO Anthony Goldbloom said that he hopes the site will expand to be a place where data scientists can perform all of their work.

In furtherance of machine learning innovation, Google also announced that it will be opening a competition for early stage startups implementing machine learning. Google will offer a million dollars of GCP credits for the winning startup, as well as access to engineers.

Elsewhere this week, Google released the Google Cloud Container Builder. This fast and flexible software packaging utility will make the job of building Docker containers easier for developers and administrators, according to the Google Cloud Platform blog.

While many of its cloud announcements were pushing Google into competition with Amazon and Microsoft, both of those companies have turned in earnings results that show significant revenue from cloud floating the bottom line of the company as a whole. That’s not yet true for Google. Google’s cloud revenues are growing dramatically, but not yet competing with the company’s larger advertising earnings, which have topped US$25 billion per quarter.

Collectively, in Q4 of 2016, Google’s cloud revenues couldn’t have been more than US$3 billion, as the company lumps cloud earnings in with other non-advertising businesses, such as the Play store and Chromecast sales. While this number has grown a great deal, it’s still far behind the top two cloud providers. Amazon posted US$12.2 billion in cloud revenues in 2016, and Microsoft reported US$6 billion in Intelligent Cloud revenues in its most recent quarter.

On the other side of its cloud, however, Google’s collaboration and productivity announcements at Google Next weren’t about playing catch-up with the competition. Instead, the company’s G Suite and Hangouts announcements touted the company’s existing success and future plans for growth in a market where Google says it helped Verizon transfer over 100,000 enterprise users to G Suite productivity tools.

Hangouts got an enterprise update at Google Next, introducing more Slack-like functionality. The new Hangout Chats will offer deep integrations with G Suite tools for documents and spreadsheets, while Hangout Video chats are getting a major overhaul, and adding a new whiteboard standalone screen that companies can use and tie into video conferences.

Google announced dozens of other integrations, beta releases and tools at Google Next. The new Titan security chip is used to establish root trust and to perform hardware-level authentication, while the new Data Loss Prevention beta will help companies keep sensitive information from leaking out of GCP data stores.

Google’s also released a new data preparation tool for loading information into the GCP. A new line of commercial datasets were added to BigQuery, such as weather information, news archives from Dow Jones, and real estate information from HouseCanary.

Processing all that information can be made a bit easier for users of the Python SDK for Cloud Dataflow. This Apache Beam-based tool will make it easier for Python users to perform ETL actions within the Google Cloud Dataflow.

Google Cloud Datalab reached general availability for the first time. This data science workflow tool allows developers to build with the Jupyter notebook and SQL, Python and shell commands. TensorFlow support has also been added for the first time.

Cloud Dataproc was updated at Google Next as well. This fully managed service for running Apache Spark, Flink and Hadoop pipelines is designed to make stream processing easier and to accelerate development of stream processing applications and architectures.

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For Google, this has long been the biggest problem for its enterprise business: Google moves fast and breaks things, and it’s not uncommon for the software firm to end products that it didn’t deem successful enough, like its search appliance and the Google RSS Reader. Even now, the company has a dozen APIs on the way to depreciation, or already deprecated from Google App Engine over the past two years.

(Related: Google releases mission-critical relational database service)

Amazon and Microsoft are increasingly floating their bottom lines with their cloud offerings. It was only a matter of time before other major software firms began to earnestly attempt to compete. While Oracle is now on board and pushing its cloud to enterprises, Google’s been pushing its offerings for almost a decade now.

Why isn’t Google’s cloud as big as Amazon’s, then? It appears Google is finally asking that question, too. At Google Next in San Francisco this week, the company’s primary goal was to prove to the enterprise world that it truly is serious about its enterprise software offerings.

To do this, the company packed its keynote with top-level executives, including Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and the legendary leader of the Google Cloud Platform, senior vice president of Google Cloud, and former CEO and founder of VMWare, Diane Greene.

Rather than going for an Apple or even Google I/O style keynote filled with innovative new products and services, her keynote focused on partnerships with companies like Colgate, Disney, Home Depot and SAP. She highlighted Google’s ability to satisfy the demands of some of the world’s largest enterprises.

“The cloud with the best technology is the best cloud, and you want to be on a cloud that’s going to keep you on the edge of technology that’s moving fast,” said Greene. “But all this technology needs phenomenal customer focus. We’ve really doubled down on our customer-facing part of Google. I am super proud today to give you those proof points.”

One of the highlights of her keynote was the repeated success of G Suite. Greene highlighted a rollout to more than 100,000 users inside Verizon, as well as work inside Colgate that turned 20,000 users live over a weekend. The growth of G Suite was the only real indication of solid product growth at Google Next, however. Google did not intimate the size of its over cloud business, nor did it share customer numbers for the Google Cloud Platform.

Greene isn’t the only major hire Google’s made in its cloud group. Looking at the talent on board there, it’s clear Google means to make a major business out of cloud. After buying Apigee last year, the company turned around and hired former Apigee VP of strategy Sam Ramji, who had already left to become CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Ramji is now vice president of product management at Google Cloud Platform, where he’s now finished up his first 100 days in the position. He said that he’s had to severely reform some of the ways the team has traditionally worked on projects at Google in order to make things more amenable to enterprise customers.

Ramji started with Google App Engine, which today introduced updates to expand its range of capabilities. He said he had to significantly cut down the release schedule for App Engine to ensure better quality of the individual updates. As a result, today’s announcement is smaller than was was initially hoped for, but it still includes major updates to the platform.

For example, the update offers expanded language support inside App Engine. Users can now use C#, Go, Java 8, Node.js, PHP 5 or 7, and Python 2 or 3 inside App Engine, a major upgrade from the formerly restrained Python and Java environments available there.

App Engine also received better controls for more advanced use cases in this update. It allows developers to SSH into an underlying application instance and get the infrastructure-level information they need to help with debugging and performance monitoring.

Slowing down the release schedule and focusing on more complex use cases may not seem like the way Google has traditionally handled its products, particularly now that the company has implemented a company-wide release schedule of sorts and has asked for reliable update windows for its myriad products. The problem, traditionally, is that Google’s cloud offerings began as a 20% time project, not as a major push into a new business, said Ramji. “That turned into App Engine. There was not a cloud business, and not a business unit. There was no ad revenue or search revenue at the time, and of that team many are still together. They’re passionate about what they’ve built. They’re glad because cloud is going to be an enormous business.”

That means also building out an enterprise service and support business, which Ramji said has already been growing inside Google for years. The trick now is to find the right balance between profitability and long-term support for features in the Google cloud, he said.

“Long-term support rhymes with enterprise,” he said. “You have to know you can do something for an enterprise long term. As for eternal support…at IBM there’s a tape drive they support that’s 50 years old. It’s a question I am asking on a weekly basis. I have to be able to prove we can make a business here. We have to earn everybody’s trust. I think that’s fair concern: We have to define that based on what we hear all of our enterprise customers demand.”

That’s a tough battle to fight, however, for a company that has 12 APIs scheduled for or already sunsetted with App Engine in the last two years alone.

Ramji has started out addressing some of the concerns developers have long had with Google’s enterprise products. Chief among those was that there is no cohesive interface policy at Google: Many tools make it out the door with an engineer-designed UI that does not conform to any particular standards or conventions.

Ramji said that while he’s already moved to fix this problem long term, that what he really needs is “A developer tastemaker. Where’s my Jony Ive of developer experience? We’re bringing that in as a feedback cycle, making sure we’re constraining what we’re doing so it’s easier to understand for developers.”

Thus, he has moved developer relations into the position of gatekeeper for product releases. “They were reviewing releases and sending them out,” said Ramji. “As they’re rolling into Q2, they’re at the front end to make sure the projects will be accepted. Saying ‘Here’s what the experience needs to look like, and by the way I also know 18 [different] things about the Google Cloud Platform as a whole.’ It’s an end-to-end system, and allows us to have internal representation.”

And this gets to the heart of the problem inside Google, said Ramji: The teams are incredibly smart, fairly small, and terribly silo’d. As a result, cross-team collaboration suffers. Ramji said he hopes to remedy this with more processes and teams that cross projects, like developer relations and the new UI team he’s put together under JJ Geewax, a former GE Predix engineer.

Ramji likens his approach to the Total Quality Management approach that became popular in manufacturing in the 1980s. He said that engineering for quality won’t actually slow the teams at Google down, but it will require a new way of thinking about their products and customers.

The team at Google Cloud Platform is hoping the internal changes will also dovetail with some of the changes the platform as a whole has made so far. Today, Google pushed out a public beta of its new Functions, which are standalone event-driven processes that work in a fashion similar to AWS Lambda’s.

The company is also working to unify its many development products to make it easier for enterprises to adopt them. Most notable among these was the announcement yesterday that the terms of service for Google Cloud Platform and Firebase are now the same, making it easier for enterprises to adopt both in one legal evaluation.

Greene’s challenge, now that Ramji is working on the internal development issues with Google’s cloud, is to build the marketplace relationships enterprise software companies need. She’s already done this with SAP by bringing HANA into the Google Cloud Platform.

Perhaps Greene’s biggest challenge, however, is convincing the enterprise world that Google is no longer playing capriciously with its cloud products. “Already we’re winning more than half our deals. We are, at our core, a technology company. Technology is what’s giving our customers the competitive advantage. I will say that Google on the consumer side will take things away, but we cannot take anything away. We have to provide full support. We are here to be a full-on enterprise company, and finding ways of providing backward compatibility,” she said.

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Frankly, isn’t this exactly what spies are supposed to be doing: spying? Of more interest to us here at SD Times is what these documents say about the CIA and its software development practices.

Diving into the documents, it would appear that this is a set of web pages scraped from the CIA’s intake and developer onboarding sites. Within, we can learn a lot about their development processes and practices.

(Related: New Docker feature keeps “secrets”)

Firstly, we can see that they have a multi-platform approach. This is exemplified by the various types of tips and tricks we see in their files. In one section, the developers wonder aloud how to best update their DerStarke macOS spyware to the then newest version of macOS Mavericks.

Elsewhere, they’ve accumulated some tips and tricks for dealing with Windows. Specifically, on the Programming Gotchas page, the CIA documents list a few common Windows headaches. For example, there is the difficulty of determining if a process is running as an admin. Elsewhere, they ruminate on the difficulty in differentiating Windows 8.1 from Windows 8.

The CIA is also using Lockheed Martin’s Dynamic Automated Range Technology (DART) to help with its testing of software. This seems to be coupled with JIRA and Git to flesh out the larger part of the software development life cycle inside the CIA.

The teams at the CIA must also be fairly agile, or else they wouldn’t need Bamboo. They’re also using TDD, as evidenced by the extensive links containing information on how to properly write unit tests.

Perhaps the best way to get your mind around the CIA’s development processes is to start at the beginning with their developer onboarding page. This includes information on setting up Visual Studio, getting acquainted with Git, and going down the rabbit hole of unit testing.

One area where there’s not enough information to determine exactly what the CIA means is in Tradecraft. This mysterious heading seems to insinuate that it’s focused on coding practices and CIA-specific development techniques. They provide no details, however. Instead, we’re given this cryptic message and little more:

“Tradecraft plays a critical role within our tool development cycle. If a tool is sloppy its [sic] life is much shorter, and worse, the lifespans of the tools it is [sic] deployed with are also at risk. If we’re going through the trouble of coming up with some cool stuff, we’d rather not get beat on something silly.”

According to the WikiLeaks analysis of these as-yet unreleased documents, Tradecraft refers to the work done by CIA developers to obfuscate their code and hide it from antivirus programs. One could consider this to be their style guide, of sorts.

As interesting as this information is, it should be noted that it all appears to be about two to three years old. We can expect the CIA has changed some of its tools and practices in that time.

The CIA does not have a monopoly on well-honed development practices and open-source tooling within the government. The NSA was the original impetus for the creation of the Apache NiFi project, which gives developers a graphical flowchart design tool for creating streaming data process flows.

The information on the CIA’s hacking tools included in the leaks have been analyzed by WikiLeaks itself at. Evidently, the tools are uncopyrighted and unclassified so as not to indemnify agents who have installed these tools on unsecured devices, like the laptops of bad guys.

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Available today in a preview to select customers, the Pepperdata Application Profiler will be fully available within the next few months. The tool is based on Dr. Elephant, an open-source monitoring and performance project created by LinkedIn.

(Related: Apache Ranger graduates to top-level project)

Ashfaq Munshi, CEO of Pepperdata, said that Dr. Elephant is a great tool, but it’s also completely standalone. “Traditionally, when people were deploying Dr Elephant, they had to run a different dashboard and deploy it. Ours is a SaaS offering, and it’s completely integrated into what we have today. In Dr. Elephant, a developer gets to see ‘This part of my job is taking a long time,’ but what developers want to know [is] what else was running on the cluster at that time. Stock Dr Elephant doesn’t provide that context, but Application Profiler does.”

Munshi said that this is the first tool the company has made specifically targeted at developers rather than operations. “Developers can get an understanding of everything that was happening at the time. The idea here is that the current products already help the Ops guys tremendously. When something happens and breaks on a cluster, our Cluster Analyzer gives them a speed improvement to find those problems. Application Profiler doesn’t need to be used by developers; it can be used by Ops guys to go to the developers and say you need to change this,” he said.

Munshi added that, while Application Profiler is separate from Dr. Elephant, the team at Pepperdata is still contributing its changes back upstream to the project itself.

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But this year, VR is just another platform among the many that developers must consider when building a new application. Between mobile devices, consoles, handhelds and desktops, the marketplace is as vibrant as ever, and the blunt realities of the business have led to something of dearth of content for various VR platforms. Put succinctly: There is no killer app.

(Related: Microsoft releases Mixed Reality dev kits)

While VR is by no means an understood concept from an interface perspective, the devices have nonetheless shipped and are thus driving sales. Developers are now able to see what’s working thanks to user feedback. In fact, many of the VR developers at GDC cited application discovery as the single greatest advantage of being in the space.

Fewer competitors means that the VR games market is almost the exact opposite of the mobile market in every way. That is to say, it’s small. Fewer games, fewer buyers, fewer developers, and fewer noise to be heard over. That, however, is a recipe for small returns on big risks, something most companies wish to avoid.

Such was the case for the team behind VR Invaders, a game developed by Russian game company My.com. Instead of betting big on VR, My.com’s development team formed and built their game a year ago in an agile fashion. Now that it’s been in the market for a full year, however, they’ve updated it for free to version 2.0, which implements advice from its player base.

This is a somewhat different course for game development houses, which typically spend years working on a single project and then leave it for the next game as soon as it ships. Instead, when it comes to VR, the small size of the current hardware footprint in the marketplace seems to reward developers who release something simple and grow it through community feedback.

Elsewhere in the VR scene, the pipeline is still hampering developer progress. Ikrima Elhassan, cofounder of VR game developer Kite and Lightning, said that building 3D art for VR is a painful process that requires slow handoffs between his company’s 3D art tools, the Unreal Engine, and the physical gear used to play the game. Because the process requires pouring art into the 3D engine and then outputting a new binary just to check if it works at all, development within the VR market can be a slow process reminiscent of the days when builds took hours.

One company trying to solve this is Limitless, which offers artists and directors an in-VR animation and scene development kit. Users can position animation points, set pieces, and actions all from within the VR space they’re creating. This means that when a set piece is added to a room, the user immediately sees what it looks like in VR, rather than having to go through a build and test process.

Limitless was founded by former Pixar employee Tom Sanocki. Pixar focuses heavily on storytelling, and that’s exactly what Sanocki said he hoped to enable with Limitless. He said that his tool allowed a team to build a 10-minute interactive VR story in four months, a significantly shorter period than using traditional tools.

What works and what doesn’t
While that will definitely help developers get their experiences to market faster, it remains to be seen if that market is truly worthwhile. Sony’s Playstation VR system has been selling well, said the company, but other companies’ VR offerings aren’t flying off the shelves.

There are some clear reasons for this, however. First of all, Playstation VR simply works with a Playstation 4, and requires no extra hardware. Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive both require a fairly burly PC with modern hardware inside, raising the barrier to entry far above the US$600 to $800 price-tag for the goggles alone.

Another sticking point is that the Xbox One’s own VR offering, tied to the Oculus Rift headset, requires users to buy a brand new Xbox One console; the original cannot be used with the Oculus Rift.

Still, VR manufacturers are not deterred. Rikard Steiber, president of Viveport and senior vice president of virtual reality at HTC, believes the real path to growth involves more outreach to consumers. This is likely to involve VR arcades, he said. Such VR shops would provide users with a pay-by-the-hour VR experience, and Viveport will even offer rental options and commercial licenses for software to foster these parlors.

This is because, he said, when the public gets its hands on VR, it’s always exciting and popular. The big trick is getting people to try it out for the first time. He said that prices for headsets and equipment will certainly fall over time, but right now, the challenge is a market education problem.

For VR developers (according to Damon Hernandez, 3D web and immersive technology developer for Samsung), mobile devices and WebVR are the platforms of the future for VR developers. He cited the ease of distribution and forthcoming support by major software players as the draw to WebVR.

“If you’re a developer and you want to make money,” said Hernandez, “go for what everybody already has. The writing is on the wall: Facebook is having WebVR talks, Google is going [in] that direction, Samsung is going in that direction. The Web is the platform for content delivery. This year, is it worth it to ship a product on that? No, but it will be stable this year, and if you want to release in Q1, Q2 or Q3 of 2018, start looking at it now.”

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Uncoupled from the need to make money and do business, however, innovation in software development can look as innocuous as a cardboard box. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, many of the tools enterprises use to create and maintain their innovative software were on display.

(Related: Can cybersecurity education be a game?)

Yet, tucked into the many aisles of booths in San Francisco’s Moscone Center was also an area that highlighted unique interface devices created by independent game developers. These displays showed just how far afield software can be spread.

The wild devices shown off in the Alt.Ctrl.GDC.Showcase ranged from an inflatable dome made of trash bags, to a complex spaceship control panel modeled on those of World War II submarines.

The displays themselves are even reinterpreted here. VinylOS is an interactive experience that uses a spinning record on a turntable as its display screen. A projector mounted above the turntable projects the field of play onto the record itself.

Flat Earth Games’ project uses submarine controls

Flat Earth Games favored a more traditional button- and-toggles interface. The game was designed by Elissa and Leigh Harris, who are, evidently, big fans of submarines. The multiple interface panels they’ve built for the fictional Ceres spaceship includes dozens of flashing buttons and lights that require constant attention from the player.

Spacebox gets literal with its interface design

Spacebox came all the way from Champlain College in Vermont, but that distance pales in comparison to the stellar distances traveled in the game. Built by Champlain students from a cardboard box, markers, an Arduino and some Unity code, Spacebox places the player in the guise of a child imagining space flight inside a makeshift box ship.

Other interfaces within the exhibit included an entire bookshelf where the books themselves performed in-game actions when the user tilted them outward; a crowded elevator simulator called Schadenfreude; and even a multiple-choice trivia game that used a sneaky robotic finger to choose the wrong answers when players dawdled.

Finding what was left behind
The Game Developers Conference also highlighted some of the perils of the industry’s increasing desire to preserve its own history. Traditionally game development studios are terribly unstable. A single missed payment from a publisher can tank an entire studio overnight, leaving unfinished games sitting on people’s abandoned desks.

One such game was “Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego.” Originally designed as a collaboration between the state’s education department and Carmen Sandiego maker Broderbund, “Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego” was seen as the first in a series of games that would focus on each state individually.

Armed with a state almanac compiled by teachers, the player would traipse through North Dakota seeking the missing felon as they did in all the series’ other titles. Unfortunately, the project was never published, and only 10 copies were ever produced, which were mailed to the teachers involved in the project.

Frank Cifaldi is a digital archaeologist. He tracked down the game, flew out to North Dakota and interviewed many of the people involved in the project. He seeks to save such lost works, as he did with Penn and Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors and other older unpublished titles.

To support this work, Cifaldi on Monday announced the founding of the Video Game History Foundation, a non-profit designed to digitally preserve lost assets, games and ephemera from the games industry.

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Kurian demonstrated specific capabilities within the Oracle cloud, including configuration of load balancers, web servers and storage systems. He explained that the Oracle cloud begins as infrastructure-as-a-service, but offers more on top of that layer.

(Related: Qubole added to Oracle’s cloud)

“The second piece we’re working on is platform-as-a-service. If you took our IaaS and you wanted to deploy your software on top of that, you’re responsible for all the manual labor associated with writing the software, backing up the software, encrypting it, and maintaining it,” said Kurian.

“For the platform layer, which sits on top of IaaS, what we’re really doing is eliminating all the manual work associated with the platform layer. We’re not doing that with human beings; we’re doing that with software itself. We’re providing you a complete platform that includes all these elements, and automating it through software and machine.”

Other elements touted by Kurian include the Oracle cloud’s focus on microservices. To enable users to build with them, Oracle has built out Docker-based infrastructure for running containers.

Kurian said the Oracle cloud offers a Docker registry and discovery service, rather than requiring users to build their own. He even said that Oracle’s cloud offers Redis as a database for doing caching.

That’s news to Ofer Bengal, CEO and cofounder of Redis Labs, who had little familiarity with Oracle’s cloud offerings, at least from a customer-interest perspective. When asked about Oracle’s cloud, he was unaware of anyone using Redis there, and replied that most customers used AWS, with some Azure and IBM being the alternative choices.

One of the reasons for that, he suggested, is that Oracle’s cloud and database are not necessarily the same thing. “The dominant position of Oracle and IBM is probably not going to last. This is not because they don’t have good databases, but because the whole space of databases is becoming more and more specific to use cases. Today modern applications in IoT and in machine learning use several databases, side-by-side,” he said. “They’ll need to adjust to the new breed of developers. That’s why we don’t see them almost at all in the cloud.”

Oracle is not alone in needing to play catchup in the cloud market. Google is also attempting to ramp up its cloud offerings, and last week it announced an open beta of its Spanner transactional database. Spanner was designed by a team led by Eric Brewer, the man who formulated the CAP theorem.

Amit Zavery, senior vice president and general manager of integration products at Oracle, said that the company supports and services its Redis instances itself. He also said that Oracle’s cloud is more open than Amazon’s and Google’s because it was designed to avoid lock-in.

“If you have users who say, ‘I want to use the datacenter of my own choice,’ you can,” said Zavery. “I think Google and Amazon have more lock-in than you see with Oracle. I can use my full stack in the datacenter of my choice. You can’t do that with Amazon or Google. We are definitely not architecting in any way for lock-in.”

Zavery added that Oracle’s cloud strength is in its cloud as a platform, not just as infrastructure. “The battle is going to be for the platform over time. Infrastructure is becoming table stakes,” he said. He added that Oracle needs to do a better job promoting the use of MySQL in its cloud offerings.

Oracle Code wasn’t just about Oracle’s cloud, however. The company also invited Douglas Crockford, senior JavaScript architect at PayPal, to discuss some of the problems that exist in modern programming languages, and to advocate for solutions that could be implemented in future languages.

As an example, he said, math in JavaScript is a mess: 0.1 + 0.2 does not equal 0.3. JavaScript

also ignores the associative property of mathematics, meaning that the order in which items are calculated affects the results, even when it shouldn’t. This problem exists in other languages as well.

As a remedy, Crockford advocated the use of DEC64, a decimal floating point format that takes its inspiration from computers as old as the Burroughs B5000 from the 1960s. Crockford advocated for DEC64 to be the only number type used in any newly crafted programming languages, thus eliminating inconsistencies in the handling of basic math that exist in some environments.

Crockford then went on to advocate for better computer and software security through programming languages specifically designed to deal with security issues from the ground up. He ended his talk with advice: “Please be careful out there. The web is big and full of errors.”

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That’s not to say sports are without their software developers. Baseball has, in particular, been an early adopter of new technologies. Last year at this time, we spoke to Sean Curtis, senior vice president of engineering at MLB Advanced Media group (MLBAM). He laid out a lot of the central work done by the league, particularly around the online streaming service it offers.

Curtis said that building a streaming business for MLB took a long time, and was initially viewed with skepticism. “MLBAM was formed by the 30 owners collectively coming together and saying, ‘Let’s centralize how baseball goes into the next phase.’ That happened 15 years ago. Our subscription things  were looked at skeptically when we started. Today it’s the over-the-top model,” he said.

“People want to consume media wherever they are at any time. I would say the broadcast paradigm itself, and the advertising, and the home game rule, and how rights are distributed—we do have an increased awareness of things like location of home team affinity and broadcast area. I think it is a little different than Netflix, where they have their library of video. There’s the emphasis on live programming, so it’s a little different of an animal.”

Outside of the head office for the MLB, however, software continues to influence the sport in other ways. We sat down with the new president of the Oakland Athletics, Dave Kaval, to discuss software, and we found that there are aspects of the baseball software game that really are similar to the enterprise world—particularly when it comes to proprietary algorithms.

The A’s have a history of mathematics-based baseball. The team was the first to use sabermetrics, a method of calculating player value based exclusively on their stats. Sabermetrics revolutionized baseball, sparked the creation of the book and movie “Moneyball,” and took the A’s to the playoffs multiple times.

“That became standard when it started here in Oakland at the turn of the century. I really do feel that they’ll look back in 100 years at the transition to sabermetrics and say it was a turning point for baseball,” said Kaval

“On the baseball side, we have proprietary algorithms. We have Ph.D.’s working with Billy [Beane, executive vice president and minority owner of the A’s] to identify value players, and how to make sure we’re projecting out their value. In many ways, this has been the epicenter of this movement. I still feel very strongly about Billy and David Forst [A’s general manager] and innovation in this area.

“Even in our industry, a 1% or 2% increase in your knowledge base can make the difference. Billy has a 20-year history of managing this part of the business. Some of it is a little bit of a black box. Suffice to say we’re using all the latest technology: algorithms, decision science and solving the problem in an effective way. Over time you get more data to check against, so you get better at solving these problems. I don’t think there’s a better group in the industry than we have here.”

Digging into the nitty gritty of those analysts and developers, however, is not an option: Beane and Kaval treat that software like industry secrets, and rightly so: Many teams have copied the A’s player acquisition philosophies, and those tactics are what took the Boston Red Sox to the World Series.

The more mundane aspects of running the Athletics organization as an enterprise are there, however. Kaval said the A’s have always used NetSuite for ERP, and it doesn’t hurt that Beane is on that company’s board of directors.

Elsewhere, the A’s use Microsoft Dynamics for CRM. “There’s so much data you collect on your fans when they come to the ballpark,” said Kaval. “We use Dynamics to make sure we tailor the experience in a positive way, but it’s also important to handle their privacy. We think it can be additive to the fan experience.”

That’s not a sentiment limited to the A’s, either. SAP began touting its HANA Big Data platform by offering up a stadium example, where every seat was digitally instrumented, and usage statistics were reported back to the central office.

But software as code isn’t the only thing influencing the enterprise business of sports. Software culture has made a major dent in the Bay Area’s sports scene as well. In 2010, Joe Lacob, partner at venture capital powerhouse firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, bought a majority share of the Golden State Warriors basketball franchise.

Lacob had been friends with Beane for some time, and brought a similar approach to basketball. Instead of focusing entirely on payroll, the Warriors focused on better management decisions, similar to the A’s tactic of finding overlooked players.

Lacob and the Warriors implemented a nimble management team, and adopted a more egalitarian method of making decisions. Rather than ownership dictating, Lacob favors advice from experts throughout the organization, even going so far as to have the players themselves chime in with opinions when the team was planning to acquire Kevin Durant in the offseason.

That fast-moving, all-inclusive style runs is used by Kaval, too. He’s already working on more team-building exercises for the front office, including handing out a history book on Oakland and taking employees for a movie night at the local theater.

Kaval is a high-powered business entrepreneur out of Stanford, and his fast-moving style jibes well with the Silicon Valley credo of “Move fast and break things.” He’s also taking another cue from the valley and pushing for transparency in the process of building out a new stadium for the A’s, a monumental task to be sure.

The post The Oakland A’s: Moving fast and breaking things (with software) appeared first on SD Times.

Making matters worse, once in the clutches of said recruiter, most companies are still only looking to hire people with certain names on their résumés: Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Facebook.

(Related: How older developers stay relevant in today’s job environment)

As a jobs-finding site, Indeed.com has long offered good jobs to everyone, not just software developers. But two years ago, the company became irate with the state of recruiting and decided to do something about it by building a premium job-listing site specifically targeted at software engineers.

Prime, as Indeed puts it, offers a window into the top 5% of software developers listing their résumés on the site. Through a series of coding challenges, these candidates are vetted for their skills, ensuring that only real developers make the cut.

This also allows for talent outside of the normal stream to be surfaced to recruiters. Doug Gray, senior vice president of engineering, said that sometimes employers become blinded by those big names on a résumé, and thus they may pass over a candidate with a Ph.D. in another field, but years of experience in software development.

Two years in, Prime isn’t just helping customers; it’s also helping Indeed find new talent. It was all born out of discoveries made within the company’s data. Said Gray: “One of the things our data showed was that right now high-tech jobs have an interesting market dynamic. Many employers are looking for high-tech workers like software engineers. We were able to see what kinds of résumés get contacted more frequently than others. It turns out it’s software engineers.”

Gray said that the popularity of engineers makes them targets for recruiters, many of whom are simply latching onto a keyword in the candidate’s résumé and making a cold call. “We saw the same pattern ourselves: Engineers are inundated by contact from recruiters. They develop blindness and stop responding,” he said.

Each week, a new group of candidates is presented to Indeed Prime customers, said Gray. “Employers can see [that] this is the pool for this week—who am I interested in contacting?” he said. “We’re able to discover someone you might normally review. These candidates that we’re pulling in, most are sourced from their job search, and they’ve engaged with us in some way, so they’re at least in some way engaged with the job seeking experiences. There’s a 60% positive response rate.”

Gray said that rate of response is much higher than normal.

Elsewhere, Indeed has a few development practices that differentiate it from other software companies. For a start, Indeed has four offices, and each one has its own culture. This allows each team to offer its own insights into the development of projects.

Specifically, Gray said that Indeed does not use the spoke and hub approach to offices. Instead of all products being designed at the center and built by the outside hub branches, Indeed divides up the work into modules across a single project.

This ensures that each office has ownership over its work, but they’re also not stuck being the office that only works on Product X or Y. The danger, said Gray, is that developers will get bored when working on the same product for many years, and are likely to seek a new job elsewhere.

Another unique tactic at Indeed is that its architecture is designed for fast experimentation on live systems. Gray said the team at Indeed can run around 500 experiments on their site per week. After analyzing the data, most of those experiments turn out to be failures, but about 30% of them work out, he said.

“One of the things to understand about us is how data-driven we are,” said Gray. “The way we view the world is figuring out how to provide a great job-seeker experience for billions of people. We think of our market as everyone who wants a job. Every week we run 500 experiments and 70% fail, and that’s awesome because that means we found some good ideas.

“Where does the data come from? Two hundred million visitors a month. We have country-specific sites in 60 different countries around the world. That represents 95% of world GDP.”

And that’s important because the growth of software development as a career is not limited to the United States, or even to the first world. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects there to be 1.3 million software development jobs by 2024, and that’s 17% more than we have today. Compare that to the 400,000 developers the Bureau expects to see enter the job market over the same period of time, making for a major gap that needs to be filled.

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Those engineers weren’t just working at the software level, however. There are two secret sauces to Spanner that give it the ability to provide five nines of uptime for transactional data across datacenters. Those sauces are atomic clocks and transoceanic fiber cabling.

(Related: SQL a Top 3 coding language for 2017)

Dominic Preuss, technologist for Google Cloud Platform, said that these two hardware elements have combined in a manner that, while not side-stepping the CAP theorem, greatly reduces the need to notice those distinctions.

“Spanner is CP,” said Preuss, meaning it favors consistency and partitions over availability. But within that equation, he said, is a great deal of fine detail that comes between 100% availability and the 99.999% availability Spanner offers.

As with all infinities, there’s a great deal of room to make compromises between 100% and 99.999%. As such, said Preuss, the Spanner cloud database can handle data inconsistencies without compromising the overall structure of the database.

This is because Spanner takes advantage of TrueTime, an API and system the company developed alongside Spanner. TrueTime is based on redundant atomic clocks within each datacenter region, allowing for millisecond syncing of data writes around the world. This, coupled with Google’s massive global fiber network, ensures data is kept in sync.

“The integration of software and hardware that creates TrueTime really is what makes Spanner possible,” said Preuss. “Those are the two innovations that have allowed us to build this technology, and it’s what differentiates us from what other providers have done.

“Google is one of the largest private fiber providers in the world. We’ve always believed we should own the network between us, our customers and our various datacenters. We’ve laid multiple trans-Pacific fiber pipelines ourselves and through consortiums. We announced last year at our event in September that we’re adding 10 new regions in 2017.”

Preuss said that enterprises are very much a target for Spanner, and that Google already provides service and support for its cloud offerings in various levels of availability. These same support services are being extended to Spanner, including the option of dedicated resources on Google’s end.

“Google is very much focused on being the open cloud, so we always want to adopt open standards,” said Preuss. “The real question was how do we take this internal tech and put it out to customers in a way they can understand? We have a big focus on standard ANSI SQL, so there’s no difference. We offer things like a read-only JDBC driver and really first-class client libraries for Java, Python, Go and Node. It’s really where we spent a lot of our time trying to make sure we provided the most seamless experience for developers trying to adopt Spanner.”

For now, the focus is on getting Spanner up to snuff for a generally available release, said Preuss. “Right now the big things we’re working on are getting to general availability and collecting a bunch of data. We plan to go [general availability] quickly. We’ll try to do that by the end of the year. We’ll also be launching multi-region instances by the end of the year,” he said.

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