Technical Debt

Technical Debt is a metaphor, coined by Ward Cunningham, that frames how to think about dealing with this cruft, thinking of it like a financial debt.  Image reference is from Martin Fowler's wiki.

The danger here is that most of the time this analysis isn't done well. Cruft has a quick impact, slowing down the very new features that are needed quickly. Teams who do this end up maxing out all their credit cards, but still delivering later than they would have done had they put the effort into higher internal quality.

 As I'm working in SAFe Agile model, wishing to leverage Tech Debt theory in right way.

Amazon FedEx Contract

Yesterday, FedEx announced that it isn't renewing its US contract with Amazon to transport packages on FedEx Express. The move comes as FedEx and Amazon compete more directly in delivery logistics.

FedEx said in a press release it plans to focus on serving the broader e-commerce market with continued partnerships with brands such as Walmart and Target. The company said Amazon accounted for less than 1.3% of its total revenue in 2018.

Amazon is under increased pressure to deliver packages quickly. In April, Amazon said it planned to begin delivering packages to Prime customers in one day rather than two. Amazon loses contract with FedEx Express as it builds out competing delivery network.  The e-commerce giant is increasingly competing with FedEx, UPS, and USPS

It is no secret Amazon wants to own every link in its logistics chain, from the warehouses that store its products to the planes, cargo ships, and delivery trucks that move its products around the world. Just last month, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos celebrated construction crews breaking ground on the company’s $1.5 billion, 3 million-square-foot air hub attached to the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

Earlier this week, Amazon revealed its brand-new hybrid Prime Air delivery drone, a device that Amazon hopes will one day compete with FedEx and UPS delivery trucks

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac

Start of this (May'19) month, Microsoft made a great announcement for Mac users.It was about the next major update for Visual Studio for Mac: Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.1 Preview.

In this update, Microsoft offers new C# editor as the default experience in addition to introducing support for .NET Core 3 Preview and new project templates.  They worked to improve performance and reliability across the board, based on feedback from the Visual Studio for Mac community
. 
Microsoft's interesting Mac roadmap is available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/productinfo/mac-roadmap

Blockchain from Amazon

Amazon announced Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS re:Invent 2018.  There, they invited the participants to sign up for a preview.

Now, Amazon Managed Blockchain is now available for production use in the US East Region. It leverages to create scalable blockchain networks that use the Hyperledger Fabric open source framework, with Ethereum in the works.

Amazon is also in Blockchain race of the production emerging technology.

AWS Blog Ref: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-managed-blockchain-create-manage-scalable-blockchain-networks/

Uber IPO

Uber debuted below its IPO price ($45) on Friday and ended up down -7.62%.   Lesson learnt from this incident, is quite interesting.  Because, Tech industry seems to be going through a phase of serious introspection.

Tech leaders like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff have started to talk about and fund solutions to societal problems like homelessness. Entrepreneurs, investors and academics are having substantive conversations about artificial intelligence and its possible effects on society now, while the technology is still in its early stages.

Employees at major tech companies like Google are pushing back against leadership decisions they don’t agree with, like walking out over revelations that the company paid millions to executives accused of sexual improprieties and protesting the company’s exploratory plans to build a censored search engine for China. It’s gotten easier for companies with meaningful missions to recruit from the tech giants, as employees look for more than a paycheck.

Funding for gig-economy start-ups that serve mostly to replace the parents of young tech workers has faded, while more money has been flowing into start-ups trying to solve ambitious problems like fixing health care or revolutionizing agriculture.

Right now, I'm writing it from Silicon Valley, which has been the most innovative place in U.S. industry for the better part of 70 years. That innovation can serve the broader needs of society, rather than existing in an isolated bubble apart from them. But only if the people participating in the industry want it to go that way.

Trillion Microsoft

Microsoft has become the third US company to pass a market cap of $1 trillion. The software giant passed the milestone briefly this week after a jump in stock price following strong fiscal Q3 earnings. Microsoft joins Apple and Amazon in hitting the $1 trillion valuation ahead of rival Google.

Microsoft has overtaken Apple in market cap value for the first time in eight years. Microsoft briefly reached a market cap value of $812.93 billion this week, followed by Apple at a market cap of $812.60 billion. It made Microsoft the world’s most valuable company, even if it was only a temporary title. Microsoft and Apple are now trading back and forth for the title.

Microsoft’s latest earnings also revealed that the three main buckets the company splits its businesses up into are all doing well and roughly contributing the same amount of revenue this quarter (around 30 percent each).

1. Office, LinkedIn, and Dynamics = $10.2 billion in revenue
2. Azure cloud, server products, and enterprise services = $9.7 billion in revenue
3. Windows, Xbox, and Surface = $10.7 billion in revenue

Microsoft failed spectacularly in the mobile era with its Windows Phone efforts, but the company has shown it’s resilient. Microsoft is now focused on cross-platform technologies, the cloud, artificial intelligence, and is aiming to secure the future of quantum computing and mixed reality computing.

All of these efforts will face intense competition from Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other companies, so expect to see a lot of market cap position trading in the years ahead

Visual Studio 2019 Ready

This week, Visual Studio 2019 got launched on Tue 2 Apr.  With Microsoft's Open
Source strategy, it is built for any developer, any app and any platform.

Three high level advancement in VS 2019, are:

1. Develop: Stay focused and productive with improved performance, instant code cleanup, and better search results.
2. Collaborate: Enjoy natural collaboration through a cloud-first workflow, real-time editing and debugging, and code reviews right in Visual Studio.
3. Debug: Highlight and navigate to specific values, optimize memory use, and take automatic snapshots of your application's execution.

For a complete list of VS 2019 product is available at Visual Studio 2019 release notes.

As usual, the product is available in 3 mode (1) Community (2) Professional and (3) Enterprise