How Can Managers Work More Efficiently with IT?

Would you rather work under someone who is an excellent developer but lacks people skills or leadership capabilities - or for someone that has excellent people skills, communicates well, and is a great leader but has limited understanding of productive coding practices? That’s not to say that the choice is one or the other but in many professional situations it does.

Managing an IT staff comes with numerous challenges, especially if the manager has no previous experience with the coding necessary for completing the project. Managing a business and IT's execution of tasks vary greatly in required skill sets, but it's important to find a cohesive and cooperative middle ground in order to see a project to its end. To fully grasp the intricacies of IT's involvement in the project at hand, managers can do the following to help further their efforts.

Get a basic understanding of coding and technical practices necessary for the project at hand by taking the time to research and practice enough to get a grip on the concept. This will allow managers insight on what their IT folks are really working on daily. Expertise in a programming language is not required, only an overview of the stuff that matters, i.e. understanding the concept of OOP (Object Oriented Programming.) Having this knowledge cannot be overlooked and will gain respect among multiple spectrums in the organization.

Getting involved with the IT, or Internet Technology industry, is a way for you to break into a variety of potential coveted career paths and job openings. Whether you prefer working with the back-end of programming or if you enjoy improve user experience while browsing online, there are many different in-demand IT skills that are useful to obtain today if you are seeking a career in the tech industry yourself.

Cloud Computing

Working with cloud computing, otherwise known as "the cloud", requires you to work within various types of servers that store and access data globally from any location. With the increase in mobile usage, cloud computing is becoming even more prevalent in today's society. When you want to work with cloud computing, understanding the basics of programming and network security is a must. Working in cloud computing is a way to help with building new applications, expanding companies online as well as allowing anyone internationally to locate and access a specific blog, website or mobile app.

UX Design

UX Design is also known as user experience design. A user experience designer specializes in understanding the usability and overall experience a web visitor has when browsing on a site or blog. UX design is essential to ensure that all visitors on a website are capable of navigating the blog properly and accessing the site's content with ease, regardless of the browser they are using or the type of device that is being used to access the site itself. Cross-browser compatibility and ensuring that all websites you are working with are accessible via mobile platforms is another responsibility of many UX designers today. Working in UX design is highly recommended if you believe you have an eye for "good" web design and if you have an interest in improving the overall experience web users for a specific audience have when visiting the blog or website you represent or that you are building for yourself.

IT Security

IT security is one of the fastest-growing positions throughout the entire IT industry and field. IT security requires you to understand network infrastructures as well as how to properly manage each server individually to provide security and protection from potential hackers and online thieves looking to steal sensitive data and information. Maintaining the security of a network and all servers for a company is only becoming more popular with the expansion of mobile phone usage along with the growth of the Internet altogether.

Understanding the variety of IT skills that are in demand today can help you to better decide on a path that is right for you. The more you understand about various IT skills, the easier it is to find a position or career in your future that is most suitable for the type of work you enjoy. Whether you are looking to develop new apps or if you are interested in managing the security of company servers, there are hundreds of positions and skills that are in demand in the IT industry today.

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The RSS feed, which commonly stands for Really Simple Syndication, is an internet protocol that helps spread the availability of frequently published or updated Internet content.

RSS Benefits for an Internet Content Provider or Blogger
The use of an RSS feed saves immeasurable time for a content provider. When an interested person subscribes to an RSS feed, the owner of that feed now has a way to reach large numbers of people without having to resort to spamming techniques. The RSS feed also allows a content provider to send the requested topical information without specifically asking, every time, to those people who have subscribed. The content provider uses a program, written in XML code to make the information they post available to each person that has requested a subscription to that particular RSS feed.

RSS Benefits for the Average Internet User
The Internet grows larger by the minute. It is easy for a person to have information overload. The use of an RSS feed gives an individual more control over what information they see while on the Internet. It is also very useful for anyone that wants to stay up to date. Subscribing to the RSS feed for a topic of interest automatically provides the subscriber continued availability of the latest information on that topic. The Internet user relies on a small program called an RSS Feeder to gather the information on the RSS feeds to which they have subscribed.

Most browsers these days have built in RSS readers making that gathering the desired information easier than ever to accomplish. Joining an RSS feed is a very simple thing to accomplish.
 

RSS Benefits for Small Businesses

More and more Small Business owners are adapting targeted online marketing campaigns such as RSS Feeds in order to provide relevant content to new and existing customers. Maintaining web content such as:  company news; contests; promotional events; related articles; notifications; product launches; directories; and newsletters are examples of ways of staying in touch with customers in any niche market.  As search engines retrieve information from RSS Feeds and content is syndicated to other websites, chances of increased traffic are inevitable.  For active websites, RSS feeds are invaluable tools for small business owners.

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In programming, memory leaks are a common issue, and it occurs when a computer uses memory but does not give it back to the operating system. Experienced programmers have the ability to diagnose a leak based on the symptoms. Some believe every undesired increase in memory usage is a memory leak, but this is not an accurate representation of a leak. Certain leaks only run for a short time and are virtually undetectable.

Memory Leak Consequences

Applications that suffer severe memory leaks will eventually exceed the memory resulting in a severe slowdown or a termination of the application.

How to Protect Code from Memory Leaks?

Preventing memory leaks in the first place is more convenient than trying to locate the leak later. To do this, you can use defensive programming techniques such as smart pointers for C++.  A smart pointer is safer than a raw pointer because it provides augmented behavior that raw pointers do not have. This includes garbage collection and checking for nulls.

If you are going to use a raw pointer, avoid operations that are dangerous for specific contexts. This means pointer arithmetic and pointer copying. Smart pointers use a reference count for the object being referred to. Once the reference count reaches zero, the excess goes into garbage collection. The most commonly used smart pointer is shared_ptr from the TR1 extensions of the C++ standard library.

Static Analysis

The second approach to memory leaks is referred to as static analysis and attempts to detect errors in your source-code. CodeSonar is one of the effective tools for detection. It provides checkers for the Power of Ten coding rules, and it is especially competent at procedural analysis. However, some might find it lagging for bigger code bases.

How to Handle a Memory Leak

For some memory leaks, the only solution is to read through the code to find and correct the error. Another one of the common approaches to C++ is to use RAII, which an acronym for Resource Acquisition Is Initialization. This approach means associating scoped objects using the acquired resources, which automatically releases the resources when the objects are no longer within scope. RAII has the advantage of knowing when objects exist and when they do not. This gives it a distinct advantage over garbage collection. Regardless, RAII is not always recommended because some situations require ordinary pointers to manage raw memory and increase performance. Use it with caution.

The Most Serious Leaks

Urgency of a leak depends on the situation, and where the leak has occurred in the operating system. Additionally, it becomes more urgent if the leak occurs where the memory is limited such as in embedded systems and portable devices.

To protect code from memory leaks, people have to stay vigilant and avoid codes that could result in a leak. Memory leaks continue until someone turns the system off, which makes the memory available again, but the slow process of a leak can eventually prejudice a machine that normally runs correctly.

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