Snowden has been identified as a former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. He revealed his own identity on his own volition.

(See also: PRISM Fallout: In Cloud We Don't Trust?)

In an interview with the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, Snowden revealed that he became increasingly disturbed by the U.S. intelligence community's broader focus on gathering information, especially from domestic U.S. sources.

"The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone," Snowden said. "It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time, simply because that's the easiest and most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends."

Snowden said he decided to make his identity public to help establish the veracity of his claims.

Where things go from here is anyone's guess. Certainly, given its previous convictions to prosecute intelligence leaks, the U.S. government will want to have a word with Snowden, a U.S. citizen who is reportedly in Hong Kong at this time. Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the U.S. but that treaty specifically excludes individuals who are being extradited for political purposes. In matters of foreign relations, it's Beijing that has final say on Hong Hong's affairs, so it will be interesting to see how they interpret Snowden's actions.

Given the timing of the recent summit between U.S. President Barack Obama and China President Xi Jinping this past weekend, it's a good bet the subject of Snowden's status came up during at least one of the meetings between the two leaders or their staffs.

Snowden, for his part, suffers no illusions about what's coming.

"I could be rendered by the CIA, I could have people come after me, or any of their third-party partners… that's a fear I'll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be," the programmer stated.

Image courtesy of The Guardian.

Now that the infographic craze has saturated us with new visual knowledge (and marketing gimmicks), something interesting has happened: The creation of infographics has become democratized. No longer is the act of creating a visual data story confined to professional designers using professional tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. Now anyone with a data set can build an infographic.

(See also 5 Business & Design Tools Every Tech Freelancer Should Learn.)

Trust me when I say that with these tools, you don’t have to be a designer to create a high-quality, effective infographic. Does this mean there’s no place for professional designers and data? Not at all. Uniqueness and customization will always carry a premium (as Column Five can attest), but there are plenty of instances where a prefab or low-cost alternative can be mighty useful.

With that in mind, I’ve cobbled together a list of five services/methods that even non-designers can use to create or commission great infographics.

Infogr.am: All The Bells And Whistles

Infogr.am is free, and free is good. It’s a popular platform that has seen more than 800,000 infographics created to-date. Infogr.am is nice and simple, but the features it does have are power-packed. For instance, you can make more than 30 different types of charts (compared to 11 in Excel). Speaking of Excel, Infogr.am’s built-in spreadsheet editor makes editing data easy and enables importing of XLS and CSV files.

One of its best features is the ability to download files in PNG or PDF format. This is perfect for including the infographic in a presentation or emailing itto a colleague. Many people will like the fact that you can publish your infographic online, which makes it sharable and embeddable. If your data is sensitive, give it a password and a private link.

Infogr.am is far and away my favorite online infographics editor.

InfoActive: Interactive, Live And Mobile-Friendly

Of all the infographic tools that claim to make data “fun,” (there are more than you’d think), InfoActive – now in beta testing - probably comes closest to delivering on the promise. It’s unique features – including interactivity and live data - make it seem more “up-to-date” than the competition.

The platform lets you visualize data that isn’t just static - a big plus in today’s environment where people want to become part of the story. The addition of embedding live data is important given how quickly information can become outdated. The InfoActive website phrases it like this: “Hitting ‘publish’ isn’t the end of the story; it’s just the beginning.”

Simplicity is a core feature here: the InfoActive site boasts that you don’t even need a tutorial to get started. No word yet on what, if anything, InfoActive will cost post-beta.

Piktochart: Drag-And-Drop Templates Galore

For $29 a month, Piktochart gives you access to a WYSIWYG editor that will let you drag and drop elements to create an infographic. Some 300,000 users strong, including clients such as Harvard University, Red Bull and GE, Piktochart has built that following on the back of more than 90 included themes. But from a design standpoint, many of those themes are decent, but others are mundane or downright bad.

As with Infogr.am, you can share your creations via social networks or download print-quality files. If you like the Piktochart editor - which is free to try - you may find the service worth paying for. One nice bonus: In the latest version, Piktochart lets users create search friendly graphics!

Easel.ly: Theme-Based Drag-And-Drop With Objects

Like InfoActive, Easel.ly is currently in beta. Easel.ly also takes a theme-based, drag-and-drop WYSIWYG approach to infographic creation, but it comes loaded with a modest selection of just 10 “vhemes” (visual themes).

Easel.ly sets itself apart by making it easy to insert a selection of objects from categories as varied as people, banners, icons, animals and nature (among others).

While the current theme selection is a bit limited, people who enjoy the platform and interface can completely customize their infographics through the upload feature.

Many Eyes V2: Pre-Made Visualization Filters

While there are no themes in the new (beta) version of IBM’s Many Eyes, there are 11 different ways to visualize data, many of which you won’t find on the other platforms and services listed here. These visualization features let you go beyond pie charts to harness the power of word trees, heat maps, tree maps and yes, the infamous word cloud.

It all starts by uploading a data set (or selecting one from the site, though many are basically useless at the moment) and then simply applying a visualization style. The visualizations can be broken down into three categories: Compare A Set Of Values Track Rises And Falls Over Time See Parts Of A Whole

One of the coolest options is the View In Context visualization, a type of line graph that shows changes in data over a long set of intervals (like time, for example).

Note that the output of Many Eyes might not technically qualify as an infographic all by itself. But it’s a great tool to add variety to other offerings, like Infogr.am.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

In April, Google announced it would shut down CalDAV, an open standard application programming interface, or API, that developers used to access calendar data across the Web. A few big-name outfits — like, say, Microsoft — would retain access to CalDAV to keep their apps syncing with Google Calendar. All other developers were encouraged to use Google's own Google Calendar API, a move ReadWrite's Matt Asay decried as part of Google's march away from open standards.

Enough developers complained, however, that Google has done a U-turn and will not only keep CalDAV available to all developers, it will also provide access to CardDAV, a similar API for accessing contact information. Both APIs are also getting updates that enable OAuth 2.0 authentication and integration with the Google APIs Console.

See? The 'Plex really does care. Sometimes.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

In a blog post late last week, Nandini Ramani, head of the software development team that builds the Java platform, acknowledged the problems that have affected Java running in Web browsers and outlined three significant steps her company would be taking to get Java's security headaches managed.

(See also: Java Is No Longer Needed. Pull The Plug-In)

The most significant outward change will be the addition of another scheduled update every year for Java, ramping up the number of scheduled updates from the current three per year to four per year. The new update has already happened for 2013, when the Critical Patch Update for Java SE happened in April.

Beginning with the October 2013 scheduled update, the Java update schedule will align with the quarterly Oracle Critical Patch Update program that's already in place for every other Oracle product, Ramani explained.

"Obviously, Oracle will retain the ability to issue emergency 'out of band' security fixes through the Security Alert program," she added.

Another change to the Java platform has been alterations to the browser trust/privileges model, which, upon the release of JDK 7 Update 21 back in April, included changes to the default security settings to "discourage the execution of unsigned or self-signed applets," Ramani outlined.

In addition, Oracle is planning to increase its investment in the Java organization so the team will have "the ability to more quickly respond to reports of 0-days and other particularly severe vulnerabilities."

Ramani's blog entry does a good job outlining the myriad of plans designed to get Java's security problems under control. What is stunning, though, about these changes is that they took this long to get implemented. Ramani herself raised the issue:

Whenever Oracle makes an acquisition, acquired product lines are required to conform to Oracle policies and procedures, including those comprising Oracle Software Security Assurance. As a result, for example, the Java development organization had to adopt Oracle’s Security Fixing Policies, which among other things mandate that issues must be resolved in priority order and addressed within a certain period of time.

This is all well and good, but given that Oracle started the process of acquiring Sun Microsystems in the spring of 2009 and completed the acquisition 42 months ago in January 2010, that's a long time to get Java's security policies aligned with Oracle's.

It is not clear what the cause of the delay was, but given the widespread use of Java, the platform is probably one of the most - if not the most - important technology Oracle picked up with Sun. It would be nice if they could actually start treating it with the priority it deserves.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

We’re not talking about your personal spending habits. If you are any good at what you do, you probably make a fair amount of money and spend it on whatever catches your fancy. 

We’re talking about the tools you use to do your job. Developers expect, no, demand free tools and services to do their jobs. Whether it is analytic services, integrated development environments (IDEs), application programming interfaces (APIs) or software developer kits (SDKs), developers almost always refuse to pay for the tools they use to do their jobs. Many developers would rather go out of their way to build their own tools or use bug-ridden free tools than plunk down the money it would take to buy a service or subscription that could actually help them do their jobs more efficiently.

@dan_rowinski many will spend a week trying/configuring free tooling instead of paying for something that works out of the box.

— Max Katz (@maxkatz) May 21, 2013

Oxymoron: Developer-Focused Businesses Models

The Mobile Revolution as we know it is about six years old now. About halfway through it in 2010, lots of companies saw an opportunity to make apps for the rush of developers building apps for the Apple App Store and (as it was called then) Android Market. The idea was to make their lives easier and make some money at the same time in a nascent market. 

We saw a bunch of startups and (a little bit later) enterprise technology companies move to provide tools for these mobile developers. Companies like Localytics, Kinvey, StackMob, Appcelerator, appMobi, Sencha and many more all had the idea of providing developers with tools to help them do their jobs. Almost all of them have shifted their business models away from the “developer tools” avenue of making money. Because developers just don’t want to pay. 

@dan_rowinski engineers are cheap. they also prefer engineering solutions to paying.

— Alice Marshall (@PrestoVivace) May 21, 2013

Appcelerator, StackMob and Kinvey have gone with an enterprise-focused business model. Localytics' prime target is to sell to marketers that crave data to do their jobs. appMobi sold its HTML5 developers tools to Intel. Sencha makes money by, among other things, selling cloud services to developers (a common theme with several of these companies). Enterprises and marketers pay for data, tools and services. Developers? Not so much.

The Culture Of Free

Developers are spoiled. The big platforms basically give them all the tools they need for free. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook basically give their tools to developers, hoping to entice them to write for their platforms. In Microsoft’s case, sometimes they even straight out pay developers to build for Windows or Windows Phone and entice them with thousands of dollars of free tools. 

Almost by nature, developers can be arrogant, stubborn people. It makes them good at their jobs. But it also means that they almost always won’t use something that is not free or open source. They will spend a week building something that they could pay for out of the box and have running in an hour. 

Developers have come to expect free. In an odd, preternatural kind of way, they gravitate toward it. And the tech industry enables them to do it. The goodies at developer conferences like Google I/O are always tasty treats for developers (this year they all got expensive Chromebook Pixels, last year a smartphones and tablets). For the big software companies, it is about building a community around their brand and getting developers to publish apps and services for their platforms. Part of the core mission for Google at this year’s I/O was to update the Google Play Developer Console to give developers a suite of free tools like a new Android-focused IDE, analytics and translations services.  

.@dan_rowinski Leverage of labor. You want me to develop for your platform, you have to lower the barrier of entry.

— Joshua Goldbard (@ThePBXGuy) May 21, 2013

“As we give them more tools to make it easier to make great aps, they can try out more stuff,” said Google’s Ellie Powers in a recent interview with ReadWrite. “The basics are covered, people are generally very happy, they are giving us tremendous feedback on our product and great tools that we give them.”

The Red Tape Of Paid Tools

If has become fairly clear that developers – from the hobbyist to the professional developer studio to the enterprise-level wonk – hate paying for tools. Sometimes that has to do with their budgets (or lack thereof). Sometimes they think they can do better themselves. 

Developer focused site Stack Overflow had a great discussion on the topic a couple years ago. One developer, Erik B. sums up the problem with buying software tools in an enterprise nicely:

If I find a non-free tool I might be able to download a free trial, without telling the boss, but if I want to buy the full version of the tool I'll definitely gonna have to talk to my boss and he's not just gonna give it to me. I'm gonna have to motivate why I need it. He is definitely gonna ask if there are any free alternatives and "I don't know." is not a good enough answer. So if I want the non-free tool I'm gonna have to evaluate all the free tools first.

What Developers Will Pay For

If you can’t get developers to pay for tools, what the heck can you get them to pay for?

Services and subscriptions. More appropriately, the cloud.

Amazon pulls this off perfectly. They offer a lot of free SDKs and APIs, especially around its Appstore development program for the Kindle Fire. Once Amazon has its hooks into the developer, it can then push them to pay for cloud hosting and computing through Amazon Web Services.

In many ways, it is kind of a “freemium” model targeted at developers (which is ironic considering it is usually the developers that target freemium models on consumers). Get them in with the free tools, charge them for the cloud. This was essentially the model that appMobi used when it developed its litany of free HTML5 development tools. It would design for HTML5 and then sell developers cloud services to host and run their apps. 

When Developers Should Pay For Tools

In a recent conversation with a developer friend, the topic of developers being cheap bastards came up. He said his rationale for when to pay for tools was fairly simple. If a developer is making around $80,000 a year, they are worth (depending on the scale) about $300 a day (considering time off for weekends and holidays). This scale slides, of course, but take the numbers as an example. So, if a developer downloads free software tools or tries to build them on their own, they are taking time out of their day from what is their normal job to configure those tools.

Say a developer tool from a reputable source costs $300 and will work out of the box. If a developer wants to create a workaround, they should no more than one day on it. Otherwise it is no longer cost efficient to not buy the off-the-shelf product. Essentially, a developer should spend no more than one day trying to configure or build their own tools. 

Developers: When do you pay for tools? Which ones do you pay for? Let us know in the comments.

In a conversation at All Things D's D:11 conference this week, Motorola Mobility's head of advanced technology and projects group Regina Dugan lamented the fact that for all of the technological advances that we have made over the decades, we are still relying on outmoded password-based authentication, the kind the guys in the lab coats were using back in the day.

And we're doing it a lot. Dugan speculated that power users would have to authenticate themselves nearly a hundred times a day.

(See also Two-Factor Authorization Is Awesome - Until You Lose the Damn Token.)

Dugan presented two options for better ways to securely access information in the near future: tattoos and "authentication vitamins."

The electronic tattoo, which Dugan demonstrated on stage at the conference, are biostamps made by the firm MC10, which can be used by healthcare professionals to monitor a patient's vital signs. In a medical context, these tattoos, which are thin and stretchable, could be implanted within the body to monitor conditions like irregular heartbeats or brain activity.

The technology, Dugan explained, can also be used as an authentication tool, worn right on the user's skin.

Ink not your thing? Dugan pulled out another conceptual idea: a small pill-like device that, when swallowed, would turn your whole body into a authentication device.

The device runs "like a reverse potato battery," Dugan explained, pulling power from the acids in your stomach to generate an 18-bit authentication signal from the embedded chip inside. The pill has reportedly been approved already by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Motorola seems to be taking a shortcut to the coveted holy grail of pure biometric identification with these interim bio/tech hybridized tools. The more technology that an authentication system employs, however, the bigger the more chance it can be hacked.

That said, tattoos and pills are a pretty interesting place to move the authentication conversation.

Image courtesy AllThingsD.

Programming skills are becoming ever more important, quickly turning into the core competency for all kinds of 21st Century workers. That inescapable fact is leading individuals to seek out new ways of learning to code, startups and non-profits to find ways to help them and businesses to search for innovative approaches to finding the coders they so desperately need.

When daily deal site Living Social couldn't find the coding help it needed, for example, the company took matters into its own hands and successfully created its own qualified programmers. Through an experiment called Hungry Academy,  Living Social paid 24 people to learn computer programming within five months. All two dozen passed the class and became full-time developers at Living Social following their graduation. 

“We believe that intelligence and passion are far harder to hire for and much more important than a specific technical skill,” Chad Fowler, LivingSocial’s senior vice president of technology, told the Washington Post last year. “We have enough of the kind of DIY sort of mentality here and, maybe it’s a little bit of hubris, we can teach faster than the industry.”

Likely due to Living Social’s larger troubles, the company won’t be repeating the experiment. However the concept it nurtured - teaching untechnical people technical skills - is gaining in popularity in a wide variety of ways. Learn-to-code programs bent on teaching anyone, even children, programming skills are on the upswing, at non-profits, at startups and at companies that need to hire programmers.

See also:

• This Is What The Next Generation Of Programmers Looks Like
• How To Raise The Next Zuckerberg: 6 Coding Apps For Kids

Plenty Of Ways To Learn Programming

Mark Lassoff, founder of Learntoprogram.tv, believes it’s not the place you learn to code that counts. It’s the portfolio you can show potential employers.

“People think you have to go back to school to learn programming and other computer skills, but you don’t,” he said in a statement. “There’s also the myth that you have to be some kind of math or science genius to learn it. Not true. You just need to learn the process, and then practice it. You can build a portfolio by doing volunteer work for a church or charity.”

Ordinarily, newly minted developers would be less desirable than experienced ones for employers. But the current developer drought means there are far more jobs that require programming skills than people who have those skills.  So companies are more accepting of programming newbies.

Lots Of Coding Jobs Going Begging

(See also Don't Look Now, But We Might Be In A Developer Drought.)

The number of coding jobs is only expected to increase over time. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 913,000 computer programmer jobs in 2010. That number is expected to jump 30% from 2010 to 2020. Meanwhile, the average growth of all other U.S. jobs is predicted to be just 14%. 

“There aren’t enough people to fill these jobs because technology and the job market are moving much faster than education in high schools and colleges,” Lassoff said. 

How Coding Can Boost Everyone's Career

Developer and mentor Joe O’Brien believes that computer skills are essential even if you’ve already got a non-technical job. 

“We all interact with computers in such a way that they’re no longer this extra thing you do on the side,” O'Brien told ReadWrite. “Computing is a vital part of what everybody does nowadays.

"Not that we want everyone to go out and create Web programs and write the next Twitter, but I think having a base understanding of what happens behind the curtain can be huge,” he added.

O’Brien never graduated from college, but he did recently sell Edgecase, the software development company he founded and operated himself. He thinks that his programming skills made him a better CEO than he would have been without them. Today, he mentors aspiring programmers in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. 

“Even if a CEO never codes for her company, just understanding what is happening is going to be huge for her from a risk standpoint, from an understanding standpoint,” he said. “CEOs need to have a lot of knowledge of a lot of different things and programming is a large part of that.”

Teaching Programming Is Big Business

CEOs who think like O’Brien might be the reason that learn-to-code startups have been able to fundraise millions in venture capital. Investors seem to realize that companies like Treehouse and Codecademy don’t just train the next generation of developers, but that the skill they teach are essential for managers, too. 

(See also There's A Boom In Teaching People How To Code.)

Whether to boost your career or just to keep pace with the rest of the world, learning to code has never been more important or more accessible. If you haven’t started yet, what’s stopping you?

Second image courtesy of Team Round of APPlause. Final image courtesy of Girls Who Code.

Entrepreneurs, developers and investors devote a lot of effort and energy to identifying a new project's Killer Feature. They hope this feature will engage users and create the stickiness that will draw them back to the project again and again. Much has been written about the importance of a Killer Feature, but would you know one when you see it?

Only Users Can Determine A Killer Feature

It must be a very challenging task, because at the end of the day, only the app's users will determine whether any feature has the elusive "it factor." That uncertainty is pretty scary. Starting an Internet project requires significant investments of time, money, connections and energy. We hang our hopes on the assumption that users will love what we think will be the Killer Feature.

But since we can't be sure whether any given feature will be a Killer, startups often add multiple features, hoping that if one doesn't turn out to be the coveted Killer, maybe another will. They consider this a risk reducing strategy, but it's actually counterproductive.

Tailor The Suit To The Clients: Users appreciate simplicity. They like apps and websites that are easy to understand, and they feel confident when they know they're taking advantage of what the website has to offer.

If things are too complicated or they feel they're not making the most of what's available, they can get frustrated and uncomfortable. In this sense, too many features that don't get used can be harmful.

The trick isn't to offer users everything. The trick is offer them exactly what they need,

Overloading your Project With Features Could Kill It: It's best to go online with a feature or two missing. Your users will let you know if there's anything else they need, and then you'll know those features are really necessary.

So maybe I've convinced you to carefully choose the features to include in your next startup. But how do you know which feature is necessary and what might be that elusive Killer Feature?

FUV: Feature Usage/Value ratings

First, make a list of all the features you're not sure about.

If your project is about issue tracking, you know that "Open a new issue" is a necessary feature. The project wouldn't work without it.

Instead, focus on features that raise doubt. If you're not sure a certain feature is crucial, add it to the list.

Second, evaluate and rate each feature according to two criteria:

1. What percentage of users are likely to use it
2. How much value it will generate for users (on a scale of 1 to 10).

Pay special attention to the factors that may distort your ratings:

Percentage of use. Different people have different goals, needs and motivations. This leads to different usage of the same system.

Project managers would use an issue tracking system somewhat differently than their clients or than developers or designers. A project manager or a client may spend most of their time creating new issues, while developers would mostly try to understand them and update their status.

It's critical to consider all potential users of your system (usually in the form of user 'personas'), and the different ways they each one might use it. It's best to go through this process for each persona.

The value contribution of a feature. This is often the biggest obstacle. We tend to fall in love with our inventions, especially if we think our invention has got what it takes to be a Killer Feature.

But how can we tell if it's really worthy?

Ask yourself and your team: What would happen without it? Would the users know their way around the system without it? Would they notice it's missing? Would it be easy to learn it and adopt it? Would it be used on a regular basis?

Once you've rated all the features on your doubt list, the next step is build a diagram that depicts your features' percentage of use and value ratings.

Now it's time to determine how strict your feature inclusion policy should be. A rule of thumb is that a feature should be useful to at least 50% of users, and should have a value rating of at least 5 out of 10.

This is a pretty lenient guideline… the more you believe that unnecessary features alienate users the higher the usage percentage threshhold should be. The more you believe that every feature should be outstanding, the higher you should set your value rating minimum.

Mark your minimum ratings on the diagram, as shown here:

The diagram makes it easy to tell which features should be included. If it's in the yellow area – it's in the project. As for the rest – better luck next time. (Of course, it's wise to reassess your initial ratings as things change.)

Stalking The Killer Feature?

At this point, you have a visual guide to identifying the killer feature.

Notice the green dot at the top right hand corner of the diagram. It represents a feature that an estimated 100% of customers would use, and they would feel it gives them a 10 out of 10 value. That definitely sounds like something worthy of being called a Killer Feature.

You won’t always have one of those, of course. In those cases, the feature that comes closest to perfect ratings is your best candidate for the role of Killer Feature.

Finally, notice the red dot at the bottom left hand corner. Any feature with ratings like is a Startup Killers - make sure it never makes it into your project!

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

When you work as a freelance designer or coder, your success or failure is entirely reliant on you. Since there's no one else you can blame for missed deadlines or shoddy work, it's incumbent on you to keep your skills fresh, your attention fixed and your ideas polished.

The people who excel working for themselves are more than just good networkers - they make themselves marketable through the array of tasks they can tackle and complete. Quite simply, they offer more opportunity and flexibility than their peers.

It's always going to be easier and more efficient for a company to hire one contractor for a given project than two, or more. If you show that you have the skills to accomplish all aspects of the project yourself, you'll be more a more attractive option. For independent contractors, that versatility requires the ability to make ideas jump off the page. Selling an idea is sometimes not as simple as putting together a Powerpoint presentation, so it helps to know both basic and advanced tools of creating and presenting your work.

(See also 15 Programming Skills Most Coveted By Employers.)

Developing skills in these five tools - four from Adobe, one from Microsoft - will come in handy for almost any tech freelancer:

1. Adobe Dreamweaver

Lots of developers are taking over basic elements of design because technology has made everything so much simpler. Adobe Dreamweaver is the quintessential program that combines HTML and design, and it saves you time as it writes HTML code for you as you go. You can think about layout design as you write code for your site, and then check how those elements are developing on the back and front end.

2. Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is the most commonly known image manipulation program around, and is used primarily for photographs, banner design and Web graphics. Since Photoshop is a pixel-based software, be careful to keep all images to a fixed size or risk stretching them out and distorting them. On the plus side, it's a relatively user-friendly applicaiton that's easy to pick up and even for basic color correction and retouching. While many people already have a basic understanding of Photoshop, taking the time to dive in a bit more will reveal an endless world of possibilities.

(See also Adobe Just Killed Your Ability To Pirate Photoshop.)

3. Illustrator

If you're working on vector-based projects, like logos, illustrations or typography, you should use Illustator to prevent blurriness. Quality is retained as you enlarge or shrink images. If you're in the market for a new business card, Illustrator is the way to go. Make sure, however, to first edit and crop your photos in Photoshop before moving them over to Illustrator. You can get more creative with projects in Illustrator, taking on brochures, stationary, and more.

4. Adobe InDesign

Once you've edited and prepared your images, sometimes you'll want to incorporate them into bigger features. That's where InDesign comes in. It's a layout program that lets you organize text alongside your images to make for more consistent displays. You can import graphics from both Photoshop and Illustrator to brighten up text-heavy PDFs, for example. It also supports multi-page assignments like annual reports that some clients may ask for.

5. Microsoft Excel

You may not be a math person, but Microsoft Excel can still serve you well. In addition to offering easy-to-manage spreadsheets that will help you keep track of expenses and progress, Excel gives you the chance to really investigate your opportunity costs and growth opportunities for your freelance business. Successful consultants and freelancers need to think analytically and know how to process data to tell a story. For Web developers looking to increase their organization's scalability, it's worth investing in basic Excel skills. There are plenty of other spreadsheets, including some good free ones in the cloud, but Excel remains the standard, and the one your clients are most likely to use.

(See also 9 Things Microsoft Does Right.)

Blackboard image courtesy of Shutterstock.

What does root access do? It lets you tinker under the hood of Glass, allowing you to, for instance, install Linux and run apps tailored to the open-source OS. 

Google software engineers P. Y. Laligand and Hyunyoung Song started with the warranty warning and a quick presentation on how to enable a debug mode that lets you load Android applications (APKs) on Glass. The two stressed that Google recommends this method for tinkering with Glass, as the debug mode doesn't void your warranty. 

It being Google though, the duo hurriedly brushed past the warning. Using a Bluetooth trackpad-enabled keyboard synced to Glass, the engineers outlined five steps involved in rooting Glass: 

1. Access the bootloader
2. Unlock the device & erase personal data
3. Swap out and override boot partition
4. Reboot into normal state
5. Access root mode

Laligand was nice enough to run through a demonstration in real-time. Below are the screens from his fast hack. 

Accessing The Bootloader & Unlocking Device

Reboot To Root 

Success!

I'd argue that the definition of "developer" is expanding to embrace a larger and larger set of people, people who previously thought of themselves merely as technology enthusiasts or heavy users of technology at home and in the workplace. And Google is at the forefront of pushing this redefinition.

Google executives Vic Gundotra and Sundar Pichai hinted at the expansiveness of I/O's reach. We've heard that some 7,500 developers are registered for this year's event. Gundotra, a longtime champion of developers at Google, noted that 1 million people were watching the live stream. (That's him in the image above.) And Pichai hinted at the explosion of post-PC, post-smartphone, post-tablet devices for which we might build experiences soon: Google Glass, smart watches, and other wearable-computing gadgets.

It's All About The Tools

A software developer, in the Microsoft era, was someone who wrote applications for a desktop PC.

Now, we get computing devices through an explosion of screens, from TVs to big monitors on our desktops to tablets and smartphones. Google Glass and the Pebble smart watch give us even smaller screens—just enough room for blips of information. There are simply too many ways of delivering digital experiences for anyone to dedicate developers to each one.

That means that we need more and more layers of abstraction around the development of software. At I/O, Google showed off one such tool, called Android Studio, which aims to simplify the frustrating process of figuring out what screen an Android user might have. It was launched to big applause.

A new developer console for Google Play, Google's store for Android apps, tells developers when they're getting a lot of users in a specific country—and even offers a translation service to adapt apps to speak those users' language.

But Google also seems to be recognizing that there's a set of people who need simpler tools. Take its mobile content recommendations tool, which people can add to a website with a single line of code, like dropping in a YouTube video.

Think of managing a YouTube channel, or a page on the Google+ social network: Those, too, in a sense are working in code, though at a very high level.

As is anyone publishing a website. Google's tools for webmasters, aimed at helping them make sure users can find their pages in Web search, can be thought of as another form of access to Google's platform. Those are slowly getting woven into Google+, as are Google-linked Android and Web apps, which can now use Google+ to let users log in and share activity with friends.

And for that matter, Android smartphone owners who simply download an app are, when you think about it, reprogramming an incredibly powerful computing device. That's working with code, whether or not they think of it as such.

Services At Your Fingertips

We're only seeing glimmerings of how Google might pull this all together. But consider how, say, a music-video app might interact with Google. It might well use YouTube for distribution and discovery, as well as having a Google+ page. It might use Google+ for sign-in and activity sharing, so when people search for an artist's name, videos watched by friends pop to the top of search results. For mobile, it would certainly have an Android version, sold through the Google Play store, of course.

That's a staggering array of Google services that one app developer might need to touch. And it's hard to imagine that any single developer, or even a team of developers, might be able to learn how to use them in great depth. That means Google will need to deliver more simple ways of accessing the power of its computing platforms.

There will always be a need for highly sophisticated programmers who dive deep into code, plumb the depths of computing architecture, and probe the limits of what's possible.

But for the rest of us, who just want to do something amazing and make use of Google's tools while doing it, one line of code sounds awfully nice.

Photo by Nick Statt for ReadWrite

Our stories so far:

• In Google's Future, We Will All Be Developers
• Now Google Wants To Kill The Mobile Web (Good Riddance)
• Google Just Launched A Grenade At Spotify — And It Just Might Work
• Google Is Turning Search Into The Planet's Biggest Anticipatory System
• The Future Of Google Maps: Social, Personalized And Way Smarter
• What Google Didn't Announce At I/O
• Google Search Learns To Listen & Understand Context
• Google Is Making Life Easier For Android Developers

For the rest of the live blog coverage, see our real-time posts on the ReadWrite Google+ page.

That’s the theory behind STEAM Carnival, a traveling circus designed to introduce kids to the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math — plus the arts. (Put the initials together to spell STEAM, get it?) Some 40 different high-tech games and demonstrations will educate and inspire kids by blinding them with science. 

Professional Roboticists!

STEAM Carnival started as a joint idea dreamed up by Brent Bushnell (whose dad is Nolan Bushnell, the inventor of Pong) and Eric Gradman, professional roboticists who made their reputations turning science into art. If you caught OK Go’s famous Rube Goldberg machine music video, you’ve seen their work. In fact, they said that video prompted the idea for the carnival. Steam Carnival's board includes the elder Bushnell, game industry luminary Brian Fargo, and Mythbuster Grant Imahara.

“Some of the most compelling feedback we got from that video was from parents and teachers coming to us, saying ‘We don’t know what our kids learned from that, but they were so excited about engineering when they saw it,’” said Gradman. 

Gradman explained that the goal of the carnival is not only to introduce kids to the potential of engineering, but to show them just how capable they are of picking it up themselves. 

Simple Components Create Complex Machines

For example, he described one attraction — a robot that responds when kids stand in front of it and make gestures. On a table nearby sit all the components that make up the robot, and kids are encouraged to play with them and assemble the parts. Basically, it lets them see that even the most complex electronics are made up of simple pieces. 

"It's like going to a magic show and then as you exit through the gift shop, realizing not only how all the magic tricks worked, but how to do them yourself,” Gradman said. 

STEAM Carnival Is Looking For Funding

Bushnell and Gradman have built the attractions themselves, but now they need the public’s help funding the project. Their Kickstarter campaign, with an initial aim of getting STEAM Carnival to Los Angeles and San Francisco, is already halfway to its $100,000 goal with nearly a month to go.

Until it’s funded, the duo is drumming up interest by presenting a prototype to test audiences of lucky middle school and high school kids in Los Angeles.

Bushnell said educators are always surprised to see how quickly kids become interested in science once lasers are involved. 

“We’re not up there describing dry principles,” he said. “We’re doing demonstrations. It’s a complete left turn for them from traditional education.”

Bushnell and Gradman hope to expand to many cities beyond Los Angeles and San Francisco, but they’ll need STEM educators’ and mentors’ help to do it. If you’re interested in bringing the STEAM Carnival to your city, cast your ballot here.

STEAM Intro video - short from Brent Bushnell on Vimeo.

All images courtesy of STEAM Carnival.

Enter the Declassification Engine, which aims to harness Big Data analysis and some old-fashioned crowdsourcing to peer through the "black bars" of redacted documents and reveal what the government doesn't want you to know. 

Using publicly available, declassified documents as its sources, the Declassification Engine aims to eventually make informed guesses about what those black bars are hiding, providing a "word cloud" of likely possibilities. Is that blacked out word "Aurora," for example, potentially referring to new types of advanced aircraft? And, if so, does that imply that similar redacted memos refer to the same key words? 

A Tool For Historians And The Public

The Declassification Engine could be an instrument for historians and conspiracy theorists alike. For now, though, it's basically just a set of data-analysis tools developed by researchers at Columbia University.

One finds correlations between specific words and often-classified memos, for example. Another was designed to help train the system to pick up on differences between redacted documents, and what was revealed years later when the government declassified them for public eyes. Eventually, they'll form a more cohesive whole, the Engine's creators say.

To take the next steps, the Engine's founders are asking for help. Last week, historians, journalists, legal scholars, statisticians, and computer scientists met at Columbia University to formally launch the Engine — and to ask for money. The Declassification Engine hopes to raise $50,000 to fund the project, and its founders have only raised a few hundred dollars at present.

Matthew Connelly, a historian at Columbia and one of the creators of the Declassification Engine, explained that the group is consciously trying to put the Declassification Engine on the "white hat" side of the fence — the opposite side, in other words, from organizations like Wikileaks.

The Engine's source material consists of documents that have already been declassified and released by the government for public scrutiny. Furthermore, its users aren't "cracking" redactions; they're simply making guesses. What they hope are good guesses, but guesses nevertheless.

How The Engine Revved Up

Declassification straddles a long-standing fault line in American politics, as Marc Trachtenberg, a professor of political science at UCLA explains:

There is thus a built-in conflict between the consumer and the supplier of historical evidence: we historians want to see the 'dirt,' but those responsible for the release of documents want to make sure that the material released does not damage the political interests they are responsible for protecting.

A redacted memo, made public by the Freedom of Information Act. (Source: http://www.foia.cia.gov/)

Declassified documents are often a tool to better understand our own history. But getting at that understanding sometimes requires teasing out decades-old data.

One of the first things the team did last year was to analyze which keywords were most closely associated with federal decisions to withhold documents among 1.4 million State Department cables. They then created a tool to analyze diplomatic activity over time depending on which terms were used, and the likelihood that a cable that included a specific term would still be classified.

That analysis revealed that 1970s cables that contained the word "Boulder" or phrase "Operation Boulder" were much, much more likely to be withheld, Connelly said. As it turned out, Project Boulder was President Nixon's plan, hatched following the hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics, to increase FBI scrutiny of Arabs entering the United States. In other words, 1970s-style ethnic profiling.

In this case, Connelly said, the archive of scanned documents could have served as a historical context when people began discussing the treatment of Arab-Americans thirty years later, after Sept. 11. But without the digital archive of source documents, that context wasn't readily available.

"The reason that these historians have never even heard of it is because the vast majority of the documents have been withheld, in the archives," Connelly said. "Without those documents, we can't even begin to try and derive some of these lessons."

The government originally held back the majority of memos that contained the word "Boulder". (Source: Matthew Connelly)

Is It Legal?

Given the political climate surrounding security in the decade-plus since September 11, the Declassification Engine's creators said last week that they were somewhat nervous that the U.S. government might try to clamp down on it. (The creators, naturally, believe that it's perfectly legal.) Connelly, however, said that the discussion during Friday's conference gave him reason to believe that the Engine's creators aren't likely to face any investigation from law enforcement agencies. 

Nevertheless, on Friday, the FAQ portion of the site was modified to eliminate all references to the project's legality, including that the group sought input from the State Department and the National Archives to better understand the declassification process.

"In some cases, we are using statistical methods to predict what is still classified," the Declassification Engine's FAQ said Thursday night.

How The Tools Work

Connelly gave ReadWrite an early glimpse of one component of the Engine on Thursday night. That's the Redaction Visualizer, which compares redacted and unredacted documents and highlights the differences. On the surface, this seems pretty obvious. 

Comparing an unredacted and redacted memo. (Source: Declassification-engine.org)

But the Visualizer is also the basic equivalent of your math homework: the redacted document provides the problem to solve, and the unredacted document is the "answer". This supervised data will  "teach the computer to teach itself about what's in the redaction," Connelly said.

The text that the Redaction Visualizer pulls out. (Source: Declassification-engine.org)

The real work for the Engine, though, lies in deciphering the redactions themselves. And the biggest arrow in its quiver is context. In total, the Engine uses 117,509 documents from the DDRS, with the most from the Eisenhower and Johnson administrations.

The text of the documents themselves are just one part of the puzzle. But there's a surprising amount  of unredacted metadata attached to each as well: the date, the author, the subject, who classified it, when it was declassified — 68 fields in all, Connelly said. All can be used as clues to make guesses as to what the redacted content contains. Connelly admits that he's not even clear on how well the Engine could work, once it's up and running.

What the Declassification Engine hopes to do for each redaction is generate a "word cloud" of the words that are statistically likely to be hidden by the redaction. Granted, this is a lot easier to do with a short series of letters, such as a name or date. Still, any guesses could be used to tease out further possibilities, and cross-correlated with other, similar documents to make further guesses.

Eventually, the Declassification Engine could become a Web site, where users could upload their own declassified documents, run them against the tools, and also add their own insights. "It would create a virtuous circle, and [users] would be able to make more and more powerful and accurate predictions," Connelly said.

Obama Turbocharges The Engine

The Declassification Engine received an unexpected boon from the Obama Administration on the eve of its launch: an executive order making machine-readable government documents the law of the land.

"Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable," President Obama wrote. "In making this the new default state, executive departments and agencies shall ensure that they safeguard individual privacy, confidentiality, and national security."

The order could remove the need to optically scan some government documents, allowing the Engine to more quickly process bunches of files. It remains to be seen how executive agencies will protect their electronic documents, however. 

But, as Connelly noted, the order begs the question: if machines are now allowed to read government documents, shouldn't they be allowed to guess what they're hiding?

Image courtesy of NASA. 

API Security Is Critical

Among other things, APIs serve as gateways to Web-based services like Twitter or Facebook. They are the specifications that let developers build applications that communicate directly with those services. You can think of APIs as doors; they let data in and out of a Web service. Just like physical doors, leaving APIs open can let anyone wander in, for whatever purpose.  

APIs are only as secure as they are written to be, explained Alistair Farquharson, chief technology officer for API-management vendor SOA Software. Smart developers make sure their APIs are open only for those people who have the authorized key.

What Problems Can APIs Cause?

The threat assessment for an API that isn't locked down isn't a pretty thing. Insecure APIs can fold under the artificial pressures of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks (which attempt to overwhelm a site or service with spurious requests in order to block legitimate access) , blocking the door through which data from a Web service is supposed to flow - perhaps bringing down the entire site. SQL script injections (which attempt to insert malicious code into a database), Farquharson added, could be used to re-route or copy data to outside servers operated by people who have no business looking at your data or your customers' information.

Because APIs enable very deep leveraging of a web service's features, they can be misused by hackers to spoof services, or even pretend to be entire websites, as web designer Feross Aboukhadijeh detailed last Autumn, when he discovered how the HTML5 Fullscreen API could be abused to appear like any legitimate site, such as a banking transaction web site. Aboukhadijeh works through how the fake web site could be created and fool many unsuspecting users, even down to a citation of a study on "change blindness," a psychological event where people can miss obvious changes.

And then there are the less subtle attacks, such as the 2008 security breach that took advantage of a bad Myspace-Yahoo services API and ended up gaining access to celebrity photos that were supposed to be privately stored.

These are the obvious malicious outcomes of APIs that aren't secured properly. But hacked APIs can also create perceptions of poor quality of service, which could erode customer confidence in a Web service.

The importance of getting APIs under control can't be overemphasized, contended identity-management vendor Xceedium's VP of Product Management, John Suit. "If the web interface is the front door to a company," Suit said, "then the API is the side door." And any door that lets in the wrong person - or the wrong code - can result in the same disastrous results.

Building A Better API Lock

Locking down APIs can tricky business. In these early days of the API boom, there are many different API standards being used by vendors to create the APIs through which applications will leverage Web services. Complicating that is the fact that there are a lot of different security standards, too.

This is a rich recipe for problems, since an effective API management system must allow authorized developers in to use the API, but not let anyone gain so much access they can subvert the API or use it as a doorway to the host service's internal data. Oh, and add to that mix the problem you have if APIs have to reside in a public cloud environment, outside your firewall.

Most security experts recommend using some sort of the strong authentication process in place when working with APIs. You need to make sure that the absolute correct person is accessing the API.

SOASoft's approach is a just-launched API Gateway virtual appliance that uses an OAuth server to work with many different existing security protocols. Playing to its strengths, Xceedium uses role-based identity systems to not only make sure the right person is connecting to the API, but that person should be accessing that API in the first place.

Things To Do Right Now

Even if you don't want to implement a formal identity and security management system for APIs, there are steps to take right now that will at least help mitigate potential problems.

If you want to prevent SQL injection attacks, then by all means sanitize the inputs in the API that connect to your internal databases. This will reduce the risk of a successful attack of this kind: 

API developers should also make sure that everything is transmitted through the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) - encrypted and transmitted by HTTPS - so that information like usernames and passwords are not captured in-process and then used to gain access to users' accounts or worse, the host organization's account. 

APIs are becoming increasingly important as so many new devices on the Internet generate and consume data via an ever-expanding list of Web services. While essential, those APIs also creating tempting targets for hackers. The need to lock down this growing vulnerability has never been a higher priority.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock, comic courtesy of XKCD.

The Passport app does not, however, include posting or messaging capabilities, a deliberate choice intended to push users toward other apps developed for the network. In addition, the app provides new tools for developers:

An additional benefit of the Passport app for 3rd-party developers is a new Authentication SDK which makes it easy to seamlessly integrate App.net login/signup functionality into any app.

Who's John Sloan? He's the man pictured in a photo I used in a recent post on 10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job. (See that photo below - or on the iPad in the photo above.) While Sloan may look like a symbol of outdated technology in the older photo, he's actually the polar opposite. As, in fact, the newer photo of him above should lead you to believe.

Sloan, aka Chip Overclock, has not only participated in the many amazing, globe-spanning, nano-shrinking changes in computer tech over the past four decades, he has stayed current with the changes - and kept himself gainfully employed - by taking full responsibility for his own career and professional development.

Pictures Tell The Story

The picture below shows Sloan at Wright State University, Ohio, circa 1976. He would soon go on to earn his B.S. in computer science, and later his master's degree. He's seated next to an IBM System/360 Model 65.

Sloan, now 56, lives in Denver. Several of his friends saw my story and noticed the photo, and forwarded it to him, which prompted him to contact me. Sloan describes his current career as a "freelance product developer specializing in real-time and highly concurrent systems." The photo at the top of this post shows Sloan next to his Mac Mini with Cinema Display. That's a first-generation iPad he's holding - displaying the original picture, no less.

Why John Sloan's Story Matters

Talking to John Sloan made it clear that long-term survival in the tech industry was about much more than just mastering a specific set of skills. Instead, it's all about taking personal responsibility for learning and adapting over the years and decades:

ReadWrite: Getting a computer science degree in 1976 was an awfully forward-thinking move.

John Sloan: It was the closest I could get to living in the kind of science fictional universe that I was reading about and watching on television. I still remember today watching the very first episode of the original Star Trek.

ReadWrite: Are you currently employed?  

John Sloan: I'm a self-employed, offering consulting and contracting through my one-man company, Digital Aggregates, and have been since 2006.

ReadWrite: How do you stay connected to all the changes in the computer industry?

John Sloan: I spend almost all my time (when not working with clients) on professional development. I read, I attend conferences, I learn new skills. This is the kind of professional development that companies simply no longer offer anymore to their regular employees. My company exists not just to service my clients, but to keep me current and employable.

Favorite Tech And Tools

ReadWrite: What technologies have you worked on over the years?

John Sloan: I've had a lot of career success, almost all in the systems area, much of it working low in the software stack, close to bare metal. I've worked on IBM mainframes, PDP-11 minicomputers. Cray supercomputers [all the way] to huge distributed Linux systems. My current gig is developing a tiny PBX with Iridium transceivers that will allow flyers in business jets to make phone calls from anywhere in the world.

John Sloan: My iPhone 5. I have no idea how I'd live without it.

ReadWrite: One of the big tech shifts has been the move to open source. How have you tackled this change?

John Sloan: Open source has been very good to me. For several years now a lot of my income has come from hacking open source software ranging from various portions of the Apache software stack written in Java to the Linux kernel and various portions of the GNU software stack in C.

The economics of open source is the most interesting part about it. Back in the mainframe days, you bought the hardware, and got the software and support for free. Now the hardware is almost free, the software is mostly free, and the support is how a lot of companies book revenue.  

ReadWrite: What about the shift from desktop to mobile?

John Sloan: Every time I pick up my iPhone 5 or my iPad, I feel like I'm in a science fiction movie. Same goes for the Android mobiles. I also have a Samsung Galaxy tablet. It's astounding.

Tech Advice For Young And Old

ReadWrite: Do you have any advice for workers who have been in the industry a long time?

John Sloan: Do not trust your career and professional development to your employer. You absolutely must take charge of this yourself.

ReadWrite: What about advice for those just starting out?

John Sloan: No matter what technologies is being taught when a freshman enters university, they will almost certainly not be the ones being taught when that senior graduates. And whatever technologies that student learns will not be what he ends up needing expertise in when he enters the workforce. Continuous, life-long learning isn't a buzzword, it's a requirement.

People who grasp specific technologies but can't quickly learn new ones on their own are the ones who are going to be laid off or whose jobs are going to be outsourced.

ReadWrite: Anything else you want to add?

John Sloan: Hardly a day goes by in which my wife of nearly 30 years and I don't remark on how lucky we've been. Just the other day one of my friends and former Bell Labs colleagues remarked that she was surprised that she still got paid good money to do what she loves to do. I feel the same way.

Lead image courtesy of Flickr.

Meet Kira Becker, Emily Moschella, Tara Abrishami and Anna Venetianer. Not one of them is older than 16, but they’re already accomplished programmers. 

The four have spent the past five months developing Navi Car. Since they attend Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school that attracts gifted students from all over the Washington, DC, area, their commutes are often lengthy. The girls all have active after-school lives, including tennis, track & field and theater, but it’s not always easy to get where they need to be. 

So the girls decided to solve their commuting problem by building an Android app. Since January, the four friends have spent weekends and afternoons making their app a reality with the help of a free programming tool, MIT App Inventor. 

Building Apps To Solve Problems

Not everyone feels adept enough to build an app to solve his or her problems. But for the next generation of programmers, it’s second nature. 

“Technology is becoming more and more accessible. I definitely think people will be making their own apps in the future for exactly what they need them for,” said Venetianer. 

Encouraged by a teacher, the girls were spurred to enter their app in a programming contest specifically for high school girls, the Technovation Challenge. Under the name Team Round of APPlause, they’ve been selected as one of the top ten global finalists. On Thursday, they visited Twitter HQ in San Francisco to have their app judged. 

Although the very existence of a programming contest just for teenage female participants reveals the severity of the gender gap in computer science, the girls said they never felt like they were doing anything groundbreaking. 

Girls Coding: Not Unusual?

“Being in the community that we are in, everyone is so supportive. there are so many other girls [at Thomas Jefferson] interested in computer science and tech in general,” said Abrishami. “I guess a lot of people are impressed and proud of us, but nobody thinks it's unusual.”

As sophomores in high school, none of the girls have made a decision about whether or not they want to pursue computer science careers. But if app building appears as accessible to others of their generation as it does to them, the future of programming looks very bright.

If you want to know the most in-demand tech skills, that info is readily available. Want to learn the programming skills most coveted by employers? Done. But what are the skills and specialties that no one wants any more? What core competencies raise red flags instead of call backs? 

(See also the Top 7 Most In Demand Tech Skills For 2013 and 15 Programming Skills Most Coveted By Employers.)

A survey of 1,100 tech-hiring professionals by Dice, a job firm for tech professionals, offers some insight. Combining the Dice survey and other research, including an off-the-record conversation with an engineering VP who participates in hiring decisions, here are some of the outdated tech skills and withering technologies to be wary of putting on your resume:  

1. Windows XP Admin/Help Desk

Many IT professionals, from engineers to help desk support workers to system administrators, have significant XP experience. Unfortunately, this may no longer be a useful attribute. Windows XP still holds the #2 spot for desktop operating market share (just behind Windows 7), but its fate is sealed. Microsoft ended XP license sales more than two years ago and plans to cease supporting it in less than a year. 

(See also Microsoft Is Trying To Sell Windows 8 To Enterprises, But Most Want Windows 7 Instead.)

2. Adobe Flash Developer/Designer

Web developers, app developers and designers have long relied on Adobe Flash to create interactive features. Yet Flash's future, particularly on mobile - is quickly drying up. It's now been three years since Steve Jobs created a stir when he posted his Thoughts on Flash memo outlining the reasons why Flash would not be part of Apple's iOS. At the time, Flash was considered so dominant that many analysts wondered if Jobs' decision would crush iPhone sales.

It did not.

Just over a year after the Jobs memo, Adobe announced it would stop developing Flash for mobile devices. Today, Adobe's former CTO, Kevin Lynch, works for Apple. The future belongs to HTML5. Learn, write and build accordingly.

3. Software Support

The transformation of computing from desktop to mobile, and especially the transition of software and services into the cloud is limiting opportunities for traditional/packaged software support. Today, you need to know how to manage software services and software configurations in the cloud. 

(See also Legacy IT Vendors Shoot The Sales Messenger.)

4. SEO Specialist

Google no longer has a Search group. It's now called "Knowledge." That should be a telling warning for all the search engine optimization (SEO) gurus and ninjas looking for work. Expect SEO work to be de-valued going forward. The explosion of smartphones, apps and real-time location information - and especially social media recommendation - is diminishing the importance of search results. Eventually, information may be delivered to us even before we search for it as our integrated, connected systems anticipate our needs.

5. Quality Assurance Specialist and Managers

Hiring professionals in the Dice survey placed Quality Assurance (QA) on the "low priority" side of the ledger. Do not expect this to change. These days, the tech industry seems to be following Google's lead and turning everyone into beta testers. Users are the ultimate quality assurance staff - and they don't get paid!

6. - 9. Mainframes, Voice Telephony, PC Support, COBOL

According to a recent story in the Austin Post, tech recruiters "recommended (that) a 40-year-old still working in COBOL reevaluate why they're a coder." Pretty harsh. But the fact is, technology continues to move forward with no time spared for sentiment.

If you are gainfully employed as a PC repair tech, a COBOL coder, or are working on any of several older technologies, such as voice telephony or as a PBX technician, say, good for you. But don't count on keeping that job for the long-term, or being able to find another one like it. 

10. Something That Seems Secure Today

The TIOBE Programming Community Index lists C, Java, C++ and Objective-C as the programming skills most in demand right now. But here's the thing. In 2009, Objective-C was barely in use. The rapid success of the iPhone and iPad vaulted the language's popularity. Now, however, just over three years later, its popularity is already stabilizing.

In today's superheated technology environment, even the most popular, most secure seeming technology skills can suddenly become obsolete. That's just the way it is. No matter how in-demand your current skill set, you can never rest on your resume. 

Learning Is The Key

Will highlighting the wrong skill set to a recruiter brand you as out of touch - or too expensive to hire? Perhaps. But don't expect anyone to tell you that's what going on. More likely, they may just won't return your call, or let your resume vanish into the ether. (There will probably always be a few legacy jobs in all these areas, but that's about it.)

The only solution is to keep learning - and keep showing that you can learn. While the pace of skills disruption may well be increasing, learning new skills has never been easier. That includes formal schooling as well as free and low-cost resources like Khan Academy and CodeAcademy, for example. 

Here's the bottom line: Since so much technology is fairly new to everyone, why should a company invest in experienced candidates - rather than someone just starting out? Writing for The Wall Street Journal, business professor and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa, was brutally direct:

It may be wrong, but look at this from the point of view of the employer. Why would any company pay a computer programmer with out-of-date skills a salary of say $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate — who has no skills — for around $60,000? Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. 

(See also Vivek Wadwha in How A $20 Tablet Will Change The World [Video].)

It's not just about the money, of course. To justify any salary, it's not only about what you know - now - but what you can learn going forward. The key to a long career in Silicon Valley, or anywhere in the tech world, is showing that you can learn and adapt - and master - constant change.

Good luck!

Lead image courtesy of Flickr.