JetBrains announced in late January that Kotlin 1.1 has reached beta. We invited Hadi Hariri, VP of Developer Advocacy at JetBrains, to talk about Kotlin’s strengths and the upcoming 1.1 and to answer the question that’s on everyone’s lips: What does the future hold for Kotlin?

Apache Beam has successfully graduated from incubation, becoming a new Top-Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation. We invited the Apache Software Foundation’s Davor Bonaci and Jean-Baptiste Onofré to talk about the project’s journey to becoming a Top-Level Project and concrete plans for its future.

Cloud technologies are changing the IT landscape and companies that want to implement a cloud strategy must face the challenges that go hand in hand with this transformation. Apache jclouds, an open source multi-cloud toolkit for the Java platform, helps fill some of the gaps in the cloud landscape. We asked Ignasi Barrera, member of the Apache jclouds Project Management Committee to identify the benefits of jclouds and to clarify what’s under this project’s hood.

Automated testing of mobile applications can shorten your delivery cycle, improve your application’s reliability, and save you time. We talked to Chris Lample, Test Automation Engineer at TestObject, about the Appium testing framework; he also shared some test automation best practices that will allow you to scale your test coverage more effectively.

An increasing demand is being put on automobile manufacturers to move to autonomous vehicles or connected cars that require connectivity to back-end systems for pushing updates to the car’s computer system that previously required a trip to your local dealership. We talked to Alissa Valentina Knight, Group Managing Partner, Brier & Thorn Inc; Managing Director, Brier & Thorn Germany, GmbH and W-JAX speaker, about the challenges and vulnerabilities of connected cars.

Machine learning may sound futuristic, but it’s not. Speech recognition systems such as Cortana or Search in e-commerce systems have already shown us the benefits and challenges that go hand in hand with these systems. In our machine learning series we will introduce you to several tools that make all this possible. Next stop: MOA, an open source software specific for machine learning/data mining on data streams in real time.

Apache Allura is a set of tools to help people collaboratively develop software, and an open platform on which innovative new tools be built. It’s being hosted publicly and is built through contributions of individuals and companies who want to promote Open Source development. We talked to Dave Brondsema, VP at Apache Allura about what’s under this project’s hood and why software forges are gaining momentum.

There are many hundreds of public cloud providers who use CloudStack to deliver IaaS to their customers. These range from massive, global provider’s right to small ISP’s who need to adopt a cloud model. Public cloud providers choose CloudStack because it provides all of the capabilities required to deliver multi-tenant IaaS services, in a cohesive, reliable platform that is easily deployed and managed. We talked to Giles Sirett, PMC member of the Apache CloudStack project, about Apache CloudStack, the idea behind this project and its biggest assets.

Machine learning may sound futuristic, but it’s not. Speech recognition systems such as Cortana or Search in e-commerce systems have already showed us the benefits and challenges that go hand in hand with these systems. In our machine learning series we will introduce you to several tools that make all this possible. Third stop: HTM (Hierarchical Temporal Memory), Numenta’s machine intelligence technology.

Machine learning may sound futuristic, but it’s not. Speech recognition systems such as Cortana or Search in e-commerce systems have already showed us the benefits and challenges that go hand in hand with these systems. In our machine learning series we will introduce you to several tools that make all this possible. Second stop: MLlib, Apache Spark’s scalable machine learning library.

Machine learning may sound futuristic, but it’s not. Speech recognition systems such as Cortana or Search in e-commerce systems have already showed us the benefits and challenges that go hand in hand with these systems. In our machine learning series we will introduce you to several tools that make all this possible. First stop: CognitiveJ.

Apache OODT is an award-winning software birthed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, being used for scientific data system projects in Earth Science, Planetary Science, and Astronomy. DARPA XDATA and National Cancer Institute’s Early Detection Research Network are also using OODT. We talked to Tom Barber, software developer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, about the idea behind Apache OODT and its uses.

The Apache Software Foundation recently announced Apache Bahir as a Top-Level Project. We asked Chris Mattmann, a Principal Data Scientist and the Chief Architect in the Instrument and Data Systems section, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, to comment on this project and reveal what’s next for Apache Bahir.