AI is finding it's way in a wide variety of applications pertaining to almost every industry. This AI driven rapidly evolving landscape has created a demand for a unique blend of technical, creative, and interpersonal skills highly sought-after by employers. Listed below are some specialized AI-related skills that are becoming increasingly valuable in the modern times. 1. AI Models Development Understanding how AI and ML work including the underlying algorithms, and learning to develop ML powered apps using tools like TensorFlow or PyTorch is a highly desirable skill to master in the age of AI. Furthermore, the skills in fine-tuning and adapting large pre-trained models (like GPT, BERT, or Vision Transformers) to specific use cases are also useful, allowing you to create specialized applications without starting from scratch. Leveraging pre-trained models and adapting them to new tasks with limited data is particularly useful in NLP and computer vision. 2. AI Models Deployme...
The birth of Linux was one of the magnificent events of software development history. It marked the dawn of open source software development. Thousands of part time interested developers distributed across the globe contributed to the software making it a world class operating system. This open and peer style of software development shattered the traditional cathedral style in many ways. Today we find large number of successful and huge open source projects in active usage. The rise of the internet and flexible process models like agile have also boosted open source software development. Internet today provides all the tools to facilitate collaboration, hosting and configuration control of open source projects. As open source world continues to marvel the closed source development community, we look at various software development aspects challenged by free and open software development.
Cost and Budget
The cost of the software is distributed across it's entire lifetime. The cost of maintaining the software is around 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it. This cost is strongly affected by the number of users because more users find more bugs. Open Source software development reduces maintenance costs to a large extent because users are co-developers. Each user looks at the software from a different angle for the task of bug characterization. Even the best team of beta testers in Closed Source software development may not be able to find an evident bug which may be discovered later in software operation by a user. The cost of fixing a bug is much higher when the software goes in active usage. The recent history of software development indicates that Open Source projects have outperformed Closed Source projects in budget and cost effectiveness. The up-migration cost of Linux for 16 to 32 to 64 bit transition is nearly effort less as compared to propriety operating systems. Closed Source software development also includes overhead costs of keeping a traditional management hierarchy.
User Satisfaction
The release early and release often approach of Open Source software development ensures high user satisfaction. Users can either get cutting edge latest releases with new features or find more stable bug free releases. This approach has been adopted by more formal software development process models like agile. The best thing about Open Source software development is that users are actively involved at every stage of the process. Users are an active part of the community to provide novel ideas and later act as co-developers and beta testers. The resulting software delivers functional value to the user and thus user satisfaction. The more rigid process models in Closed Source software development do not involve the user until the later stage of the development. The resulting software might not be what was actually intended. This is the reason why many IT projects fail to deliver value to the customers.
Developer Morale
The best part of Open Source software development is it's rich community of self-motivated developers. The users themselves act as developers out of their own interest in the software. This approach works exceptionally well and has been replicated in formal software development process models like agile. Volunteer developers are driven mostly by their ego and reputation in the community. Closed Source community on the other hand has to spend a lot of resources and management effort to keep the developers motivated. Closed Source software developers are generally driven by money and not by sheer technical love for their work. Typical Closed Source cultures have very few really talented developers and managers spend most of the time managing rest of the human resource. They will naturally be less motivated and may produce low quality work. The typical cathedral style of working is itself a source of less motivation in the developers. The more democratic and bazaar style of working keeps the developer's morale high.
Meeting Deadlines
Open Source projects have mostly been ahead of delivering software to the customers in time. The approach, "deliver fast and deliver often", ensures that working software reaches much eager intended customers. Closed Source software development is rigid and mostly fails to meet timelines. The approach "frequent delivery of working software" has been adopted in agile philosophy to make it more flexible and realistic to user needs.
Project Management
Project management is typically hierarchical and cathedral style in Closed Source teams. Open Source communities work in a peer to peer bazaar style of management. The leader of Open Source projects must exhibit inter-person skills to keep the developer interest alive. The Open Source projects die once the developer community loses interest in the software. The Closed Source projects have a tremendous overhead of traditional management. Despite this overhead, many project fail to meet deadlines, budget constraints and user requirements. Due to these factors, Closed Source project management is also getting more flexible and democratic in style. We have seen tremendous progress of agile methodologies in few recent years. The major tasks accomplished by traditional management like define goals, monitor progress, motivate and organize people and manage resources seem largely irrelevant in the context of Open Source software development. Open Source developers are self motivated volunteers who are working for interest and ability to contribute to the project. Open Source community naturally attracts the top programmers and their is no need to motivate or organize them.
Service and Support
Open Source projects have been able to provide support during the project lifetime in a better way. It can be verified by comparing the support provided by Linux and Windows in recent history. Linux has always been ahead with new feature integrations, patches and technological enhancements. Linux provides support for a widest range of hardware platforms and architecture types. It has been modified for embedded systems and real time solutions.
Security
"Security through obscurity" has been a complete misconception amongst windows users. Some of the top notch open source projects like Linux and Mozilla Firefox are considered much secure as compared to the competitors in Closed Source arena. The fact is due to restricted privileges and root access in Linux world. "Linus' Law" states that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". This is one of the core ideas behind success of Open Source software and it also contributes to it's security. Most of the security vulnerabilities are identified by expert hackers and consequently fixed.Software Quality
Users are co-developers as well as beta-testers in Open Source world. They are the most valuable resource who work out of self motivation. They will naturally create a software of quality which is created at a heavy cost in Closed Source world.
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