The WatersWorks Podcast

Everyone knows the World Wide Web is evolving, and its next major iteration is quickly coming into focus. Sort of. There's a surprising amount of confusion in this space. The terms "Web 3.0" and "Web3," for example, are often used synonymously, though they're not the same thing. Web3 is often conflated with "the metaverse," even though they, too, are distinct concepts. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) built on open-source blockchains are considered the essence of the next-gen Web, but the security risks they raise are not well understood. And how do cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) fit into this picture? To define some concepts and answer some questions about the next-gen Web, John was joined on this podcast by Gladys Rama, senior site producer in the Converge360 group of 1105 Media, in a conversation with two keen observers of this phenomenon: Ian Thornton-Trump, Chief Information Security Officer at Cyjax,  and Philip Ingram, founder of Grey Hare Media.

Ireland is well-known as a welcome destination for high-tech companies, including some of the biggest names in the U.S. technology sector. Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Dell, to name a few, have taken advantage of the country's generous tax laws and high-quality technical talent. Victoria Mackecknie, VP of Enterprise Technology at IDA Ireland, was in the Bay Area for the annual RSA Security Conference recently. John caught up with her to talk about Ireland's appeal to the tech sector, and its evolving efforts to provide workers with in-demand cybersecurity skills. 

Ransomware attacks dominated the headlines in 2021. As of September of last year, according to one report, there was a 148 percent surge in ransomware attacks as compared with the same period the previous year. And another industry watcher says 714 million attempted ransomware attacks will have been recorded once the stats roll in for the year. To get a complete picture of how we got here, and what to expect going forward, John reached out to Allan Liska, Intelligence Analyst for Recorded Future, better known as the Ransomware Sommelier.

The disclosure of the Log4j vulnerability in late 2021 and the subsequent exploitation attempts reminded us that, as one observer put it, "Java is everywhere." If ever we needed a reminder that Java continues to be one of the most widely implemented languages and platforms, this was surely it.  The news gave John an excuse to reach out to Heather VanCura, director of the Java Community Process, better known as the JCP, and chairperson of the JCP Executive Committee, for an update on this ubiquitous technology.  

Foojay.io is a community website for developers who use, target, and run their applications on Java and OpenJDK. It's been up and running since April of last year, and it's been evolving into a rich, well-designed, and essential resource. John spoke with Geertjan Wielenga, senior director of open-source projects at Java development tools and runtimes provider Azul, about Foojay. Wielenga is the author of "Developer, Advocate!: Conversations on turning a passion for talking about tech into a career," a former employee of Sun Microsystems (the mother of Java), and the guiding hand behind the project.

The rush to remote work driven by the COVID-19 pandemic may well have been the fastest and most widespread workforce "migration" in history, catching many companies unprepared and scrambling to adapt. Although tech companies have long utilized distributed teams to develop their systems and solutions, the scale and velocity of the change was a shock even to them. And just as we began to drift back to a kind of normalcy, the delta variant dashed many back-to-the-office plans. Apple, for example, which had already pushed its initial return to work date to September, pushed back its timeline again, telling its worldwide workforce that they won’t be required to return to their respective offices until early next year. In this podcast, John talks with writer and tech-sector maven Tom Fenton about these trends. Tom's session, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Rush to Remote Work," was recently featured in a Converge360 online summit, which John moderated.

The Java language and platform has been around for 25+ years, surviving almost annual predictions of its death. A veritable avatar of this resilience is the GlassFish application server--and one of the original forks of GlassFish is the Payara Server. Steve Millidge, founder of UK-based Payara, talks with John about the longevity of Java, recent changes in the enterprise Java space,  his company winning the  Queen’s Award for Enterprise, and the origins of that mean-fish logo.

This week's podcast is a conversation with Prof. Ahmed Banafa, teacher, author, and all-around tech maven. Banafa currently serves on the faculty in the School of Engineering at San Jose State University, and he has taught at both Stanford and UC Berkeley. In 2018, LinkedIn identified him as an influencer and "technology fortune teller," and two years earlier named him No. 1 Tech Voice to Follow. John K. Waters reached out to Banafa to talk about the effectiveness of the remote learning techniques and technologies employed during the pandemic, but they ended up having a wide ranging conversation that included Banafa's observations about a number of technology trends spurred by the lockdown.

Shawn Wildermuth is a long-time software developer, an author, a teacher, a blogger, a board member of the .NET Foundation, and most recently, a filmmaker. His film, "Hello World," is a paean to the art and craft of software development told through the personal stories of the people who write the code, ranging from in-the-trenches developers to academics, managers, and entrepreneurs. The film weaves in some surprising history, some eye-opening statistics on race and gender in the world of software development, and an intimate story about the filmmaker's evolution as a coder and a person. In this podcast, John K. Waters talks with Wildermuth about his film, his personal journey, and the state of the industry he loves. is a long-time software developer, an author, a teacher, a blogger, a board member of the .NET Foundation, and most recently, a filmmaker. His film, "Hello World," is a paean to the art and craft of software development told through the personal stories of the people who write the code, ranging from in-the-trenches developers to academics, managers, and entrepreneurs. The film weaves in some surprising history, some eye-opening statistics on race and gender in the world of software development, and an intimate story about the filmmaker's evolution as a coder and a person. In this podcast, John K. Waters talks with Wildermuth about his film, his personal journey, and the state of the industry he loves. 

Recent employee unrest at Google was stirred, in part, by their concerns about the company's research into, and implementation of, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Google has been making significant advances in AI, and it's not alone. AI is now a focus of a range of enterprises, and it’s becoming an essential part of a growing number of products and services. Google's employees threw a spotlight on what has been called "ethical AI.” John K. Waters sorts out the evolving definition of this concept in a conversation with Anupam Datta, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Datta is also the director of the school’s Accountable Systems Lab, and co-founder of a startup called Truera, which grew out of his work on explainable AI. 

John K. Waters interviews Java luminary and Brazil-based open source advocate Bruno Souza.

In this first-ever episode of the WatersWorks podcast, John K. Waters talks with Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh, project scientist in the School of Computer Science at the Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute,  about his work on machine learning classifiers that sorted the hopeful from the hateful in hundreds of thousands of comments on social media.Links to the research papers mentioned in the podcast can be found at https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~akhudabu/  Read John's written coverage of the research on PureAI.com:https://pureai.com/articles/2020/01/15/carnegie-mellon-ai-hate-speech.aspxhttps://pureai.com/articles/2020/08/12/hate-speech-to-hope-speech-part-ii.aspx