By BleepingComputer Deals

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Prices subject to change

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Pick the right class to enhance your programming skills - BleepingComputer

The Rust systems programming language is still in its infancy, having only released the first stable version of the language in 2015, but that hasnt stopped it from rising to the top of developer charts.

Last year, it broke onto the TIOBE Index Top 20 list of the most popular programming languages for the first time, and it continues to win over more developers. It has been voted the most loved programming language on the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for the last five years. Out of the developers surveyed using Rust, the report found 86% are interested in continuing to develop with it.

What is all the fuss about?Developers who have never used Rust might be wondering what all the hype is about. According to Jake Goulding, StackOverflows top Rust contributor, the short answer is that Rust solves pain points present in many other languages, providing a solid step forward with a limited number of downsides.

Rust was first started as a personal project from Mozilla developer Graydon Hoare in 2006. In 2009, Mozilla started sponsoring the project and the first introduction to the language happened in 2010.

The initial selling point was the promise of memory safety, according to Armin Ronacher, director of engineering at Sentry, an application monitoring and error tracking company. They didnt compromise on the core promise of memory safety, he said. If you think about all the other languages developed over the last couple of years in that space, there is really no contender. There hasnt been a language that was ever designed to be as good as C and C++. Rust didnt compromise as being a replacement for those languages as other languages have.

Jim Blandy, free software developer and author of the Programming Rust book, explained that while typically almost all programming is done in a high-level language like JavaScript, Java, Python or TypeScript, when developers need to program something that involves memory usage or the computer processors, high-level languages dont work. The reason for this is because those languages use a garbage collector to attempt to reclaim memory that is no longer in use. Garbage collection can have a negative impact on resource consumption, performance and program execution.

There are other systems programming languages like C and C++ that dont use garbage collection, but they are difficult to program with. According to Blandy, C and C++ enforce rules that make sense in theory, but dont work in practice. Its possible to have rules that are easy to understand, but impossible to follow, he explained. Its like if someone put a chess game in front of you and told you to win it, you know the rules and youll do your best, but you cant just say okay I am going to win it. C and C++ have been putting programmers into that exact situation.

Rust is designed to accomplish memory safety without the need of a traditional garbage collector. We agree in this industry that memory safety is necessary because the moment you start to touch bad memory, you are implicitly opening yourself up to a bunch of vulnerabilities, said Ronacher. If you look into C and C++ projects, most security vulnerabilities have been a result of a program not dealing with memory properly.

Rust is able to ensure memory safety through its ownership and borrowing system, which includes a set of rules that the compiler checks to make sure memory usage is safe, the program is free of memory errors when it is compiled, and features dont slow down the program.

All programs have to manage the way they use a computers memory while running. Some languages have garbage collection that constantly looks for no-longer-used memory as the program runs; in other languages, the programmer must explicitly allocate and free the memory. Rust uses a third approach: memory is managed through a system of ownership with a set of rules that the compiler checks at compile time, the Rust team wrote in its documentation.

Beyond memory safetyMemory safety is why developers come to the language, but they stay for the package manager and Cargo ecosystem, according to Sentrys Ronacher. According to the Rust team, developers love Rusts build system and package manager because it is able to handle a lot of tasks such as building code, downloading libraries, and building libraries.

The fact that you can build your project with all the dependencies without having to pull in another tool is what makes people happy. It comes out of the box full-featured and with a good development experience, said Ronacher.

When free software developer Blandy looked into why people choose the languages they choose, the number one consideration is not the language itself, but the libraries and tools they connect to.

According to Ronacher, developers enjoy working with Rust over C and C++ because its less prone to crashes and its tooling is much stronger. He explained that while the compiler integration for C and C++ might be good, the tooling is bad and requires external dependencies. Additionally, if developers want to reuse code someone else wrote, its hard to do in C and C++ because of a lack of a package manager. Ronacher also explained many C++ libraries are difficult to add to large projects because of the lack of standardized strings and common types. Rusts packaging ecosystem makes it easier to do iterative development and doesnt require developers to reimplement everything or make everything consistent with the codebase.

That is a huge reason why Rust is so successful, because you can actually both integrate with the existing codebases, but when you start from scratch you can put in so many dependencies much easier than you can in C and C++, said Ronacher.

As a result of the memory safety, Rust also resolves a lot of concurrency issues, making it much easier to write concurrent programs with Rust than other languages, Blandy explained.

Memory safety bugs and concurrency bugs often come down to code accessing data when it shouldnt. Rusts secret weapon is ownership, a discipline for access control that systems programmers try to follow, but that Rusts compiler checks statically for you, the Rust team wrote in a post. For concurrency, this means you can choose from a wide variety of paradigms (message passing, shared state, lock-free, purely functional), and Rust will help you avoid common pitfalls.

Helping to avoid those pitfalls actually forces developers to write good quality code, according to Maxwell Flitton, an R&D software engineer in financial tech and author of Rust Web Programming. When you compile, you are very confident that it is going to work and you are less likely to get bugs that creep in, he said.

Beyond the code, Rust has a strong and welcoming community around it, according to Shane Miller, the senior engineering manager of the Rust platform at AWS, which recently announced it would sponsor the project. Rust really focuses on providing a great experience for people. The Rust community is particularly welcoming, reaching out to those who havent traditionally participated in systems programming or open source.

The limitations of RustRust is both safe and manages to reach really close to what the C and C++ languages can do, but it is a more restrictive language and comes with its limitations, according to Blandy.

For instance, the way Rust is able to provide security guarantees is by restricting what developers can do. Rust takes pointers and pointers are this functional thing in every language in Java every object is a pointer to that object. They are ubiquitous and Rust restricts how you can use them. It basically says there are some rules. I am only going to let you use them in a certain fashion. It challenges the programmer, said Blandy.

Blandy also mentions that the debugging support in Rust is not up to the level of C++.

In addition, while Rust is memory efficient, it takes way too long to compile programs. It rivals C++ in how slow it is to compile the code. Once it is compiled, it runs really fast, but the compile times are really bad, said Ronacher.

And since it is still so new, developers might run into situations or environments that no one has worked on before. For instance, if you want to develop something for Bluetooth, in JavaScript there is a rich ecosystem, but in Rust there is just a barely maintained Bluetooth module, according to Ronacher.

Web development has also been an area where Rust hasnt been too strong, but Flitton believes thats changing, especially as the world becomes more digital. The 2020 State of the Developer Ecosystem Report by JetBrains revealed while Rust is mostly used for systems programming, 44% of respondents are now using it for web development. In the beginning, Rust was mostly associated with embedded systems or robotics, but it has matured and stable frameworks have started to come out. The possibilities with web development are opening up for some core services that take a lot of traffic or require a lot of processing power, he said.

Learning Rust has also been a problem in the community because a lot of developers feel too intimidated to take it on, according to Flitton. Rust has this very nasty image of, it is going to be really hard to code. Its really fast, but going to be hard to codebut not really. It is memory safe and if you focus on a few quirks initially then you can pick it up quite quickly, he said.

The problem has been because it forces you to do good quality coding, it can be annoying for developers who picked up bad habits and dont want to change the way they code. There is a saying that a bad workman always blames his tools. When I first started to get Rust programs compiled, I was incredibly frustrated because it kept saying you havent thought about this. I am not compiling because this doesnt seem safe. So I was quite frustrated, but when you look at it it is just forcing safety, said Flitton.

Ronacher added that the way developers learn Rust is different from the way they learn other languages. If you go into the mindset learning Rust the same way you approach other languages, you are going to have an uphill battle because the language will punish you in ways that you wouldnt expect, he said.

However, Flitton believes Rust can help developers realize all the things theyve been doing wrong and in turn make them better for it.

Top tech companies turn to RustAfter working with and incorporating the language in many of its services, Amazon announced in 2019 that it would sponsor the Rust project. The first notable product the company wrote in Rust was Firecracker, an open-source virtual machine manager. The language is also used in Lambda, EC2 and S3 Amazon services.

Since that launch weve found more opportunities to build high-performance customer experiences quickly and securely. Rust helps us deliver fast, robust services to AWS customers at scale, and our responsibility and investment in the Rust ecosystem and community of builders grows with our adoption, said Shane Miller, the senior engineering manager of the Rust platform at AWS.

At the end of last year, Amazon revealed it started to hire Rust contributors to ensure the language got the time and resources necessary to improve. The company also started to build a team around the Rust asynchronous runtime Tokio, and invest in developer tools, infrastructure components, interoperability and verification.

We believe Rust changes the game when it comes to writing safe systems software. Rust provides the performance and control needed to write low-level systems, while empowering software developers to write robust, secure programs, said Miller.

In 2019, Microsoft also revealed it started to experiment with Rust after it saw a need for a safer systems programming language. Were using languages that, because they are quite old and come from a different era, do not provide us the ability to protect ourselves from vulnerabilities, Ryan Levick, cloud developer advocate at Microsoft, said in a video. C++ is not a memory safe language and no one would really pretend that it is, he said.

Microsoft has since been moving toward using Rust over C and C++, and rewriting low-level components of the Windows codebase in Rust.

For C++ developers used to writing complex systems, using Rust as a developer is a breath of fresh air. The memory and data safety guarantees made by the compiler give the developer much greater confidence that compiling code will be correct beyond memory safety vulnerabilities. Less time is spent debugging trivial issues or frustrating race conditions. The compiler warning and error messages are extremely well written, allowing novice Rust programmers to quickly identify and resolve issues in their code, Adam Burch, software engineer at Microsoft, explained in a post.

Originally posted here:
What's all the fuss about Rust? - SDTimes.com

Good morning

Tesla Founder Elon Musk aka the real-life Tony Stark is as much an inspiration as an enigma for his many fans and followers across the world.

Lately, he seems to have made it a habit of making the headlines with nearly every move of his, which is of course, tracked and followed very closely across the world.

Tesla has said it would begin accepting the controversial cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, as payment for its electric cars. The announcement comes in the backdrop of the electric carmaker investing $1.5 billion in Bitcoin; the biggest company to back the currency till date.

The Tesla founder has also been regularly posting about cryptocurrencies on micro-blogging site Twitter, where he has over 46 million followers.

After Teslas investment in Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency surged to an all-time high, jumping as much as 15 percent.

The year 2020 was the year of edtech as schools being shut led to online learning becoming mainstream. For edtech startup Cuemath, the year was both challenging and rewarding as the startup had to redo its yearly plans in a matter of weeks, and shift from an offline-focused model to an online model. Its CEO Manan Khurma says that almost overnight, the company moved its entire user base both teachers and students to the live class platform, and has since seen tremendous growth.

From working on Google Maps and Gmail to building a bitcoin platform

Mike Hearn started coding when he was just six years old buoyed by his father's interest. At the age of 14, he used to do open source programming by using a dial-up connection, but was never really interested in the theory of it all. So, to escape the academics, he took up an offer by Google and soon began working on Google Maps and Google Earth, learning technical skills and building new products until the bitcoin phenomenon took the world by storm. Read more.

Mike Hearn, Lead Engineer R3

Bengaluru-based EV startup Simple Energy is building electric two-wheelers from scratch

The future is electric, however there are a lot of challenges in the way of achieving that goal including high battery replacement cost, limited range, charging time, and poor charging infrastructure. To address these issues, Bengaluru-based EV startup Simple Energy is building vehicles from scratch to boost the adoption of EVs. Read more.

Image Credits: YS Design Team

Udaan Co-founder Sujeet Kumar

Sujeet Kumar, Co-founder, Udaan

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The real-life Tony Stark is back to making headlines - YourStory

Rust is not currently ranked highly on programming language popularity indices like PYPL and TIOBE, but it is a rising star in the software development world.

Growing out of a personal project started by Graydon Hoare in 2006, Rust is a programming language that focuses on performance, and guaranteeing memory- and thread-safety.

This not only helps catch many types of bugs when code is being compiled into a program or software library, but it also reduces the risk of critical security vulnerabilities which frequently rely on memory handling bugs.

Hoare stepped back from his technical leadership role within the Rust project in 2013 for personal reasons, and the project is now led by a core team of eight people.

Rust has operated under the umbrella of Mozilla Research and is currently establishing its own foundation.

In the past few years, big technology companies have started to adopt Rust for crucial systems including Cloudflare, 1Password, Discord, and Amazon.

Microsoft has also started exploring how it can use Rust and has posted a job advertisement for an engineer to work on Rust compilers and tools.

Facebook also started hiring Rust compiler and library engineers last year.

Discord, a communications platform popular with gamers, said in a blog post published early last year that it uses Rust in its client application for its video encoding pipeline, as well as on its server side.

The company said that it switched from using Googles Go programming language to Rust due to performance problems it found in its Read States component. Read States in Discord keeps track of the channels and messages you have read.

Discords blog post came just months before Mozilla retrenched around 250 people from the company. These lay-offs affected various teams within Mozilla, including those working on Firefox and Rust.

Our pre-COVID plan for 2020 included a great deal of change already: building a better internet by creating new kinds of value in Firefox; investing in innovation and creating new products; and adjusting our finances to ensure stability over the long term, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker wrote at the time.

Economic conditions resulting from the global pandemic have significantly impacted our revenue. As a result, our pre-COVID plan was no longer workable.

Following the retrenchments, the Rust core team and Mozilla announced plans to create a Rust foundation.

The foundation will take ownership of the trademarks and domain names associated with Rust, Cargo, and crates.io, and will also take financial responsibility for the costs they incur.

While the lay-offs at Mozilla stirred speculation and caused some uncertainty regarding the future of Rust, the big tech companies of Silicon Valley continued to support the language.

One of Rusts core team members, Nicholas Matsakis, posted at the end of last year that he was leaving Mozilla to start a new job as tech lead of the new Rust team at Amazon.

Amazon has stated that Rust helps its web services teams write highly performant, safe infrastructure-level networking and other systems software.

Amazons first notable product built with Rust, Firecracker, launched publicly in 2018 and provides the open source virtualization technology that powers AWS Lambda and other serverless offerings, the company said.

We also use Rust to deliver services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, and more.

The Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), which looks after projects like the free and open Lets Encrypt security certificate authority, recently announced that it was embarking on a project to rewrite an important security module for the widely used Apache webserver (httpd) in Rust.

One of the biggest issues with httpd is the fact that its written in C, which is not a memory-safe language. Memory safety issues dominate its list of security vulnerabilities, ISRG stated.

Rewriting httpd from scratch or moving its users to a memory-safe alternative would be incredibly difficult, but fortunately we can tackle httpds memory safety problem incrementally.

It will begin with a new Transport Layer Security (TLS) module for httpd called mod_tls.

Transport Layer Security is the protocol that encrypts web traffic between your browser and the web server. It is often represented as the lock icon in your URL bar when you connect to a site that supports encryption.

The new module will use the excellent Rustls library for TLS instead of OpenSSL, said the ISRG. We hope that someday mod_tls will replace mod_ssl as the default in httpd.

ISRG said that it has contracted Stefan Eissing of Greenbytes, who also contributes to the httpd project, to do the work on mod_tls with funding provided by Google.

We currently live in a world where deploying a few million lines of C code on a network edge to handle requests is standard practice, despite all of the evidence we have that such behaviour is unsafe, ISRG stated.

Our industry needs to get to a place where deploying code that isnt memory safe to handle network traffic is widely understood to be dangerous and irresponsible. People need memory safe software that suits their needs to be available to them though, and thats why were getting to work.

As of February 2021, Rust was ranked 16th on PYPL, which bases its index on Google Trends data looking at how much tutorials for a language was searched.

On the TIOBE index for February 2021, Rust is ranked 30th (down from 26th in January). The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses, and third-party vendors.

More:
The rise of the Rust programming language - MyBroadband

The cancellation comes one day after Fox News and three of its hosts, Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, were sued for $2.7 billion. Wochit

Fox Business Network viewers may have seen the last of conservative talk host Lou Dobbsafter the cable network canceled his show, "Lou Dobbs Tonight," on Friday.

It would be an unceremonious ending forDobbs, 75, one of Fox Business Network's highest-profile personalities and one of the strongest supporters of former President Donald Trump in cable news.

The cancellation comes one day after Fox Newsandthree of its hosts, Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, were sued for $2.7 billion by a voting-technology company that claims they conspired to spread false claims that the company helped "steal" the presidential election.

FoxNews Media issued a statement that made no mention of the lawsuit by the company, Smartmatic USA, referencing instead an October announcement that program changes were in the offing after the election.

Fox Business Network Friday canceled "Lou Dobbs Tonight," a high-profile network program hosted by Dobbs, seen here speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2017.(Photo: Alex Brandon, AP)

"As we said in October, FoxNews Media regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on FoxBusiness this is part of those planned changes. A new 5 p.m.program will be announced in the near future, the statement said.

Last month, Fox News added an hour of opinion programming at 7 p.m. EST, shifting Martha MacCallum's show to 3 p.m. EST, a time when fewer people are watching. Fox's 8-11 p.m. EST prime-time lineup of opinion personalities attracts its strongest ratings.

Fornext week, Dobbs' 5 p.m. EST time slot, which will be renamed "Fox Business Tonight" in the interim, will be filled by substitute hosts Jackie DeAngelis on Monday and Tuesday and David Asman on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. It will repeat at 7 p.m. EST, as Dobbs' show did.

Dobbs remains under contract at Fox News, but he likely will not be seen on any of the company's networks again, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Dobbs'last appearance on his Fox Business Network show was Thursday. He made no mention of the Smartmatic USA lawsuit that was filed earlier in the day.

Fox News Media, in a statement Thursday on behalf of the network and its hosts, rejected the accusations in the lawsuit, saying it stands by its 2020 election coverage and will defend this meritless lawsuit in court.

Lou Dobbs, seen in 2007, is likely to be out at Fox Business Network after his show was canceled Friday.(Photo: Karen Bleier via Getty Images)

Smartmatic's participation in the 2020 election was restricted to Los Angeles County, which votes heavily Democratic. ButFox aired at least 13 reports falsely stating or implying the company had stolen the national 2020 vote in cahoots with Venezuela's socialist government, according to the complaint.

The company says the hosts perpetuated lies and disinformation that damaged Smartmatic's business and reputation.In December, Smartmatic sent a letter threatening legal action to Fox and two other networks popular with Trump supporters, Newsmax and One America News Network.

In December, a nearly two-minute taped fact-checking segment aired on Dobbs's showand on Fox News Channel shows hosted byBartiromo and Pirro. The segment featuredEddie Perez, a voting technology expert at the nonpartisan Open Source Election Technology Institute.

I have not seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to delete, change or alter anything related to vote tabulations, Perez said in the segment.

Dobbs, who has been at Fox since 2011, has long been one of the network's most pro-Trump on-air champion, especially of his economic and immigration policies. His provocative views on immigrants helped lead to his departure in 2009 fromCNN, where he was an award-winning pioneer in TV business news.

In the weeks after the election, Dobbs repeatedly attacked the Republicans for not doing enough to support Trump's claims that the election was rigged in favor of Biden.

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Fox Business Network cancels 'Lou Dobbs Tonight,' one of its highest-profile shows - USA TODAY

Austin artist Topher Sipes

This weekend, the Houston Symphony is bringing virtual reality technology into the concert hall, allowing audience members to see music in ways beyond their imagination.

As the orchestra, led by guest conductor Ming Luke, plays light classics such as Debussys Clair de Lune and Saint-Sanss Carnival of the Animals, the Austin-based artist Topher Sipes will use Tilt Brush, Googles virtual reality painting app that recently transitioned to an open-source project, to translate the sprightly tunes into life-sized works of art by way of structured improvisational, full-body movement.

Throughout Music Illustrated: Virtual Reality in Concert, a video team will draw the curtain back to share a behind-the-scenes perspective from inside the virtual world, welcoming viewers into the artists creative space. This insightful glance into his process combined with live footage of him performing downstage left and of the orchestra playing the inspirational melodies close by will be projected onto two screens on either side of the stage, mimicking a mixed reality environment. The hour-long program, which has been a few years in the making, will be available to view in person with two socially distanced concerts at Jones Hall and online with a livestream option for Saturday evening.

This, to me, is like Fantasia in real time, says Lesley Sabol, the Houston Symphonys director of popular programming. Her childhood fascination with Walt Disneys musical masterpiece cultivated her affinity for artistic expression, and several years ago, when a friend introduced her to this virtual reality technology, she immediately set out to unite the immersive sensory experience with the orchestra and perhaps captivate a wider audience along the way.

In her search for a collaborator, Sabol was referred to Sipes, who had won the inaugural Tilt Brush competition presented by Originator Studios in 2016, after which he facilitated various Tilt Brush performances and installations, including one for Smartcar during South by Southwest.

Sipes has long approached digital visual media through the lens of a musician. Having studied piano and keyboard as a child, he eventually began to translate his ears sensitivity to rhythm and melody onto paper. Even today, after he listens to a piece of music with his eyes closed while sitting still, he plays the track again and allows his hand to move in response across a page, tracing an improvisational, abstract creation with a colored pencil.

This helps me to look at the song visually, take a step back and see how the music moves overtime, says Sipes, who then enters the next phase of his process, shaping reactive responses to the music with his entire body while wearing his virtual reality headset. He later refines the emerging imagery by selecting appropriate colors and brushes, and even times the choreography of his drawing. For me, its like solving a puzzle by whittling away at a four-dimensional time sculpture.

When: 8 p.m. performance and livestream on Feb. 13; 2:30 p.m. on Feb. 14

Where: Jones Hall, 615 Louisiana St. (Livestream ticket holders will receive a link via email)

Details: $34-84 (Single livestream tickets are $20); 713-224-7575 or houstonsymphony.org

The canvas serves as his dance floor, so to speak - a concept that is far from new to him. In 2011, Sipes co-founded ARTheism, an immersive dance company for which he projected motion graphics that he drew using a digital drawing tablet or a multi-touch screen onto performers such as his partner Samantha Beasley. The two artists formed an abstract visual language of their own that allowed them to improvise while staying in sync with one another, as if they were having a conversation through light, Sipes explains. Although his creative medium has changed, this endeavor paved the way for him to become a virtual reality artist.

In this weekends visual spectacle, Sipes will create multiple works of art, each inspired by a different piece of music, and by the end of the concert, he will reposition them into a whole new composition to the lively Perpetuum Mobile, Op. 257 by Johann Strauss II. Once the curtain closes, all of these creations will be shared online for people to explore at their own leisure.

In reflecting upon the past several years, preparing for this multi-dimensional concert and pursuing his mission to humanize technology, Sipes recalls a quote by the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat that has affirmed his practice: Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.

Lawrence Elizabeth Knox is a Houston-based writer.

See the article here:
Houston Symphony and virtual-reality technology merge in weekend event - Houston Chronicle

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced the launch of NY PopsUp - an unprecedented and expansive festival featuring hundreds of pop-up performances, many of which are free of charge and all open to the public that will intersect with the daily lives of New Yorkers. This series of events, intended to revitalize the spirit and emotional well-being of New York citizens with the energy of live performance while jumpstarting New York's struggling live entertainment sector, is a private/public partnership overseen by producers Scott Rudin and Jane Rosenthal, in coordination with the New York State Council on the Arts and Empire State Development.

The Festival will serve as a "pilot program," creating the state's first large-scale model for how to bring live performance back safely after this prolonged COVID-related shutdown. The programming for NY PopsUp will be curated by the interdisciplinary artist Zack Winokur, in partnership with a council of artistic advisors who represent the diversity of New York's dynamic performing arts scene. NY PopsUp will launch on Saturday, February 20 and run through Labor Day. The Festival will reach its climax with the 20th Anniversary of the Tribeca Film Festival and The Festival at Little Island at Pier 55, bringing the total number of performances to more than 1,000. NY PopsUp is being coordinated in lock step with state public health officials and will strictly adhere to Department of Health COVID-19 protocols.

"Cities have taken a real blow during COVID, and the economy will not come back fast enough on its own - we must bring it back," Governor Cuomo said. "Creative synergies are vital for cities to survive, and our arts and cultural industries have been shut down all across the country, taking a terrible toll on workers and the economy. We want to be aggressive with reopening the State and getting our economy back on track, and NY PopsUp will be an important bridge to the broader reopening of our world-class performance venues and institutions. New York has been a leader throughout this entire pandemic, and we will lead once again with bringing back the arts."

The events produced by NY PopsUp, in addition to being free of charge, will be staged across every type of neighborhood and district in all five boroughs of New York City, throughout Long Island and Upstate New York, and in all regions of the state. As the current realities of COVID-19 make mass gatherings and large, destination-style events impossible, NY PopsUp will meet New York City and State residents where they are, infusing their daily lives with the surprise and joy of live performance. The hundreds of free, pop-up events that constitute NY PopsUp will make stages out of New York's existing landscapes, including iconic transit stations, parks, subway platforms, museums, skate parks, street corners, fire escapes, parking lots, storefronts, and upstate venues, transforming everyday commutes, local communities, and locations never used for performances into canvases of awe and exhilaration. Instead of there being masses of audience members at a handful of events, this Festival is a mass of events, each for a safe and secure 'handful' of audience members.

As COVID restrictions begin to loosen, the model that NY PopsUp builds for holding safe live events will pave the way for the reopening of multidisciplinary flexible venues ("flex venues") throughout New York State to open and participate in the Festival. These will be the very first indoor performances since the pandemic began and will mark a major moment in New York's recovery efforts. Not only will these indoor events be a symbol to the entire world that New York is back, they will also be a key step in the long process of getting tens-of-thousands of arts professionals around New York State back to work; and a bridge to getting Broadway and all of the New York cultural world open. These Flex Venues are established performance spaces without fixed seating and are thus able to be adapted for social distancing. Examples of these venues would include The SHED, The Apollo, Harlem Stage, La MaMa, and The Glimmerglass Festival's Alice Busch Opera Theater. All indoor events will strictly follow Department of Health public health and safety guidance.

"Having artists call on other artists as a means to build this festival's giant creative community will spur opportunities for wild, bold, and intimate collaborations that would never otherwise have been possible. As a result, the work presented will represent a near limitless range, colliding disparate styles, disciplines, and points-of-view to infiltrate the daily lives of New Yorkers in genuinely surprising and unprecedented ways," Zack Winokur said. "Ultimately, this Festival is about using art as a means of reestablishing human connection. With NY PopsUp, there is no mediating force between artist and artist, or artist and audience. It's humans in direct contact with each other, and the context of this particular moment will make that connection all the more profound."

The council of artistic advisors, who are all collaborating and co-curating NY PopsUp, is comprised of a unique group of New York's premier artistic visionaries, all hailing from different disciplinary backgrounds and each a leader in their own field. These advisors are charged with inviting other artists to join the NY PopsUp community. The artists they engage will, in turn, engage their own networks, ultimately populating the festival with the broadest, most diverse coalition of performers ever united around a single mission. In short, NY PopsUp is being built by artists asking artists to participate.

The council includes renowned choreographer and MacArthur Fellow, Kyle Abraham; three-time Grammy Award nominated jazz musician, Jon Batiste; choreographer and Hoofer Award-winning tap dancer Ayodele Casel; Grammy Award nominated singer, actor, and international opera star, Anthony Roth Costanzo; the playwright of Slave Play, the most Tony Award nominated play in history, Jeremy O. Harris; Tony Award-winning set designer Mimi Lien; the legendary nine-time Grammy Award-winning musician, Wynton Marsalis; two-time National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet, essayist, and playwright, Claudia Rankine; Grammy Award-winning jazz vocalist, Ccile McLorin Salvant; leading member of the Punch Brothers and four-time Grammy Award winner, Chris Thile; acclaimed "Saturday Night Live" writer, comedian, and actor, Julio Torres; and acclaimed director and musician, Whitney White.

The public will encounter a range of artists representing all areas of performance - from theater to dance, from poetry to comedy, from pop music to opera, and so much more. Among the confirmed artists are Hugh Jackman, Rene Fleming, Amy Schumer, Alec Baldwin, Chris Rock, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, Isabel Leonard, Nico Muhly, Joyce DiDonato, John Early and Kate Berlant, Patti Smith, Mandy Patinkin, Raja Feather Kelly, J'Nai Bridges, Kenan Thompson, Gavin Creel, Garth Fagan, Larry Owens, Q-Tip, Billy Porter, Conrad Tao, Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Tina Landau, Rhiannon Giddens, Aparna Nancherla, Anthony Rodriguez, Jonathan Groff, Savion Glover, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, Chris Celiz, Christine Goerke, Kelli O'Hara, Dev Hynes, Phoebe Robinson, Sara Mearns, George Saunders, Caleb Teicher, Danielle Brooks, Jeremy Denk, Idina Menzel, Sondra Radvanovsky, Gaby Moreno, Davne Tines, Jerrod Carmichael, Taylor Mac, Sutton Foster, Jessie Mueller, and Courtney ToPanga Washington, among many others. The events themselves will ignite imaginative collisions of different artforms.

Mr. Rudin and Ms. Rosenthal said, in a joint statement, "As two lifelong New Yorkers, it has been utterly devastating to see our creative community brought to an absolute standstill for a year. It's inconceivable. We both spend our lives generating opportunities for artists, so we were both thrilled to be asked by Governor Cuomo to try to ignite a spark to bring art and performance back to life for the State. The passionate enthusiasm of every person we asked to join us in this incentive is going to make this a labor of both love and invention. We're honored to be spearheading this campaign. Frankly, our most profound hope is that by the time NY PopsUp culminates on Labor Day, New York will be fully on the way to being reopened and revitalized and that this initiative, having served its purpose, will no longer be necessary. It's the spark, not the fire --- the fire is the complete return of all the arts, in their full glory, standing as they always have for the rich, emotional life of the city and state in which we both live."

During the run of the festival, NY PopsUp will grow in its scale, volume of performances, and geographical footprint, with events throughout New York State, from the Bronx to Staten Island, from Buffalo to Suffolk County, from the Hudson Valley to the Capitol.

NY PopsUp will reach its apex over the summer, as we celebrate both the 20th Anniversary of the Tribeca Film Festival (June 9 through 20) and the opening of one of New York's most highly anticipated projects: Little Island (June).

The Tribeca Film Festival was founded by Rosenthal and Robert DeNiro in the aftermath of 9/11 to revitalize Lower Manhattan. Tribeca has come to symbolize the resilience of New Yorkers, the importance of our artistic communities, and their impact on the economic activity of our city. This year's 20th event will be the first in-person film festival in the entirety of North America since the pandemic began to host its filmmakers and their premieres in front of a live audience. With over 300 ticketed and non-ticketed events, the film festival will have screenings, panel discussions, concerts, and more, in parks, on piers, on buildings, and on barges. Tribeca will reach all five boroughs in celebration of the spirit of New York with a closing night celebration of Juneteenth.

The idea for Little Island, a soon-to-open, first-of-its-kind public park on the Hudson River that merges nature and art, was dreamt up as a solution to repair and reinvigorate New York's West Side after the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy. A Diller - von Furstenberg Family Foundation project, this is yet another example of the unique power of the arts to revitalize New York in the aftermath of crisis. Little Island, which will begin hosting performances in June, will serve as a permanent, year-round home for easily accessible, multidisciplinary programming, and it will continue bringing artists and audiences together long after NY PopsUp hosts its final performance. Little Island will host its own festival, The Festival at Little Island, in conjunction with the final weeks of NY PopsUp. The Festival at Little Island, which kicks off August 11, 2021 and runs through September 5, will host an average of 16 events per day, for a total of 325 performances by approximately 500 artists.

More details about NY PopsUp will be announced soon. Please note that, given the impromptu nature and surprise element of the pop-up format, not all performances will be announced in advance. Please follow @NYPopsUp on Twitter and Instagram for the latest.

The first performances will include, among others still to be announced, the following:

Beginning Saturday, February 20 (Opening Day), members of the artists council will lead a performance at the Javits Center as a special tribute to our healthcare workers. The performance will feature Jon Batiste, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Ayodele Casel, and additional special guests joining forces for a one-of-a-kind live performance.

Throughout the day, the performers will travel around New York City, meeting audiences at various locations throughout all five boroughs in courtyards, workplaces, parks, and street corners, at the footsteps of locations such as, Flushing Post Office, Elmhurst Hospital, and St. Barnabas Hospital. Saturday will conclude with one of Jon Batiste's signature Love Riots beginning at Walt Whitman Park and ending at Golconda Playground in Brooklyn.

On Sunday, February 21, legendary choreographer Garth Fagan's company will lead a special performance at the MAGIC Spell Studios at the Rochester Institute of Technology as a tribute for the staff who have made it possible for RIT to stay open and safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a statement, Mr. Fagan said, "I remember with great pride and pleasure receiving a NYS Governor's Arts Award from then Governor Mario Cuomo and his wife Matilda in 1986. It is fitting that during our 50th anniversary season, we work with their son, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State of New York to revive the magic of live performance in Rochester, NY, simultaneously honoring our unheralded RIT essential workers. We look forward to NY PopsUp creating more opportunities for artists in New York State in the months to come!"

ALSO:

Patti Smith performing at the Brooklyn Museum in remembrance of the passing of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Partnership with "Works & Process" at the Guggenheim, that will take brilliant new performances beyond the famed Rotunda to locations around the boroughs. These collaborations include George Gershwin's anthem to New York City, Rhapsody in Blue, performed by New York's own pianist and composer, Conrad Tao, with new choreography by Caleb Teicher; The Missing Element, a beatbox and street dance collaboration, featuring Chris Celiz and Anthony Rodriguez's "Invertebrate"; and Masterz at Work Dance Family performing a brand-new dance by choreographer Courtney ToPanga Washington.

A series of performances in storefront windows, amplified out onto the street, from artists Gavin Creel, J'Nai Bridges, Davne Tines, Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber, and more.

A new live radio show hosted by Chris Thile, broadcast from stoops all over New York State, from Brooklyn and the East Village to the steps of Albany's Empire State Plaza across from the Capitol building.

A live series hosted by Chris Thile, performed on stoops all over New York, from Brooklyn and the East Village to the steps of Albanys Empire State Plaza across from the Capitol building.

A series of dynamic and participatory performances created by Ayodele Casel taking place in the lobbies of free museums throughout the City of New York, including the Brooklyn Museum and Queens Museum.

NY PopsUp, the Tribeca Film Festival, and The Festival at Little Island will together bring a total of more than 1,000 performances to New York State between February 20 and Labor Day, signaling an event unmatched in scale and unrivaled in scope.

See more here:
Governor Cuomo Marshals the Return of the Performing Arts to New York with "NY PopsUp" - ny.gov

With the dynamic nature of the technology landscape, new technologies are emerging every day. This rapid emergence of technology is fuelling the demand for new skills and knowledge among todays workforce across industries. The year 2020 has seen a surging demand for programmers and developers in diverse industries. The programming and developer communities are emerging exponentially than ever before as computers are significantly useful for organizations to process business efficiently. There are various new programming languages coming up that are suited for developers who want to grow their career.

While programming languages are set to generate more job opportunities, we have compiled a list of the best programming languages that will be in-demand in 2021.

Python is one of the widely accepted programming languages. As a fast, easy-to-use language, it is widely used to build scalable web applications in the industry. Python provides rich library support. It has a large developer community and provides a great starting platform for beginners.

JavaScript refers to the most powerful and flexible programming language of the web. It powers the dynamic behavior on most websites. Many businesses today use JavaScript-based run-time environment Node.js. It allows developers to use JavaScript for server-side scripting to build dynamic web page content before the page is sent to a users web browser.

C++ is one of the most efficient and flexible programming languages that is built to support object-oriented programming. It has rich in-built libraries as it is widely used to develop desktop and web applications on Windows, Linux, Unix, and Mac.

Despite being losing its raking year over year, Java is among the popular programming languages. It refers to a class-based, general-purpose language designed to let developers write once, run anywhere. It means that a compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation.

R programming language provides excellent built-in libraries to develop powerful machine learning algorithms. This language is used for general statistical computing as well as graphics. It can run seamlessly on various operations systems. A majority of technology companies like Google, Facebook and Uber use R language. With growing data science and machine learning trends, this programming language will bring new career opportunities in the future.

Developed and maintained by Microsoft, TypeScript is an open-source, object-oriented language. It may be used to create JavaScript applications for both client-side and server-side execution. TypeScript catches errors at compile-time so that programmers can fix them before running the code. It supports object-oriented programming features like data types, classes, enums, etc., allowing JavaScript to be used at scale.

Go language, built at Google in the year 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, is a statically-typed language and has syntax similar to that of C language. Go was designed to improve programming productivity in an era of multicore, networked machines and large codebases. As it provides numerous features such as garbage collection, dynamic-typing, type safety, and more, companies like Uber, Twitch and Google, work with the Go language.

PHP is another open-source server-side scripting programming language that is used for website development. As it is easier to learn, this language is highly recommended for beginners. PHP can be used for various programming tasks outside of the web context, such as standalone graphical applications and robotic drone control.

More here:
Best Programming Languages That Will Be In-Demand in 2021 - Analytics Insight

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Leaders from four nonprofit groups devoted to inspiring young women to pursue careers in technology and lead healthy, balanced lifestyles will explain how their organizations became stronger during the pandemic when they speak this March at SXSW EDU Online, the annual event that fosters innovation and learning within the education industry.

"Revelations from Our Pandemic Pivots" will feature representatives from TechGirlz, Philly Tech Sistas, Black Girls Code and Girls on the Run.

"There is strength and wisdom in working to lift one another through difficult times," said Amy Cliett, director of TechGirlz, a program of Creating IT Futures. "While TechGirlz learned plenty of lessons by managing our pandemic pivot, it is important for us, and others, to hear and learn from other organizations who faced similar challenges."

Cliett, who will anchor the panel discussion, will be joined by Isis Miller, community and events manager for Black Girls Code, Lauren Psimaris, director of development for Girls on the Run for Montgomery, Delaware and Chester counties in Pennsylvania, and Ashley Turner, founder of Philly Tech Sistas.

Here is the session description for the highly coveted speaking slot at SXSW EDU:

For four groups that inspire young women to pursue tech careers and healthy, balanced lifestyles, the pandemic was more than an operational challenge. It was an existential crisis. How do you comply with COVID-19 lockdown and distancing protocols when direct, in-person interaction between students, instructors and mentors is the backbone of your organization's mission? Join a panel of executives from TechGirlz, Black Girls Code, Tech Sistas and Girls on the Run who have some answers to share.

"We are proud to share this virtual stage with organizations that not only faced similar challenges but also managed to not just survive, but thrive," Cliett added. "The remarkable pivots and achievements of these four non-profits during a global pandemic, especially given limited resources, have produced lessons that can be applied to any organization, non-profit or for-profit, on how to creatively manage through a crisis."

Information on attending SXSW EDU and the schedule of sessions can be found at http://www.sxswedu.com.

About TechGirlz

TechGirlz is a nonprofit program of Creating IT Futures that fosters a love for technology in middle school girls. Our free, open-source technology courses can be used by anyone to inspire curiosity, impart confidence and build community as the foundation for the application of technology throughout a girl's career and life. TechShopz courses have been taught by volunteer instructors in several states and four countries to tens of thousands of girls. To learn more or find out how you can participate, please visit http://www.techgirlz.org/.

About Creating IT Futures

Founded in 1998 by CompTIA, Creating IT Futures is a 501(c)(3) charity with the mission of helping populations under-represented in the information technology industry and individuals who are lacking in opportunity to prepare for, secure, and be successful in IT careers. Learn more at http://www.creatingITfutures.org.

About Black Girls Code

Black Girls CODE is devoted to showing the world that black girls can code and do so much more. By reaching out to the community through workshops and after school programs, Black Girls CODE introduces computer coding lessons to young girls from underrepresented communities in programming languages such as Scratch or Ruby on Rails. Black Girls CODE has set out to prove to the world that girls of every color have the skills to become the programmers of tomorrow. Learn more at http://blackgirlscode.org/.

About Girls on the Run of Southeastern Suburban, PA

Girls on the Run is a transformational, physical activity based positive youth development program for girls in the third through eighth grades. The girls are taught life skills through dynamic interactive lessons and running games. The program culminates with the girls being physically and emotionally prepared to complete a celebratory 5K running event. The goal of the program is to unleash confidence through accomplishment while establishing a lifetime appreciation of health and fitness. Girls on the Run of Southeastern Suburban, Pa is an independent council of Girls on the Run International, which has a network of 200+ locations across the United States and Canada. For more information, visit http://www.gotrpa.org

About Philly Tech Sistas

Philly Tech Sistas is an organization aimed at helping women of color gain technical and professional skills in order to work, thrive, and move up in the tech industry. We do this by providing intro to programming workshops and professional development events that build leadership, confidence and community. Our vision is to partner with tech companies throughout the Philadelphia area to help bridge the diversity, equity and inclusion gap by providing a greater pipeline of diverse talent. Learn more atwww.phillytechsistas.org/.

Press Contact:

Gloria Bell

Events and Marketing Manager

TechGirlz

gloria@techgirlz.org/ 267-909-2308

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/techgirlz-leads-sxsw-edu-online-panel-on-surviving-and-thriving-through-a-pandemic-301218688.html

SOURCE Creating IT Futures

Excerpt from:
TechGirlz Leads SXSW EDU Online Panel on Surviving and Thriving Through a Pandemic - Daily American Online

What is your background?: I grew up as an army brat moving around quite a bit as a child and teenager. I come from a family of hard workers and service members. My mother works in education, my father is a retired Army Officer, and my younger brother is currently serving in the Air Force. I also have men in my extended family that served in WWII, including a great-great-uncle, Jimmie Wheeler, who served as a Tuskegee Airman. I spent my formative years mostly in South Florida and Arizona, and high school years in Georgia. My previous education and career have taken me to places like New Hampshire and Las Vegas, Nevada. I found myself in Iowa after my partner, Dr. Roberts, started working for the University of Iowa, developing curriculum, managing the observatories, and doing outreach work.

What brought you to Kirkwood and why?: I was unhappy in my previous career and found myself limited to unsatisfying employment outside of it. For a few years, I was interested in software development, but my previous schooling and professional experiences limited me in the ability to enter the profession. After deciding that I would like to go back to school and make a career change, I began looking at Kirkwood. The face-to-face instruction, small classroom size, and Computer Software Development program ultimately led me to the decision that I should apply. Seeing Kirkwoods offerings was the first time I encountered a feasible route to a new career path that I was passionate about and that my previous degrees could not offer me.

What is your program of study and what interests you about it?: I am a second-year student in the Computer Software Development program, specializing in Java Programming and .NET Development. I am fascinated by things like the development process, software architecture, design models, prototyping, DevOps, and application development. The program has transformed my entire way of thinking and conceptualizing ideas. It is incredibly rigorous, and the challenges that I encounter are always intriguing and rewarding.

Are you involved in anything else on campus? If so, what and why?: When time permits, I have enjoyed participating in the Cyber Defense Club, STEM Club, Phi Theta Kappa, and LSAMP. Through these affiliations, I have participated in competitions, listened to fascinating lectures, and attended conferences.

Are you involved in anything off of campus?: Off-campus, through the support and guidance of the Career Services office, I was able to network and obtain employment as a part-time Software Quality Assurance Tester at the beginning of my enrollment in the Computer Software Development Program. This part-time employment has allowed me to gain real industry experience alongside my coursework at Kirkwood.

What do you do for fun?: For fun, I enjoy camping with my partner and dog, playing complicated board games with friends and neighbors, working on open-source software and personal applications, playing Dungeons & Dragons with friends and family, and cooking and baking at home.

Where do you see yourself in five years?: In five years, I see myself developing software and making architectural decisions as a Full-Stack software engineer. I would love to work for an organization with a mission that gives back to society. Moreover, I envision myself contributing to open-source software projects, volunteering in software-related projects, and developing software independently.

View post:
January Student of the Month: Chantal Shirley Newsroom - Kirkwood Report