Through My Health Connection, UCHealths patient portal, one can easily verify vaccinations, or find COVID-19 test results, on their phone or print from a desktop computer. Photo: Getty Images.

Youve gotten your COVID-19 vaccinations, now what do you do with your paper vaccination certificate? Fold it up into your wallet? Stash it away with your passport and other important documents?

We want to provide as much information as possible so patients have as much information as they may need, in one spot, Caputo said.

Through My Health Connection, UCHealths patient portal, you can easily find your electronic COVID-19 vaccination card to view on your phone or print from your desktop computer.

No one knows exactly what is going to be required, but we want to make sure we provide enough options for our patients to ensure they have what they need for wherever they are going, said Nicole Caputo, UCHealths senior director of experience and innovation.

Currently, UCHealth patients can access medical information, test results, schedule appointments, and message their physicians through My Health Connection. When COVID-19 vaccines became available, My Health Connection added a Your COVID-19 Information button that allows patients to view their COVID-19 vaccination record and most recent test result. A vaccination record card and detailed testing information, which third parties may require for things like entry into a concert or sporting event, or to travel, has recently been added.

We want to provide as much information as possible so patients have as much information as they may need, in one spot, Caputo said.

UCHealths COVID-19 information page will soon be enhanced with the SMART Health Cards Framework, which provides paper or digital versions of your clinical information, including vaccination records.

UCHealth joined forces with organizations such as Microsoft and Mayo Clinic as a member of the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) to harmonize standards and support the development of SMART Health Cards.

VCI, created in January 2021, is a voluntary coalition of public and private organizations. Its goal is to create a trustworthy and verifiable copy of digital or paper vaccination record forms that can serve as credentials for medical purposes and to show vaccination status if required to return to work, school and travel.

We want patients not to have to download or use other applications to verify their test results or vaccination record, said Chad Chenoweth, director of information technology for UCHealth. Our SMART Health Cards implementation is meant to be a convenience for the user so they can easily scan with VCI-capable third parties versus needing to carry paper (verification). Our UCHealth mobile application and My Health Connection are already secure and contain a lot of other patient information for patients to make it easy for them to access their information on the go. This is an added convenience.

The SMART Health Cards Framework VCI developed is an open-source code, Caputo explained. This means it is free for anyone to build within their current program.

VCI is putting it out there for the greater good of public health, Caputo said. It makes sense for all these organizations to come together to build this tool a verifiable health information tool to help in a public health emergency.

UCHealth has prototyped the VCIs specifications within My Health Connection, providing feedback to the VCI team to help with gaps in documentation or areas needing improvement. The application is now being tested by VCI to ensure its compliance with all protected health care regulations, Chenoweth said.

From the UCHealth consumer view, the SMART Health Cards would be in the form of a QR code within My Health Connections My COVID-19 information. A QR, or quick response, code (quick referring to the fact its quickly readable by a cell phone), uses a combination of spacing as a type 2D barcode that when scanned, can convey a wide multitude of information. They were invented in 1994, but you might have seen QR codes more recently during the pandemic at a restaurant to quickly pull up their menu on your phone when paper menus become a source of concern for spreading COVID-19.

Individuals and businesses can easily create QR codes that link to their online pages, like their menu or an event. But the QR code within My Health Connection is different. Because it is secure data, whoever is scanning the information must have a VCI-capable app allowed to read that protected health information.

If you or I were to scan that code with our phone, it would be jumbled information that doesnt make sense, Caputo said.

What about people without smartphones? Although the most convenient way to share your COVID-19 health information would be to bring the QR code up on your smartphone via the UCHealth app, people without a smartphone will still be able to print off their QR code via My Health Connection on their desktop computer.

There are more than 300 members of VCI collaborating to support not only the development but also the testing and real-world use of implementation guides needed to issue, share and validate vaccination records, according to the VIC website.

UCHealth My Health Connection users can expect to see the QR code in their COVID-19 vaccination cards, possibly by fall 2021.

We want to make sure patients have access to test results and their vaccinations, Caputo said. We want to give patients extreme flexibility with their information as we dont know who will be accepting what, who will scan codes, or what information will be required. Its nice to be part of a larger coalition to solve this problem together.

See original here:

A convenient way to verify vaccinations and COVID-19 test results - UCHealth Today

Mice and trackpads may rule the world, but trackballs are still an attractive option for certain types of users, and now they all have an interesting and totally Open Source option called Ploopy.

This trackball stands out for being totally open: its manufacturing diagrams are public, as is its firmware, which you can also customize to adjust the behavior of the buttons to your liking. And of course, you can create your own fork of Ploopy, if you think you can improve this unique development even more.

It is true that there are several remarkable trackballs on the market such as the Logitech Ergo M575 that this manufacturer launched on the market a few months ago, but it may be that you are intrigued by the possibilities of building one from scratch.

That is what the creators of Ploopy offer, who on the project website on GitHub explain what is necessary to carry out this process, from the tools (see preparing screwdriver and soldering iron) as well as the board (PCB) with the sensor ADNS-5050 which is a fundamental part of the operation and, of course, all the elements that you will have to print on a 3D printer.

All the schematics for printing and assembly are available from the aforementioned project website, and the instructions are precise and clear, but there is one more important element: the firmware.

This vital component for the operation of the Ploopy trackball is another of its outstanding elements: unlike proprietary firmwares from other manufacturers, in Ploopy the firmware code is available and any user can modify it and adjust it to your needs.

If you do not have so much means or so much desire, nothing happens: you can buy the different kits that allow you to save some work or components even if the price goes up. In fact the final assembled Ploopy model costs 100 Canadian dollars, about 68 euros to change.

Even so, we are undoubtedly facing a great idea that once again shows that great things can be done with Open Source hardware and software.

More information | Ploopy

View post:

Ploopy is a fully Open Source trackball that can be 3D printed and whose firmware is fully customizable Explica .co - Explica

Looking at broadband availability data over time

To track broadband availability, the Federal Communications Commission requires all internet service providers to submit Form 477-- on which they report where they offer internet service at speeds exceeding 200 kbps in at least one direction. Fixedproviders list the census blocks where they offer service to at least one location, and mobile providers file maps of their coverage areas for each broadband technology.

The accuracy of broadband availability data and mapping has long been debated because it is self-reported by ISPs and because the size and composition of census blocks varies. According to a May 19 Congressional Research Service report, the Form 477 data may be incomplete or inaccurate.

In the 10 years between the census counts, people can move in and out of an area, which not only affects the accuracy of the Form 477 data, but it also makes it difficult for researchers or policy-makers who want to study trends or changes in broadband availability. Without a deep understanding of the data, it is nearly impossible to draw meaningful conclusions about broadband penetration and coverage gaps.

Now, researchers at Michigan State University have by developed a methodology for integrating broadband coverage data over time. They produced adataset that puts data from Form 477intoacontinuoustimelineand aligns the data to the 2010census, MSU officials said in a release.

Wedevelopeda procedure for using the data to produce an integratedbroadband time series," said John Mann,anassistant professor with MSUsCenter for Economic Analysis.The team has labeled the dataset BITS, which stands for a Broadband Integrated Time Series.

According to a paper on BITS, the dataset is essential because it provides the basis for longer comparative analyses of relative provision levels and the identification of locales that lag behind others consistently. It also makes it easier to compare data from the Form 477s.

With shrinking public budgets and a need to pinpoint locations suffering from a chronic shortage of broadband, it is critical for policy-makers to efficiently allocate the human, infrastructural, and policy resources required to improve local conditions, the researchers wrote. The paper not only provides a framework for integrating and fusing Form 477 broadband data into a robust time-series database, it provides a user-friendly and harmonized version of the broadband data for use, now.

BITS includes open-source code that analysts can modify for their own research and an approach for cross-walking census data, which is important for future analysis that deals with changes in census geographies. While the BITS is far from perfect, the researchers wrote, it represents an alternative to the current, shorter time series Form 477 data that are available for evaluating broadband provision and the digital divide.

About the Author

Susan Miller is executive editor at GCN.

Over a career spent in tech media, Miller has worked in editorial, print production and online, starting on the copy desk at IDGs ComputerWorld, moving to print production for Federal Computer Week and later helping launch websites and email newsletter delivery for FCW. After a turn at Virginias Center for Innovative Technology, where she worked to promote technology-based economic development, she rejoined what was to become 1105 Media in 2004, eventually managing content and production for all the company's government-focused websites. Miller shifted back to editorial in 2012, when she began working with GCN.

Miller has a BA and MA from West Chester University and did Ph.D. work in English at the University of Delaware.

Connect with Susan at [emailprotected] or @sjaymiller.

Link:

Looking at broadband availability data over time - GCN.com

Just last month, we saw the first baby steps toward the adoption of the memory-managed Rust programming language into the Linux kernel. Google has apparently been thinking along the same lines, and in a lengthy blog post Tuesday,the company announced that the Android Open Source Project now supports Rust for low-level OS components.

Google lays out the benefits of Rust over C/C++, saying, "Rust provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid. This safety is achieved while providing equivalent performance to C and C++."In line with similar stats that Microsoft has published, Google's blog post says that "memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent ~70% of Androids high severity security vulnerabilities."

Google

Google says rewriting the "tens of millions of lines" of existing C and C++ Android code in Rust is "simply not feasible," and rewriting old Android wouldn't matter much since old code has had most of the bugs beaten out of it by now. As the Android source code is an open source project with billions of users, a lot of eyeballs are on it. Google says that "most of our memory bugs occur in new or recently modified code, with about 50% being less than a year old." Rust will be used for new components, when necessary, which should help reduce any new memory bugs Google could introduce.

Google closes the blog post saying, "For the past 18 months we have been adding Rust support to the Android Open Source Project, and we have a few early adopter projects that we will be sharing in the coming months. Scaling this to more of the OS is a multi-year project. Stay tuned, we will be posting more updates on this blog."

Go here to read the rest:
Google is now writing low-level Android code in Rust - Ars Technica

Gitpod today announced $13m in funding led by General Catalyst, a bevy of product features, and the first-ever DevX Conf

"Gitpod is obsessed with bringing back joy and speed to the modern developer experience," said Steve Herrod, Managing Director at General Catalyst. "Devs today are struggling with larger codebases and more complex dependencies, leading to cluttered environments that hamper productivity and collaboration. Gitpod removes that friction and is on track to establish an essential new product category in modern software development."

The $13m total funding will help the company to expand its position as the leading platform for development environment automation, as well as to grow Gitpod's open source community and relevant ecosystem partnerships.

Today Gitpod also announces three new product features:

Developers are pursuing automation everywhere they can, yet they are wasting a lot of precious energy manually setting up and maintaining development environments. Millions of developers are slowed down on a daily basis with tedious tasks, facing unnecessary "works-on-my-machine" problems. Developers are increasingly choosing cloud-based development environments as a result of local machine limits, security policies, and complexities of a remote world.

The developer experience gap is an increasingly documented concern as recently detailed in a post by Stephen O'Grady from RedMonk. "While developers have a wealth of tools at their fingertips, integrating them all together and operating that patchwork quilt of technologies is a major gap in the developer experience. One important tool in addressing the problem is automation, which can lower the burden on developers to maintain these complicated pipelines," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. "Gitpod's embrace of automated, higher quality developer experiences, therefore, is one to watch."

DevXConfDevXConf,organized by the Gitpod team, is the first-ever community event exclusively about developer experience - the daily experience of developers when trying to get their job done. It brings together the best and the brightest from across the developer ecosystem with a set of talks and fireside chats. The virtual event will take place April 28-29, 2021, starting at TIME + TIME ZONE. To register please visit: https://devxconf.org/

Confirmed keynote speakers include amongst others:

"We write code within specific languages/frameworks, use tools, glue them together to (tool) chains, develop against APIs and communicate and collaborate with other developers. All of that should be efficient, sustainable and joyful." said Sven Efftinge, CEO, Gitpod. "At DevXConf some of the brightest minds from the community get together and have a conversation on how we can make software engineering more productive and fun."

Gitpod is available for everyone writing code and provides a free SaaS offering. To get started, please visit: https://www.gitpod.io/

About GitpodGitpod enables professional development teams to immediately start working and collaborating in fully prebuilt, secure development environments on any project, any branch and any device. Gitpod invented the notion of prebuilds allowing developers to describe development environments as code and get an immediately productive development environment for any GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket project. The company is founded by experienced developer tools experts that worked together for 10+ years creating programming languages and growing open source communities. Gitpod operates a flight-proven product and leads the pack of fully-functional Cloud Dev Environments with more than 350k registered developers. http://www.gitpod.io

Media ContactRay George[emailprotected]1 650-922-3825

SOURCE Gitpod

Go here to read the rest:
Gitpod Raises $13m to Move Software Development to the Cloud - PRNewswire

Google has greenlighted the use of the Rust programming language in Androids low-level system-code in order to curb the growing number of memory-based security vulnerabilities in the mobile operating system.

In a post in the Google Security blog, members of the Android development team list their efforts to detect, fix, and mitigate the memory safety bugs. Despite their efforts, these vulnerabilities make up about 70% of Androids high severity security vulnerabilities.

Memory-safe languages are the most cost-effective means for preventing memory bugs. In addition to memory-safe languages like Kotlin and Java, were excited to announce that the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) now supports the Rust programming language for developing the OS itself, wrote Jeff Vander Stoep and Stephen Hines, from the Android Team.

The memory safety guarantees of Rust make it particularly useful for low-level systems programming. It is for this very reason that support for Rust has even been included in the bleeding edge branch of the Linux kernel.

Android developers work either with Java, and compatible languages like Kotlin, to write the high-level parts of the OS such as the user interface, while the low-level aspects such as the kernel and drivers are best written in C and C++.

However these languages give charge of several crucial aspects such as memory management to the developer. This is one of the charms of the languages and developers welcome the flexibility. But when memory management is improperly implemented it results in security issues, such as buffer overflows and overreads, leading to Androids current predicament.

The Google developers note in the blog that theyve been working behind the scenes of adding support for Rust in Android for the past 18 months, and promise to showcase some of the presumably internal early adopter projects in the coming months.

Via: The Register

Go here to see the original:
Google turns to Rust to remedy Android vulnerabilities - TechRadar

With its reliance on a community of physically dispersed individuals and flexibility of adoption, open-source data science is becoming an even more attractive choice among cash-strapped governments, non-profits, and businesses.

Over the past decade, data science and machine learning have made their way from an obscure academic discipline to widespread corporate adoption. The academic community has a natural preference towards open source. Science is a collaborative effort, and its advancement is best served by enabling as large a community as possible to build upon existing research.

Private companies, on the other hand, have a much stronger incentivefor proprietary technology. Developing software systems is an expensiveendeavor. Naturally, a business wants to make a return on this investment.Making the results of your work freely available to competitors doesnt seemlike the smartest choice if you are a business owner.

Still, in data science, several powerful incentives pull corporateinterests in the direction of favoring open-source implementations.

Open source tools offer a lower barrier to entry thanlicensed software. Companies can experiment more easily and with fewerconstraints. They are also more likely to find talent for programming languagesand data science tools that are freely available to everyone.

A case in point is Python, the dominant programming languagefor data science, which happens to be open source. It has the most versatileand extensive capabilities for manipulating data and building machine learningmodels. Python has even superseded commercial tools like MatLab in terms ofcapabilities for data science applications.

Most data science and machine learning frameworks such asTensorFlow, SciKit-Learn, or PyTorch build directly on Python and are also open-source.

Often, their creators are large companies that are alreadydominant in their respective markets. Evidently, the benefits of making alibrary like TensorFlow open-source outweigh the costs for its creator Google.

While Google gave potential competitors a powerful deeplearning tool, it probably benefits more from the massively expanded talentpool, the sprawling deep learning innovation, and the widespread adoption ofthe framework by other companies that open-sourcing TensorFlow entailed.

Other machine learning libraries, such as XGBoost,originatedas research projects in universities. For these institutions, the benefits ofopen-source software are overwhelming for the reasons discussed above.

Most machine learning models require large amounts of datato train. Modern machine learning models, especially deep neural networks usedin computer vision and natural language processing, require vast amounts ofcomputational resources to train. This would present an almost insurmountablechallenge for smaller organizations and individuals, who simply do not havethis amount of data internally, nor the budget to run expensive model trainingexperiments. If it werent for open source data, machine learning would bealmost exclusively the domain of large corporations. This may be in theinterest of the shareholders of said corporations, but certainly not of societyat large, which benefits from the innovations produced by startups andindividuals.

Even for large corporations, the widespread availability of open-sourcedata and pre-trained machine learning models has benefits.

Many of the cutting-edge models developed by researchers atcompanies like Google and Facebook have been open-sourced. Anyone can downloadthese models from Github and use them in their custom data science projects.

But why are these corporations so generous in sharing theirmodels and their data?

From the perspective of an established corporation, it makessense to avoid risky ventures and instead aim to expand market share throughmore traditional strategies.

Startups tend to be better suited for engaging in novelhigh-risk ventures because they are smaller, more agile, and have nothing tolose.

If a large company wants to enter a novel market, or obtainnew technology, acquiring a successful startup in the desired field may be asmarter move than trying to do everything from scratch in-house.

For example, Google acquired Deep Mind in 2014 for thepotential it saw in DeepMinds research in reinforcement learning andgeneral-purpose AI.

To maximize the potential for the emergence of innovativedata science and artificial intelligence startups, it makes sense to giveambitious new upstarts the tools and data they need.

Furthermore, many of the researchers working on commercialprojects come from academic settings. They bring with them a culture ofcollaboration based on open source.

Researchers and developers are naturally inclined toshowcase their work. Therefore, a commitment to open source and the opportunityfor employees to participate in open source projects can go a long way to makea company a more attractive employer for highly coveted data science talent.

The foundational knowledge for data science includesadvanced skills in mathematics, statistics, and programming. Until a few yearsago, this knowledge was deeply buried in academic textbooks and usuallyacquired by obtaining a technical university degree.

Today, an ambitious self-starter can learn all of thesethings via resources that are freely available on the web. An army of Youtubeeducators and bloggers has emerged that makes previously dry and highlyacademic topics accessible in a fun and easy-to-digest way.

These new educational resources grow the talent pool bymaking data science more accessible for a larger group of people, which alsobenefits companies.

Without open-source software and open-source data, offeringthis type of education for free would be much more difficult.

Online education platforms offer academic curricula that often match or exceed traditional university courses in terms of quality. In many cases, these courses are accompanied by Github repositories full of open source code.

Developing and maintaining a custom data science solutionfrom scratch in-house presents a major challenge to most companies. The largera software system grows, the more susceptible it is to bugs and the moredifficult it is to find problems in the source code and deploy the system intoproduction.

Building on open source software and models cansignificantly alleviate these burdens and speed up time to market. Bugs inwidely used open-source libraries are likely to have been discovered byprevious users. If bugs do occur,developers are free to go into the code and fix them without having to worryabout violating licensing agreements. If the open-source tool turns out to notbe a good fit, no money has been sunk on a failed trial.

Even for private businesses who have a commercial interestin protecting their software, there are strong incentives for using andbuilding open-source data science solutions.

More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has put many organizations under enormous pressure to digitize data-heavy processes as quickly as possible while physically scattering technical talent. With its reliance on a community of physically dispersed individuals and flexibility of adoption, open-source data science is becoming an even more attractive choice among cash-strapped governments, non-profits, and businesses.

Originally posted here:
How Open Source is Driving the Future of Data Science - RTInsights

@fumFum

Embedded C Engineer | Blogger | Building a collaboration community for devs at https://inspirezone.tech

Quick note: I'm creating a brand new community for developers focusing on building programming skills through a welcoming online collaboration environment. We need developers like you so consider joining us!

Like most things, practice makes perfect. And no differently, if you want to improve your coding skills the best thing to do is practice coding more. But what are the various ways you can practice coding?

Im putting in a more conscious effort to practice coding and gathered some information on the various ways I can practice. Not surprisingly, theres an abundance of information and resources on the web that can help anyone practice coding.

Here are 5 useful methods you can use to help you practice coding and in turn grow your programming skills.

Im mentioning this first as I believe its quite an important factor. Unless you have a solid reason for wanting to spend time coding you may lose motivation very quickly.

To stay focused on the task at hand and be consistent in your practice, make sure to think about your motivations for pushing you to practice coding.

Maybe youre practicing because you want to land a job as a developer eventually. Or you have a project in mind you want to accomplish, but first you need to develop your skills in a particular programming language.

Having a motivation for why you want to regularly practice coding and using that as a driving factor is a great starting point in your goal to develop your skills.

As we all know, the internet is an amazing place (most of the time). There are so many resources available to help you learn about anything, and FREE at that. Of course this includes resources on learning how to code.

So theres really no excuse to say theres nothing available to help you practice coding! There are many coding tutorial sites that can teach you how to program using a language from beginner to advanced level topics.

For an example of a tutorial based coding website checkout freecodecamp. They have a structured set of tutorials suitable for complete beginners with no background knowledge of coding needed. Im really impressed with the amount of content they have given they are completely free!

Another great way to practice coding is through quizzes. Just one of many sites you can use for quizzes are geeksforgeeks and guru99.

Completing quizzes can be quite a fun way to test your knowledge on a programming language. There are also quizzes centred around coding interviews which is a great way to practice for potential interviews if your goal is getting a job as a developer.

A warning here not to get stuck in what is often known as tutorial purgatory. This is when you spend all your time on tutorials but dont actually apply what youre learning.

And similar to learning a foreign language, a lack of using the language will eventually lead to you forgetting what you've learned. To avoid this happening, pay attention to the next point!

This is probably my favourite way to practice coding because it reminds me of why I enjoy coding.

Having the ability to create something with code is what being a developer is all about. You can do all the tutorials in the world, but the real fun is in making real life applications or finding solutions to your own problems or other peoples problems.

So why not practice coding by coming up with a project youre interested in and a problem you want to solve. Maybe theres an everyday task you perform on your PC that you want to automate? Or do you want to develop a mobile app for something you havent come across before? Or you can have fun developing a game and share it with your friends.

Completing a project thats of use, no matter how big or small is extremely satisfying. When you reach the stage of seeing projects become a reality youll understand why learning to code is such a powerful skill to have.

Not to mention while completing your projects youre gaining a huge amount of coding practice and experience.

Open source is used to describe software with the source code freely available for anyone to view. And not just to view, you can actually contribute by making modifications to the source code and submitting your changes!

Open source software is typically managed on GitHub. The Linux kernel for example is open source and its entire source is viewable on its GitHub repository.

By making an active effort to be involved in open source software youre not only being helpful but also learning to make contributions to code written by other people.

Adding to code written by other people can be frustrating but its part of a developers life.. There WILL be times you need to edit someones code if you do this for a living. Or in cases like contributing to open source, youre editing code written by possibly hundreds of contributors.

If your end goal is to get a job coding then this is a great way to get used to working with other developers. Although working on your own personal projects is great, working with others is crucial in developing large scale applications.

So what better way to practice coding, develop your skills and learn to understand existing code by contributing to open source projects. If you read source code for open source software thats known for its quality and efficiency, youre gaining knowledge and expertise from other developers. You can take what you learn and apply it to your own coding practices.

Joining a community of like minded developers is not only good for motivation, but it will push you to practice coding more. This also links in with the previous point of contributing to open source projects.

If you join open source communities and become active in them youre more inclined to contribute. And by working on projects with others, youre practicing coding and also developing your collaboration skills.

Some communities you may consider joining include stackoverflow, which youre probably aware of as a question and answer hub for developers. If youre interested in Linux you may join communities centred around the Linux distribution you use, for example, the Ubuntu community. You can also find open source projects on GitHub by exploring GitHub repositories.

Joining a community is a great way to meet like-minded developers, scale up your projects and build up your ability to work in a team.

The fact that you're here on hackernoon and reading this is a start!

Weve talked about ways that can help you practice coding. You can achieve this by having the drive to want to learn, actually doing the work by learning, completing personal projects, contributing to open source and joining communities.

Learning to code is an endless journey. Even as someone experienced, Im always looking for ways to continuously practice coding. Through these methods I can scale up my knowledge and improve my efficiency in how I do things as a programmer.

Thanks for reading! If you found this useful checkout more posts on my blog on developer tips and productivity.

Previously published at: https://inspirezone.tech/5-ways-to-help-you-practice-coding/

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SAN MATEO, Calif., April 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --Applitools, provider of a next generation test automation through Visual AI and Ultrafast Test Cloud,today announced the launch of its "Automation Cookbook," featuring free bite-sized videos aimed to upskill developers and test engineers of all experience levels. Anyone looking for quick answers to their test automation questions can use recipes to solve everyday challenges and also practice in the Test Kitchen for free. The initiative is led by Angie Jones, Senior Director of Developer Relations at Applitools and Test Automation University, with contributions from Colby Fayock, Developer Advocate at Applitools.

For more information and to use the Automation Cookbook, visit: https://applitools.com/cookbook/

The Automation Cookbook is the latest test automation resource Applitools is releasing to increase its supply of free and accessible learning resources online for the dev community. It is supplementary to Test Automation University, which has surpassed more than 80,000 students to date and is the flagship resource for engineers to learn new tools and programming languages across various topics in automation.

Since Test Automation University launched in 2019, Applitools has received requests for additional resources to help people quickly find answers to frequent day-to-day questions. Now, with the Automation Cookbook, there is a place to serve bite-sized content in one place without needing to sift through an endless web of long video tutorials, online forums, and Q&A threads just to end up with broken code examples.

"Based on feedback from the community, our goal with the Automation Cookbook is to help engineers get answers to frequently asked questions with a visual coding recipe," said Fayock.

The launch of the Automation Cookbook includes 12 videos featuring two of the most prominent test automation frameworks for functional testing of web apps, Selenium WebDriver and Cypress. Each framework has six total videos to start. New videos will be added regularly with additional frameworks planned to be featured in the future. The videos range anywhere from 3-10 minutes in length.

Initially, recipes for both Selenium WebDriver in Java as well as Cypress in JavaScript are available:

Unlike Test Automation University, which focuses on long-form education of complete learning pathways, the Automation Cookbook focuses only on specific tasks. To help engineers practice, Applitools created an open source website, Test Kitchen, with common web widgets to allow anyone to hone their test automation skills and knowledge.

For a pantry full of web components that can be used for automated testing, visit the Test Kitchen: https://kitchen.applitools.com/

"For many engineers, it's common to run into a problem while writing a test. Whether you're trying to work with alerts or upload a file, you may not be looking for an entire end-to-end course, but a quick solution to a single problem," said Jones. "We have designed this short-form education program to answer your questions accordingly."

About Applitools

Applitools delivers a Next Generation Test Automation Platform through Visual AI and Ultrafast Grid. We enable engineering teams to release high quality web and mobile apps at incredible speed and at a reduced cost.

Applitools Visual AI modernizes important test automation use cases -- Functional Testing, Visual Testing, Web and Mobile UI/UX Testing, Cross Browser Testing, Responsive Web Design Testing, Cross Device Testing, PDF Testing, Accessibility Testing and Compliance Testing -- to transform the way organizations deliver innovation at the speed of CI/CD at a significantly lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Hundreds of companies from verticals such as Tech, Banking, Insurance, Retail, Pharma, and Publishing -- including 50 of the Fortune 100 -- use Applitools to deliver the best possible digital experiences to millions of customers on any device and browser, and across every screen size and operating system.

Applitools is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with an R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, please visit applitools.com.

Contact:Jeremy DouglasCatapult PR-IR303-581-7760, ext. 16[emailprotected]

SOURCE Applitools

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Applitools Introduces Automation Cookbook and Test Kitchen to Help Engineers Break Down Coding Recipes - PRNewswire

Microsoft has launched a preview version of its own distribution of Java, making it available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The company has named the release Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, and describes it as its "new way to collaborate and contribute to the Java ecosystem".

The company has made available Microsoft Build of OpenJDK binaries for Java 11, which are based on OpenJDK source code. Microsoft says it is looking to broaden and deepen its support for Java, "one of the most important programming languages used today".

See also:

Writing about the release on its developer blog, Microsoft says: "Today we are excited to announce the preview of the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, a new no-cost Long-Term Support (LTS) distribution of OpenJDK that is open source and available for free for anyone to deploy anywhere. It includes binaries for Java 11, based on OpenJDK 11.0.10+9, on x64 server and desktop environments on macOS, Linux, and Windows. We are also publishing a new Early Access binary for Java 16 for Windows on ARM, based on the latest OpenJDK 16+36 release".

The company goes on to say:

The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK binaries for Java 11 are based onOpenJDK source code, following the samebuild scripts used by the Eclipse Adoptium projectand tested against theEclipse Adoptium Quality Assurance suite(including OpenJDK project tests). Our binaries for Java 11 have passed the Java Technical Compatibility Kit (TCK) for Java 11, which is used to verify compatibility with the Java 11 specification. The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK is a simple drop-in replacement for any other OpenJDK distribution available in the Java ecosystem.

Microsoft Build of OpenJDK is available to Microsoft Azure customers viaAzure Cloud Shell, or in the Windows Terminal.

The company points out that the binaries include backported fixes and enhancements considered important. Some of these have not yet been formally backported upstream, as is made clear in the release notes

You can find out more and download the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK here.

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Microsoft previews its open source Java distribution for Windows, macOS and Linux Microsoft Build of OpenJDK - BetaNews