Darryl K. Taft

IBM continues its push to secure more customers in the banking industry and is leveraging its strength in big data and analytics to do so. Big Blue announced new banking wins in South Africa and China. The company said Nedbank Ltd., a financial services provider throughout Southern Africa, is using IBM’s predictive analytics solutions to […]

The TIOBE Index of the most popular programming languages named Transact-SQL as the programming language of 2013. According to the TIOBE Index, maintained by TIOBE Software, Transact-SQL was the biggest mover of 2013. Last year, Transact-SQL won almost 1 percent of popularity (0.98 percent to be precise), followed by Objective-C at 0.81 percent and F# […]

Microsoft and Facebook announced that they will host a hackathon later this month at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The Facebook-Microsoft hackathon will run from 6 p.m. PST on Jan. 17 to 12 p.m. PST on Jan. 18. At the event, developers will learn to build apps for Windows and Windows Phone, and they […]

Kaplan Test Prep, a provider of test preparation materials and services, and Thoughtbot, a Web and mobile design and development firm, have partnered to launch a software developer boot camp for people interested in becoming professional Ruby on Rails Web developers. The 12-week boot camp is called Metis, inspired by the Greek goddess associated with […]

Microsoft is working on a new high-level systems programming language known as M# (pronounced “M Sharp”) that aims to deliver type safety and performance. In a blog post entitled “C# for Systems Programming,” Joe Duffy, an architect and developer working on the Midori operating system incubation project at Microsoft, said the M# project is a […]

Microsoft has added a new entry to the list of existing tools aimed at empowering business users to create applications without writing code: Project Siena. Project Siena is the code name of a new technology for business experts, business analysts, consultants and others to create apps for the device-first and cloud-connected world without any programming. […]

DevOps: 5 Signs Enterprises Need to Unite the Dev and Ops Camps by Darryl K. Taft Your Customers Find Major Defects A defect found by a customer in production can be 1,000 times more expensive to fix. But when there is a hard deadline looming, the application often gets thrown over the wall into production, […]

When it comes to the cloud, Microsoft is like the line in the old Avis ad: They try harder. That’s not to say the software company is necessarily number two in the cloud space; Microsoft clearly is behind cloud pioneer Amazon Web Services (AWS). But even AWS’ status as leader in the cloud is being […]

10 Ways to Create APIs Developers Will Love by Darryl K. Taft Approach API Design From the ‘Outside-In’ Perspective Start by asking, what are we trying to achieve with an API? The API’s job is to make the developer as successful as possible. Why? Because the application developer is the lynchpin of the entire API […]

IBM closed a busy week of cloud computing deals across Europe and Asia that indicate the systems, software and services giant is intently focused on its quest to become the leader in the cloud computing space. Last week, Dec. 18, IBM joined forces with 21Vianet Group, a large Chinese carrier-neutral Internet Data Center (IDC) service […]