Category: Education (Page 1 of 2)

Lectures, guest lectures and so forth.

Recent Progress in Digitally Supported Education

Zurich University of Applied Sciences is a campus-based university with high quality presence education in bachelor, master and continuous education programmes. There are situations in which no presence is possible – most recently involuntarily invoked by the COVID situation – where smart digital solutions help with educational procedures in online or hybrid teaching modalities. Additionally, there are also situations in which such solutions might be helpful as a general complement to all teaching modalities including presence. Eventually, the goal is to ensure highly qualified alumni to boost the local economy and to fill the pipeline of next-generation researchers. A lot of the public debate has been on lectures alone. In this blog post, recent progress on digitally supported labs and examination is being summarised, demonstrating that Zurich University of Applied Sciences is also active on the solution side with novel science-based tool, service and solution designs. We are looking forward to colleagues from other institutions to discuss and advance these solutions further with us.

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Serverless Code Linting

For software development to succeed in Switzerland, that is to justify the relatively high development cost, it is essential to offer unique advantages in terms of timeliness and quality assurance. At Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we are proud to have contributed a number of tools for quality assessment and linting especially for cloudware – among others, the first Docker Compose checker, the first multi-Dockerfile linter, and the first advanced Helm and SAM consistency scans.

As we also teach Python programming to first-year engineering students, we consider it important to encourage the frequent use of linting tools. This blog post introduces such a service, naturally doubling as informal case study on how to deliver SaaS linting functionality without much effort through serverless technologies.

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Coronavirus Mapping as a Service

Note: This post does not contain any medical advice or suggestions on how to act and react. If you are looking for that, you are looking in the wrong place.

Economy and society in Switzerland are currently highly affected by the spreading second version of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes the associated infectious desease (COVID-19). The World Health Organisation (WHO) has classified the virus outbreak as PHEIC on January 30 and as pandemy on March 11. In Switzerland, the state emergency level Eminent/Special Situation was reached on February 28, and further restrictions led de-facto to the subsequent level Extraordinary Situation on March 13. This blog post reports on how the outbreak evolution can be continuously visualised as a reliable service with off-the-shelf tools.

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Reflections on Teaching Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development

With the proliferation of hybrid cloud, cross-cloud and post-cloud environments, finding the right concepts and tools to produce mixed-technology applications and services remains challenging. At Zurich University of Applied Sciences, a course on Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development (SCAD) prepares bachelor students in computer science for facing these challenges. We argue that this is the first such lecture in Switzerland and probably even in the world. Three years after reflecting on Internet Service Prototyping teaching, this mid-semester blog post sums up the evolution of the field, explains the course design of SCAD and briefly reports on the lab results.

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Colloquium on Adaptive Software and Processes for the IoT

Adaptivity and adaptability are key characteristics of modern software to cope with sometimes unpredictable changes in the environment including system and user behaviour. Modern cloud-native architectures for instance foresee the case-by-case handling of decisions – e.g. to decide whether using a provider database or hosting one yourself – at the application or workflow level based on knowledge and rules or emergent behaviour. In workflows representing data flows from connected devices, the (self-)adaptivity should be modelled and supported by context-aware systems.

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Invited talks in Sharjah: Computation over stealthy data

The University of Sharjah is the national university of the Emirate of Sharjah in the UAE. Located in the University City, the world’s largest campus, its buildings convey the uniqueness that underpins its research activities, including in computer science and engineering. We are proud to have started cooperative research and the exchange of researchers many months ago. In this blog post, our latest joint work on multi-paradigm computating in a trilateral constellation with Penta is presented.

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Summer school on software evolution – Summary

From September 2 to 4, 2019, Tampere University hosted the INFORTE.fi-supported summer school on Software Evolution: From Monolithic to Cloud-Native. The Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences contributed with five lectures (and one coincidental serverless meetup talk) to increase theoretic knowledge and practical skills of Finnish doctoral students and developers on microservices and software engineering for the cloud. All presentations are available online but as usual the slides do not capture discussions and industry relevance, so read on to get to know more about this.

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Colloquium on Developer-Targeted Performance Engineering

The eternal software circle of life continues to pose non-trivial challenges. Developers write code, run tests, push and/or deploy, perhaps leading to more tests, and finally see their software used in production. Eventually, they might see everything working out correctly or rather not, as indicated by log messages, user complaints and other side channels, and even more eventually, when nothing else gets in the way, they might even attempt to fix the problem at any code location which might have a probability of contributing to the issue.

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Students: Invitation to Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development

Bachelor students of computer science at Zurich University of Applied Sciences focus a lot on software development. Software is never developed in the blue; rather, software needs a concrete environment to function and to deliver value. In ‘Programming’ (1st/2nd semester) and ‘Software Development’ (3rd/4th semester), you learn some basic skills. In ‘Systems-oriented Programming’ (2nd semester), you apply these skills to predefined systems with some constraints. In ‘Web Development’ (3rd semester), you apply these skills to another environment in which there is a lot of pace through new technologies. In ‘Game Development’ (5th semester), you develop for specific interactive scenarios, and in ‘Mobile Applications’ (5th semester, you develop user-facing apps for common mobile platforms.

One of the most fascinating and economically important areas is the development of applications which run in the cloud. You may access them with web or mobile devices, but you still cannot see them! Still, they are very powerful, scalable to millions of users, and interconnected across cloud providers and with various backend systems such as databases, message queues and key-value stores. This is why we offer SCAD, a new elective module on Serverless and Cloud-native Application Development.

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