Software Engineering Insights

In the daily routines of healthcare professionals, the handling of sensitive patient data is a critical responsibility. However, storing this information on local computers, once the norm, has become a risky proposition. The reason? A growing wave of ransomware attacks that have the power to paralyze entire healthcare institutions. Therefore, if you're a healthcare practitioner, safeguarding your organization's data by backing it up with a HIPAA-compliant cloud storage service is not merely a wise choice; it's imperative.

Growing up, sci-fi movies always fascinated me. Remember the distress message from Princess Leia, in the form of a 3D hologram in Star Wars. Or the video calling scene from the movie Thunderbirds. By far one of my favorites is the character, J.A.R.V.I.S. an AI (Artificial Intelligence) from Iron Man, which also resembles the innovation of chatbots in today's time. Sci-fi has been the inspiration behind many such innovations.

The era of carrying bulky wallets stuffed with various cards, receipts, and cash has completely faded. We've entered a new era of financial transactions, where the demand for contactless payments has skyrocketed. This shift from cash to digital payment options eventually has led to increased downloads for peer-to-peer (P2P) payment apps such as Venmo, Paytm, and Google Pay.

Less than two decades ago, Deep Learning (DL), or the simulation of human neural networks, was only a concept limited to theory. Fast-forward to the present day and it is being leveraged to solve real-world problems such as converting audio-based speech to text transcripts and in the various implementations of computer vision. The underlying mechanism behind these applications is known as the Attention Mechanism or Attention Model.

When it comes to online music streaming, Spotify's impact on the music industry is undeniable. Founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, Spotify was created to tackle music piracy and has successfully attracted millions of users who choose to pay for their music, which has significantly reduced piracy. 

The incorporation of information technology since the mid-90s increased productivity among different sectors around the world. There’s no two ways about it. Healthcare on the other hand was one industry that took its own course to transition from a largely paper-based process to digitization.

Whether it's shopping, job interviews, education, or payments, more and more people are making the switch to the virtual sphere. And it makes sense - doing things digitally is not only cost-effective but also faster. For instance, these instant payment services; when it comes to paying, why bother with cash when you can just click a few buttons and be done?

Once programmers are done writing a piece of code, they need to expose the code over a network for other applications to utilize its functionalities. This is done through web services. Web services are software functions for exchanging data between different applications. SOAP and REST are two examples of protocols or definitions that let web services communicate with each other.

Cybercriminals are constantly waiting for opportunities to exploit your organization's system security flaws. While the motivations of these hackers vary, be it political, financial, or just to gain notoriety, they all constitute a severe threat to your company's confidential data. There are several points of entry known as security vulnerabilities that are defined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) community.

As the programming ecosystem proliferates, a number of frameworks, libraries, and tools are being introduced to ease the software development cycle. Not just do they reduce the lines of code, they are mitigating the time between prototyping to production.