Today's Tech Digest - Jun 25, 2020

How Will 5G Networks Get Faster? Densification

The most basic form of densification involves increasing the number of cell towers. Problem is, that’s not really easy, particularly because network carriers are running into challenges with getting approval from local governments and landowners for adding new transmission points. The situation has become so challenging, in fact, that the US FCC recently had to issue a ruling clarifying the rules for 5G network infrastructure deployment. The new ruling essentially limits how much local governments can slow upgrades to existing network infrastructure, such as cell towers. Additionally, most of the early concepts for 5G densification depended on building and installing a lot of small cells—essentially shipping box- or even shoebox-size devices that could be used to enhance the network. The problem is, most of the small cell efforts were targeted towards mmWave, and it’s clear now that those efforts (and the technology overall) are going to take much longer to widely deploy than initially expected. Not only is it difficult to get small cells installed, the costs for the equipment remain high—and the ROI isn’t as clear for many network providers as they first thought.

Silos, Politics and Delivering Software Products

Misalignments between teams can focus on priorities, scope or direction. Imagine that a team finds itself blocked as it is unable to finish a piece of work until work is completed by another team. The other team might not consider this a high priority item for them, in which case there is a misalignment of priorities. Or the other team might consider the work outside of their scope, in which case it needs to be resolved who should deliver the work. Or more seriously it could be a disagreement about direction - the other team might understand the request but consider it a bad request that they do not want to see fulfilled ... A common practice is to dedicate teams to particular features with an intended system. Each team has members with different specialisations and is intended to be able to build a ‘vertical slice’ of functionality that could be delivered to users. For example, the team wouldn’t contain only frontend developers so that they would have to wait for backend developers from another team in order to progress. Teams that provide outputs for other software teams rather than for users are called component teams rather than feature teams.

Office life will never be the same again. Here's what comes next

Research suggests that, prior to the coronavirus outbreak, only about 5% of the UK's 33 million workers worked mainly from home. Despite the regulations, it is relatively easy for employers to refuse a request for home working on one of the prescribed grounds outlined in the legislation, and employees have little opportunity for recourse. As such, presenteeism ruled: workers needed to be seen in the office to ensure they were working. Now, of course, everything has changed. As Wincanton CIO Richard Gifford recognises, the lockdown-enforced shift to remote working is a total reversal of the usual approach in most big companies until now. "Our HR policy was written in a way that previously, if you wanted to work at home, you could, but you'd have to come in and give some good reasons and a decision would be made. Now we're saying, 'you will work at home and you need to give me some good reasons why you need to be in the office'. So, it's a complete turnaround," he says. Gifford has had to maintain a limited on-site presence to manage his firm's on-premise data centre during the outbreak. Yet the vast majority of the firm's 4,500 office-based are working at home – and the result, aided by a solid VPN and a bunch of cloud applications, is likely to be a long-term shift in the perception of remote working.

Three Painful Lessons You Can Avoid with Your APIs and Mobile Apps

If something goes wrong with a website or even an API, you can publish an updated version without the end user even being aware of it. Not so with mobile. If you release a new version, Apple and Google could take hours or days to approve and publish it. Even if you get it fast-tracked, and it is in the App Store hours later, you have no guarantee that the end-user will install the updated version with the fix. Which is why it is absolutely critical to have an API and mobile strategy and follow best practices when designing, developing, and publishing your mobile apps and APIs. ... When projects start going over-budget or over-time, proper testing is often one of the first things that gets cut or reduced. Your APIs and Mobile Apps need. You need a plan for this as well because having a few people randomly using the app IS NOT TESTING! As an enterprise business, you absolutely must have thorough test plans. This needs to be created by an experienced, senior QA Architect. If you are outsourcing your testing, get involved to see who is creating the plan and have a 2nd (or 3rd) set of eyes on the draft and final plans to be sure it is a solid and thorough plan.

Goodbye Xamarin.Forms, Hello MAUI!

MAUI is essentially the next evolution of Xamarin.Forms. It is a framework that will allow us to create native user interfaces for desktop and mobile devices, and the most surprising thing about this is that it has a single code base and a single project. In other words, no more different heads for each mobile OS (iOS and Android)! Alongside MVVM, MAUI will also support The Elm Architecture popularly known as the MVU (Model View Update) design pattern. MVU encourages a code-first development experience that rapidly updates the UI. Microsoft understands the power of the MVU pattern and has introduced a new unified way to build cross-platform native front ends from a single code base. ... With the arrival of MAUI, we will have a single project. We can also choose deployment between different devices or emulators even if we have a single project. But what about application resources like images? The tooling will manage shared sources on each platform as well as the management and creation of images adapted to each platform. ... MAUI is a renewed Xamarin.Forms with similar characteristics but greater features. The structure of Xamarin.Native (Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android) will not change, only the name in .NET 6 will.

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