Capgemini CoP Architecture NL evening on Agile & Architecture: the continuing discussion...

How do you ensure that your architecture is kept up-to-date and actively used when working with Agile/SCRUM teams or in a SAFe organized company? And how do you break through the demand-supply culture between business and ICT (which is crucial for being "agile")?

What we did this evening...

During our CoP Architecture NL evening on "Agile & Architecture", we shared knowledge and discussed our experiences on the role of the architect and his/her work in an Agile context.

Our colleague Ben Kooistra gave us an excellent introduction in Agile/SCRUM/SAFe and the position & work of the architect. He also teaches the Capgemini Academy "Architecture in Agile context - Practitioner training".








In our CoP Architecture NL we did a brief study on the experiences of our architect colleagues who work for clients who work to a greater or lesser extent according to Agile / SAFe. This evening we shared and discussed the results with the attendees. It seems that our findings are broadly supported.



The CJIB (Centraal Justitieel Incassobureau) also shared their Agile & Architecture experiences with us. A lot has been achieved there but (also) there is still a lot to do.

During a forum discussion in which I was one of the panel members, we had the opportunity of discussing questions and standpoints with the audience. Lively discussions, and lots of inspiration!

This will certainly have a follow-up, we are actually already thinking of an ongoing discussion within the Wednesday Evening Training.

Thanks Ben Kooistra for sharing your knowledge with us! Thanks to Birgitte Starrenburg, Dennis Hermsdorf, Martin Brommer, Mirko van der Maat for the organization and contribution!

Learn more? Join us?

​​​​​​​Contact me to learn more on Capgemini and our Architect Community of Practice.

Wednesday Evening Training #JuniorEdition: experimenting with the Arduino micro controller at the Leidsche Rijn Centrum's library

This friday afternoon, we held a Wednesday Evening Training at the Leidsche Rijn Centrum's  library, especially for kids. Our IoT champion, Aishwarya Dhall, had prepared a nice handson lab on programming a LED panel with the Arduino micro controller.

So what’s an Arduino? An Arduino is like a little computer (micro controller) where you can read input of a (example) sensor and can control your output. Like lights, LCD screen, speaker etc. It’s easy to program the Arduino.

After an introduction on the Arduino, programming and basic electronics, the kids got to work creating the electronic circuit and programming the Arduino.

Thanks Aish and others for sharing your knowledge with us! That's all in the game in the Wednesday Evening Training (also on Friday afternoon)!

 

Further study

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post or play around with the technology? Here are some links…

On the Arduino: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino
The official site: https://www.arduino.cc/
Getting started: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/HomePage
Development tools: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
Basic labs & explanation: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage-0007
Keeping up to date: https://twitter.com/arduino
A nice intro video (in only 8 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtLwoNJ6klE
10 Awesome Beginner Arduino Projects: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/RoyTobby/10-awesome-beginner-arduino-projects-78a6a6
Arduino project - Adaptive LED Morse Code Decoder and Timer Interrupt: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/shjin/adaptive-led-morse-code-decoder-and-timer-interrupt-8d18a7

Next week's Wednesday Evening Training

Next week we will continue our sessions on Practical 3D Graphics & Programming with Quincy Jacobs and Remko Haagsma. We'll be diving in Unity once again.

Great stuff, looking forward to next week!

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an mail. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #27's Wednesday Evening Training: A good old IoT "klusavond" featuring the Arduino microcontroller and Mozilla WebThings

Two topics, this evening, on Internet of Things (IoT)...

An introduction of the Arduino technology with some nice handson labs by Aishwarya Dhall

We do this on a regular basis in our Wednesday Evening Trainings, to give our colleagues the opportunity to catch up on IoT any time during the year. More experienced colleagues continued with their own labs. In this way everyone can acquire knowledge and experience with this technology at their own pace.

A first exploration van Mozilla WebThings (by me)

Well, this is quite a new thing and quite promising!
As a result of Mozilla's Project Things, Mozilla WebThings is an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web.

It consists, roughly, of the following products:

• WebThings Gateway: a software distribution for smart home gateways which allows users to directly monitor and control their smart home.
• WebThings Framework: A collection of re-usable software components to help developers build their own functionality (web things).
• Things UI: a unified web interface to monitor and control all smart home devices.

The interesting thing is that WebThings allows users to directly monitor and control their smart home over the web, without a middleman. Yes, no subscription for some kind of portal needed. This smart home gateways is focused on privacy, security and interoperability.

Installation and setup of WebThings is quite easy. In tonight's Wednesday Evening Training we just did that, and brainstormed on the applications and next steps we're going to explore next.

Interesting stuff, we'll definitely continue with WebThings!

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post?

On IoT technology
What is an IoT Gateway? (SAP EA Explorer - Short Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ObesqWDpEo
Mozilla IoT - Mozilla IoT team: https://github.com/mozilla-iot/

On Mozilla WebThings
Mozilla Project Things: https://labs.mozilla.org/projects/project-things
What Mozilla WebThings Has to Offer for the IoT: https://blog.paessler.com/what-mozilla-webthings-has-to-offer-for-the-iot
Introducing Mozilla WebThings: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/introducing-mozilla-webthings
Simple server for WiFi101, ESP8266, or ESP32 boards compliant with Mozilla's proposed WoT API: https://github.com/mozilla-iot/webthing-arduino
Mozilla WebThings - An open platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web: https://iot.mozilla.org/
Easy Home Automation With Mozilla IoT & Raspberry Pi - Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maSdWQHSzCg
Getting Started with the WebThings Gateway for Raspberry Pi®: https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/gateway-getting-started-guide.html
Mozilla WebThings Documentation - A guide to using the WebThings Gateway and WebThings Framework: https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/

On demo's and examples (video's from my YouTube channel)
Mozilla Project Things Workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEHL3ZYS790&list=PLSiMhBs48YvXSmJyFMt3eYOG12Llcqyi-&index=23&t=0s
A Universal IoT Gateway? Setting up Mozilla IOT Gateway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZexWQJtni4&list=PLSiMhBs48YvXSmJyFMt3eYOG12Llcqyi-&index=24&t=0s
Mozilla IoT Framework - Kathy Giori (Mozilla): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWCa6byiPco&list=PLSiMhBs48YvXSmJyFMt3eYOG12Llcqyi-&index=25&t=0s
mozilla-iot-gateway-sensors-20180406rzr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haKrPetGmg&list=PLSiMhBs48YvXSmJyFMt3eYOG12Llcqyi-&index=26&t=0s
mozilla things gateway - orange pi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4eTym_TVFo&list=PLSiMhBs48YvXSmJyFMt3eYOG12Llcqyi-&index=27&t=0s

On communities
Mozilla IoT GitHub Community: https://github.com/mozilla-iot/
Mozilla IoT - Mozilla IoT team: https://github.com/mozilla-iot/
Mozilla IoT - Discussion board: https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/iot
Mozilla IRC: https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC
MozIoT - The Mozilla IoT Team (a small team inside the Emerging Technologies department at Mozilla, working on the Internet and Web of Things): https://wiki.mozilla.org/MozIoT

On related topics
Mozilla IoT - Supported hardware: https://github.com/mozilla-iot/wiki/wiki/Supported-Hardware
Raspberry Pi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/
Balena Etcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily: https://www.balena.io/etcher/
Other Mozilla projects: https://labs.mozilla.org/projects/

Next week's Wednesday Evening Training

Next week we will have an update on our exploration of storing, querying and visualizing software architecture models. We’ll share the prototypes and discuss the proceedings of our research on using graph/noSQL/RDF databases like Neo4j and Apache Jena and 3djs / 3D force graphs.

Looking forward to next week!

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

What happened to the posts of previous Wednesday Evening Trainings?
Well, to be honest I am a bit behind with my blog posts. I hope to catch up with my work in the coming period.

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an mail. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #22's Wednesday Evening Training: Quantum Computing, a practical introduction using IBM technology (part 7)

Continuing our exploration of Quantum Computing in our Wednesday Evening Training, we had a nice introduction in Quantum Computing and the math behind from one of our Quantum Computing experts: Ilyas Sener.

We've discussed ports, matrix calculations, applications and made comparisons to Turing based computers.

We also had a good brainstorm on topics that we like to discuss next Wednesday Evening Training sessions on Quantum computing. I'll soon give an update on what will be on our agenda the upcoming months.

Interesting topics! We'll definitely continue exploring Quantum Computing!

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post?

Take a look at my post: "Quantum computing: an introduction and a lot of links to resources":
https://hansrontheweb.blogspot.com/2018/11/quantum-computing-introduction.html

Or visit my YouTube channel on Quantum Computing: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSiMhBs48YvWecXqKP00NGuiP5UD6RoCk

Next week's Wednesday Evening Training

Next week we will have an introduction on Android Studio by Melchior Vrolijk. We'll get basic knowledge on how to use the Android Studio IDE for developing Native Android apps, run native apps using the integrated emulator and on our own physical Android devices.

Looking forward to next week!

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an mail. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #17's Wednesday Evening Training: Quantum Computing & Encryption

On the 24th of April, the 6th edition of the Wednesday Evening Training on Quantum computing was held.

The topic was:  how quantum computing could effect encryption.

In this session, we had a great discussion on how long the most modern supercomputer would take to calculate every single answer in an RSA 2048 bit encryption calculation. And how a Quantum Computer could help.

The time that it would take was estimated to be much longer then the universe will be in existence. That is why this form of encryption is very secure and used everywhere today. However,  immense quantum parallelism would enable quantum computers to break RSA within days or hours.

This would mean that current cryptography would be completely useless when quantum computers are ready. To make matters worse, loads of data is already logged today by companies and governments. This means that data that is secure today, will not be protected tomorrow. We should, therefore, start to think about how long we want to keep our data safe.


Thanks Julian, for sharing your knowledge with us!

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post?

Take a look at my post: "Quantum computing: an introduction and a lot of links to resources":
https://hansrontheweb.blogspot.com/2018/11/quantum-computing-introduction.html

Or visit my YouTube channel on Quantum Computing: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSiMhBs48YvWecXqKP00NGuiP5UD6RoCk

On specific topics:

Bra–ket notation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation

Quantum Mechanics Concepts: 1 Dirac Notation and Photon Polarisation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBh7Xqbh5JQ

Conjugate transpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugate_transpose

Bell state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_state

Quantum Computation: a journey on the Bloch sphere: https://medium.com/@quantum_wa/quantum-computation-a-journey-on-the-bloch-sphere-50cc9d73530

Bloch sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere

Bloch Sphere Simulation: https://eecs.ceas.uc.edu/~cahaymm/blochsphere/index.html

What are theta, phi and lambda in cu1(theta, ctl, tgt) and cu3(theta, phi, lam, ctl, tgt)? What are the rotation matrices being used? https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2707/what-are-theta-phi-and-lambda-in-cu1theta-ctl-tgt-and-cu3theta-phi-lam

The Bloch Sphere (PDF): http://www.vcpc.univie.ac.at/~ian/hotlist/qc/talks/bloch-sphere.pdf

Grover’s Algorithm: https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/proxy/tutorial/full-user-guide/004-Quantum_Algorithms/070-Grover's_Algorithm.html

Grover - A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9605043

Next week's Wednesday Evening Training

Next week we'll have a good old "klusavond" in which we will have multiple topics, like the Arduino Micro processor, IoT  Neo4j, WebGL (continuation of this week's session) et al.

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an mail. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #16/17/18's Wednesday Evening Trainings: a quick preview...

Apologies! I'm a bit behind with writing my blog articles.

For that, already some impressions of week #16/17/18's Wednesday Evening Trainings on:

• Modeling patterns & solutions in Archimate using Archi & an update on how to use Neo4j with Archimate & Archi
• Quantum Computing, a practical introduction using IBM technology (part 6)
• WebGL: recap and continuation of implementing WebGL graphics

Blog articles will be published as soon as possible!

Week #15's Wednesday Evening Training: Whack-a-LED!

In this week's Wednesday Evening Training, we had a great Arduino Micro controller lab: "Whack-a-LED!"

One of our Arduino champions, Aishwarya Dhall, prepared a nice little game implemented using the Arduino Micro Controller. The game is based on the well known game "Whac-A-Mole".

Using 4 push buttons, 4 LED's and a little Arduino program, the game is implemented. The LED's are lit one at a time in random order. The player must hit the corresponding button in time to proceed with the game and gain points. This requires a timer and some interrupts.

Nice lab to get started using the Arduino!

There was a special welcome to the students of the Hogeschool Utrecht who we assisted programming a LED panel with the Arduino.

Of course, there was also plenty of opportunity for other projects & topics. Even the first ever photograph of a black hole was discussed. That's agile learning ;) !

Thanks Aish and others for sharing your knowledge with us! That's all in the game in the Wednesday Evening Training!

Next Wednesday Evening Training...

Next Wednesday Evening Training, we'll continue our architecture series with modelling architecture patterns in Archimate and an introduction in Archi, a free Archimate editor. We'll also discuss proceedings on

Further study

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post or play around with the technology? Here are some links…

On the Whac-A-Mole game:
Whac-A-Mole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whac-A-Mole

On Arduino:
Arduino Interrupts Tutorial (explanations, 2 demo's/labs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtyOiTw0oQc
My YouTube playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSiMhBs48YvV86iiXFJY-BRxOsP2A2pnH
10 Awesome Beginner Arduino Projects: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/RoyTobby/10-awesome-beginner-arduino-projects-78a6a6
Arduino project - Adaptive LED Morse Code Decoder and Timer Interrupt: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/shjin/adaptive-led-morse-code-decoder-and-timer-interrupt-8d18a7
Arduino - Multitasking (e.g. interrupts): https://learn.adafruit.com/multi-tasking-the-arduino-part-2/overview
Arduino Interrupts: https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Interrupts
Arduino Playgrounds - Interrupts: http://playground.arduino.cc/code/interrupts

On Fritzing:
Fritzing official site: http://fritzing.org/home
A quick overview on Fritzing: https://www.slideshare.net/HansRontheWeb/fritzing-breadboard-editor

Week #14's Wednesday Evening Training: A good old Micro controller klusavond

In this week's Wednesday Evening Training, we had a good old "klusavond" (Dutch for "a pleasant and educational evening in which we worked on our own projects and shared knowledge") on Micro controllers.

We gave some demo's on the proceedings on our projects, discussed the usage of sensors and I gave a short intro on Fritzing. Fritzing is a nice and free CAD application that can be used to design breadboard circuits for Arduino and Raspberry Pi. It's easy to use and I often use it to create illustrations for manuals for Arduino and Raspberry Pi labs.

Next Wednesday Evening Training...

Next Wednesday Evening Training, we'll continue our experiments with Micro controllers with a special lab: "Whack a LED!" using the Arduino Micro controller. Make sure to follow my posts!

Further study

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post or play around with the technology? Here are some links…

On Arduino:
Arduino Interrupts Tutorial (explanations, 2 demo's/labs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtyOiTw0oQc
My YouTube playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSiMhBs48YvV86iiXFJY-BRxOsP2A2pnH
10 Awesome Beginner Arduino Projects: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/RoyTobby/10-awesome-beginner-arduino-projects-78a6a6
Arduino project - Adaptive LED Morse Code Decoder and Timer Interrupt: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/shjin/adaptive-led-morse-code-decoder-and-timer-interrupt-8d18a7
Arduino - Multitasking (e.g. interrupts): https://learn.adafruit.com/multi-tasking-the-arduino-part-2/overview
Arduino Interrupts: https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Interrupts
Arduino Playgrounds - Interrupts: http://playground.arduino.cc/code/interrupts

On the Raspberry Pi:
Raspberry Pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
Raspberry Pi (official site): https://www.raspberrypi.org
Comparison of single-board computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_single-board_computers

On Fritzing:
Fritzing official site: http://fritzing.org/home
A quick overview on Fritzing: https://www.slideshare.net/HansRontheWeb/fritzing-breadboard-editor

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions here: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an mail. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #13's Wednesday Evening Training: Keeping up architecture with Neo4J graph database

In this week's Wednesday Evening Training, Fred van Nimwegen and I gave an introduction to graph-oriented databases, and Neo4j in particular. Also, we gave an update on our proceedings in using databases to store and query architecture models.

So what is a graph database? And what is Neo4j?

A graph database is a type of NoSQL database that uses graph theory to store, map and query relationships. This is essentially a collection of nodes and edges. Each node represents an entity and each edge represents a connection or relationship between two nodes. Graph databases are very well suited for analyzing networks, e.g. to mine data from social media.

Read my introduction on Neo4j here: Dealing with architecture models and views using graph databases like Neo4j

Back to our Wednesday Evening Training...

This evening, Fred explained us the basics of graph databases, and us how to query networks using the Cypher Query Language. He also showed us prototypes of extensive Archimate models generated using Neo4j. Using Neo4j and three.js (JavaScript library) 3D views of architecture models (networks) were displayed and filtered, showing all kinds of relations between architecture elements. Quite a useful way of gaining insight in a complex architecture!

Of course there was plenty of opportunity for experimenting. We did some handson labs and did walk throughs of some examples and demo's. You can find these in the resources mentioned below.

We'll continue our research on architecture modeling using Neo4j for sure and in upcoming Wednesday Evening Trainings we'll update our community on our proceedings.

Next Wednesday Evening Training on Neo4j

In our Wednesday Evening Training of April 17th, we will give a workshop on Modeling patterns & solutions in Archimate using Archi. We'll also give an update on how to use Neo4j with Archimate, Archi & architecture models. Yes, we'll continue experimenting with this great platform!

Further study

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post or play around with the technology? Here are some links…

On Graph databases:
What is a Graph Database? https://neo4j.com/developer/graph-database
Graph Databases for Beginners: Why Graph Technology Is the Future: https://neo4j.com/blog/why-graph-databases-are-the-future
Graph database: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database
Instructive video's on Graph Databases: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSiMhBs48YvXpvmWiUNeThqxOikTH1Zy4

On Neo4j:
Neo4j (GitHub repo): https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j
Neo4j homepage: https://neo4j.com/
Cypher Query Language: https://neo4j.com/developer/cypher-query-language/
Fred's GitHub repo (explanation, examples, in Dutch): https://gitlab.com/fredvn-woensdagavond/neo4j-2018-12
Learn Cypher in minutes: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/cypher
Neo4j Sandbox (handson labs, built-in guides and sample datasets for popular use cases): https://neo4j.com/sandbox-v2

Examples:
The Graph of Thrones [Season 7 Contest]: https://neo4j.com/blog/graph-of-thrones/
Dataset: Movie Database: https://neo4j.com/developer/movie-database/#_the_dataset
Exploring a UK Open Government Dataset with Neo4j: https://leanjavaengineering.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/exploring-a-uk-open-government-dataset-with-neo4j

On related topics:
4+1 architectural view model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%2B1_architectural_view_model
Database export/import plugin that store Archi models in a central database repository: https://github.com/archi-contribs/database-plugin
threejs (cross-browser JavaScript library and Application Programming Interface (API) used to create and display animated 3D computer graphics): https://threejs.org/

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions here: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an mail. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #12's Wednesday Evening Training: Hands-on with Quantum Computing, a practical introduction (part 5)

Continuing our exploration of Quantum Computing in our 5th Wednesday Evening Training, we had a good discussion on several topics:

• Qubits: determining tensor products in 2-qubit systems (matrix algebra)
• Using the Bra–ket notation
• Conjugate transpose (matrix algebra)
• Entanglement explained, the role of entanglement in a quantum algorithm 
• Bell states
• Exploring the Bloch sphere, also using a simulator (see the resources below).
• The meaning of theta en phi
• Grover’s Algorithm, implementation of an Oracle 

Interesting topics! We'll definitely continue these kind of discussions.

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post?

Take a look at my post: "Quantum computing: an introduction and a lot of links to resources":
https://hansrontheweb.blogspot.com/2018/11/quantum-computing-introduction.html

Or visit my YouTube channel on Quantum Computing: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSiMhBs48YvWecXqKP00NGuiP5UD6RoCk

On specific topics:

Bra–ket notation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation

Quantum Mechanics Concepts: 1 Dirac Notation and Photon Polarisation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBh7Xqbh5JQ

Conjugate transpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugate_transpose

Bell state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_state

Quantum Computation: a journey on the Bloch sphere: https://medium.com/@quantum_wa/quantum-computation-a-journey-on-the-bloch-sphere-50cc9d73530

Bloch sphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere

Bloch Sphere Simulation: https://eecs.ceas.uc.edu/~cahaymm/blochsphere/index.html

What are theta, phi and lambda in cu1(theta, ctl, tgt) and cu3(theta, phi, lam, ctl, tgt)? What are the rotation matrices being used? https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2707/what-are-theta-phi-and-lambda-in-cu1theta-ctl-tgt-and-cu3theta-phi-lam

The Bloch Sphere (PDF): http://www.vcpc.univie.ac.at/~ian/hotlist/qc/talks/bloch-sphere.pdf

Grover’s Algorithm: https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/proxy/tutorial/full-user-guide/004-Quantum_Algorithms/070-Grover's_Algorithm.html

Grover - A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9605043

Next week's Wednesday Evening Training

Next week we will continue our Neo4j sessions. We'll have great labs and a demo and we will discuss application of Neo4j for storage of searchable architecture models!

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an mail. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #9's Wednesday Evening Training: An Introduction to Social Engineering: Part 1 - Phishing

In our Wednesday Evening Trainings, we regularly pay attention to security, a very important topic in ICT. This evening, one of our security champions, Philipp Blaas, took us on an excellent and inspiring dive into Social Engineering.

About Social Engineering

Many security experts agree that Social Engineering continues to be the biggest security threat by a big margin. And this is even though Email scams such as “The Nigerian Prince” or “Fake PayPal invoices” have been around for decades!

Why are individuals and organisations still tricked by such tactics that led to massive scandals such as the Sony Hack, The U.S. Democrats Email Server Breach or the Petya Ransomware Attack?

Social Engineering is still highly effective because it takes advantage of human psychology. The methods used are as old as civilization. Why they still work we were shown this Wednesday Evening Training.

What we did during this session

In our session, we have covered common tactics of Social engineering and Phishing based on practical examples. Philipp showed us the steps in which attackers operate. After collecting (mostly automatically) information about a potential target, the attacker develops a relationship with the victim to attain a trusting affiliation in order to take advantage of the target, then executes the attack and leverages the information gained to plan more attacks.

As an exercise, we were asked to review Out of Office replies (often used in companies) to establish which information an attacker can easily gather as a first step. In further steps, trusted social platforms like LinkedIn can be used to gather additional information to be used in the attack.

An attacker often tries to ensure that the victim clicks on a hyperlink to malware without thinking. The attacker does this, for example, by making the victim believe that he has an acute problem. Examples of this are emails in which a strange payment, a security problem, a request from a so-called colleague or manager is reported. You can easily see through such attacks by following a few simple rules. One of them is simply taking time before responding to email; think first before you respond. In addition: determine whether the sender is reliable (take a close look at the e-mail address of the sender), or in the e-mail personal details that the attacker can not know, but also whether the relevant e-mail has been drawn up amateurish (layout, spelling). And: did you know that if you use your cell phone for reading and replying to your e-mail, you are more likely to click on links? Food for thoughts!

We were also shown a nice example of Vishing (Voice phishing), using social engineering over the telephone system to gain access to private personal and financial information. See the links below for this video.

Finally, we did a joint quiz in which we were shown several emails and had to determine whether it was a phishing email or a real mail.

A real eye opener, proving that taking time for reading your emails is crucial!

As usual, there was plenty opportunity for Q&A and discussion. We discussed using tools like Password Managers and other methods to secure your work environment. We also discussed tools that may be used by attackers. See the links below for further reading on these.

Thanks Philipp, for sharing your knowledge with us!

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post? Here are some resources...

This is how hackers hack you using simple social engineering: https://youtu.be/lc7scxvKQOo
OSINT tool:
Open-source intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence

OSINT tools: https://inteltechniques.com/menu.html

KeePass Cross-Platform Community Edition (Password manager): https://keepassxc.org
Curb Your Enthusiasm: A.I. Will Not Save Us From Phishing: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curb-your-enthusiasm-ai-save-us-from-phishing-philipp-blaas/

Onderzoek: master password van wachtwoordmanagers is te achterhalen via geheugen (Dutch): https://tweakers.net/nieuws/149368/onderzoek-master-password-van-wachtwoordmanagers-is-te-achterhalen-via-geheugen.html

Voice phishing (video): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_phishing

Video's on ICT security (e.g. types of attack) on my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSiMhBs48YvViQFNwqLZFE8GU5baI2f-g

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an email. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #8's Wednesday Evening Training: Quantum Computing, a practical introduction using IBM technology (part 4)

Continuing our exploration of Quantum Computing, guided by one of our Quantum Computer champions: Ilyas Sener. We had a little recap of Quantum logic gates, math topics and an inspiring brainstorm on topics for our upcoming Wednesday Evening Trainings on Quantum Computing.

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post? Take a look at my post: "Quantum computing: an introduction and a lot of links to resources":
https://hansrontheweb.blogspot.com/2018/11/quantum-computing-introduction.html

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an email. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #7's Wednesday Evening Training: Real world Docker for developers, part 2

Fast and easy scaling is very important nowadays. You need to respond fast to increasing load and you may want to downscale when possible, decreasing running costs. Virtualization is an effective approach to this. Applying virtualization, you actually use your bare metal infrastructure as Host Machines to run software applications (Virtual Machines) that emulate physical machines (Guest Machines). Virtual Machines use Images (files) of completely installed and configured machines (OS and the applications you want to use) to start a Guest Machine. The Virtual Machines themselves are managed (start/pause/resume/stop/...) by so called Hypervisors. Virtualization drastically increases the speed and ease in which you can scale your server infrastructure, but the required emulation and big image files poses a rather expensive overhead.

Containerization

In Containerization, like Docker does, software (the applications you want to use) is not emulated, but is run directly on the hard hardware of the host machine in separate Container Runtimes (in short: Containers). Container Runtimes are based on Docker images which contain definitions of the software and configuration you want to run in your Container Runtimes. This Containerization approach decreases the overhead drastically compared to Virtualization, increasing the advantage of fast and easy scaling.

This evenings' topics

This Wednesday Evening Training, we continued our exploration of Docker with a deep dive into the Docker technology. Two of our Docker champions, Tim Schadenberg and Robert Swier, gave us an excellent explanation on various Docker topics and on containerization in general. 

On security, for example, the Container Breakout Vulnerability was also discussed. This vulnerability allows a malicious container to gain root-level code execution on the host. We also discussed software deployment strategies using containers, managing containers and using containers combined with Kubernetes (container orchestration) in a microservice architecture.

Since the handson labs were based on Java Spring Boot our .NET colleagues got an intro on this as a bonus :).

An excellent Wednesday Evening Training with a lot of content, a lot of discussion and much to little time! All the more reason to organize a follow-up session quickly!

Thanks Tim & Robert, for sharing your knowledge and experience with us!

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post or play around with the technology? Here are some links…

Docker (official website): https://www.docker.com
Docker (software), a nice intro on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_(software)
Play with Docker classroom: https://training.play-with-docker.com/
Play with Docker classroom (specific topics): https://training.play-with-docker.com/alacart
Play with Docker - A simple, interactive and fun playground to learn Docker: https://labs.play-with-docker.com/
Bart van Beek's Docker examples (GitHub repo): https://github.com/babeek94122/wet-demo-docker
Deploy on Kubernetes: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/kubernetes/
Virtualization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization
Example Docker Compose app: https://github.com/dockersamples/example-voting-app

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work @Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an email. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!

Week #6's Wednesday Evening Training: A practical introduction to C# code reviewing

Reviewing code requires to have a fresh and different view on (your colleague’s) code. You need to look for bad practices, think out of the box, follow your gut feeling, know about best and bad practices. You need to find a balance between advising about improvements and flat out rejecting code.

This Wednesday Evening Training, we had a practical overview and deep dive into code reviewing. One of our C# champions, Bart Roozendaal, showed us what we can look for specifically in code.

What to look for when reviewing code?

You can take a look at the general structure, tidiness, common errors, code smells and easy to find things. And there is a lot of checks and examples to be found on the internet as well. But what is also important is to view your code from particular viewpoints like security, efficiency and exception handling (error handling). It is definitely worth thinking out of the (language) box when developing a software program. Especially if your code is part of a much larger whole. And that is increasingly the case nowadays.

This evening was all about sharing experiences and opinions. There is no definite right or wrong, there are only considerations that you should make in a sensible manner. For example; there are multiple strategies to choose from when handling errors. How far do you have to go to catch errors in the code? This depends, for example, on the purpose of the program and the damage that specific errors can cause.

We did a walk through of  an existing C# solution and discussed the different findings. Very educative. The code was written in C #, but that was certainly no problem for Java engineers.

During the walk through we also discussed tooling that you can use for testing your software. See the links below for some of the tools we discussed.

To be continued...

We will certainly organize follow-up sessions on this topic. Next time, participants are invited to bring their own code to have reviewed, or bring interesting samples found. The Wednesday Evening Trainings are all about sharing knowledge and experience and learning from each other.

Thanks Bart for sharing your knowledge and experience with us!

Further reading

Do you want to read more on the topics in this post? Here are some links…

List of tools for static code analysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis

CodeMaid - An open source Visual Studio extension to cleanup and simplify C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript coding: http://www.codemaid.net/

NCrunch - An automated concurrent testing tool for Visual Studio: https://www.ncrunch.net/

Live Unit Testing with Visual Studio 2017: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/test/live-unit-testing?view=vs-2017

C# Interactive Walkthrough: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/wiki/C%23-Interactive-Walkthrough

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings on all topics

You 'll find post of previous sessions on my blog and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Work at Capgemini?

Do you want to join us? We're always looking for and well-motivated young professionals. Do you have a bachelor or master degree or extensive practical experience? Or do you have a relevant ICT / Informatics training and you have become curious about us? Please send me an email. Working for us gives you access to all Wednesday Evening Trainings!