#Z and Cloud Modernization Stack

[thevillainswhore]

Read Between The Lines

Pairing: Modern!Bucky Barnes x F!Reader

Word Count: 6.6k

Summary: There shouldn’t have been anything unusual about your routine visit to the local bookstore. Your life was simple and mundane, even if you were a daydreamer at heart. But you were pleasantly surprised when this time you met a handsome stranger between the shelves.

Warnings: Pure fluff, meet cute, meddling bookstore owners, lets also pretend that walking someone home after you’ve only just met is fine 😅🤣

Author’s Note: Unbeta’d, warning graphics and dividers by @rookthorne 💜 hope you enjoy your gift my love 🥰

It was an early morning in Brooklyn as you walked down the cobblestone path — a light dusting of wind had you wrapping your coat tighter around you while a chill tingled your cheeks. 

Finally, a free day marked out in your calendar meant you had the opportunity to spend some time to yourself and of course, that had to include the cutesy, tucked away bookshop — fittingly named Hidden Treasures — found in an unplanned outing; a true secret gem you held dear to your heart. 

Weekly stops to your new bookstore soon became routine in your life. A daydreamer at heart, you were always on the hunt for a new fairytale or fantasy to delve into; best friends to lovers, soulmates bound to fall in love, a bump in with a handsome stranger — a girl could dream. 

Modern dating had proven disastrous for you when plenty of first dates arranged online had turned sour fast. That embarrassment was enough to have you swear off real romance for life. 

So, you had always kept your head in your books. Yes, your days might have been a little stale. And yes, you could have used a little more excitement in your life. But, you were more than happy to stick to your safety net of fictional men — they would never disappoint you.

The chime from the store bell rang as soon as you opened the door and stepped inside. Shimmying your coat and scarf off, you hung them on the rack and sighed happily. By the counter as always was Teddy; the sweet, old man who had greeted you with a beaming smile and an enthusiastic wave since your first visit. “Morning, darlin’!”

“Good morning, Ted.” It was impossible to contain your wide grin as you stomped the dirt off your boots onto the mat, happy to see the bookstore owner and your now good friend. “I’ll catch you when I’m finished, okay?” 

As usual, Teddy gave you the go ahead with a nudge of his head to get on with your weekly haul, already expecting you to jump into your adventure of fiction and find him after. 

The feeling of being transported into another world each time never disappeared. The floor to ceiling oak bookshelves wrapped in green vines, towered over you like castles and the bumps and ridges of variously sized books you ran your hands over reminded you of their stone walls. Fairy lights were strung between the exposed wooden beams of the roof and streams of daylight casted in through the window that brightened the shop.

All your responsibilities vanished for the time being and a blissful peace clouded the stress and anxiety of the week. It was magical.

Endless coves and hideouts hid around the shop — the amount of times you had gotten lost, even in such a small space, never failed to amuse Teddy. You would always find your way back to the counter, a stack of books overflowing in your arms with a sheepish expression. You were still finding secrets to this very day. 

After idly walking around the cozy bookshop for a while with no real goal, you eventually decided to stroll towards the romance section. You were on a mission to find the next installment of the series you were currently reading, browsing from A-Z and trailing the tip of your finger along the coffee stained, worned spines.

The rustic smell you could only find between the pages of written stories were deeply breathed in as you hummed along to the calm jazz song that played from the speakers. You scoured through the endless selection until you reached exactly what you were looking for. Finger coming to a stop, you were about to carefully pluck the book from the shelf. 

Now, you believed you were a cautious person — a healthy amount of awareness of your surroundings never hurt to keep you safe. However, instinct seemed to fail you when a figure brushed your back. They were directly behind you, light on their feet and quiet. 

The tiny hairs on your arms stood up, alert with the presence close by and before you could have spun around, a thick arm stretched over the top of your head and into your vision.  

The feel of ringed fingers gently brushed against yours as they landed on the book you planned to take. You looked at both of your hands, transfixed at the difference in size between you. The staccato of your heart was sent into overdrive, thumping wildly against your chest. 

You watched in real time as the cold silver against your warm skin thrummed all the way through your body, a bolt of electricity tingling your nerves — never had you felt more alive.   

Following a path from the stranger's hands all the way up his arms, the pattern of colourful tattoos screamed out at you. Beautiful, intricate designs with immaculate detailing bursted over his olive skin and decorated his frame perfectly. 

There was no doubt this stranger heard the small gasp you let loose. But you couldn’t have helped it. Those arms taunted you — the devil on your shoulder poked its sharp tail against you and whispered delightful sins into your ear. 

Down girl. You didn't even know him yet.

“Oh!” The stranger exclaimed. “My apologies, Doll. Looks like we were reaching for the same book.” The deep voice that rumbled above caused a shiver to run down your spine — pure heaven in your ears. 

You gained the courage to turn around and look up at his face, and you were utterly mesmerised at the ocean blues staring straight into your soul, reaching into the deep valleys of guarded secrets you kept close to your heart. Everything you wanted to keep hidden started to unravel in one look. You were unsure whether you loved it or hated it.  

Your mouth fell agape as this tattooed stranger with a dreamy gaze smirked, watching you take his appearance in. Swallowing the lump in your throat, you racked your head for something to say as your eyes darted over his features — desperate to take in his beauty. 

However, you failed to realise this man had also been basking in your beauty too, obsessing over every detail of your face. You watched him slowly lick his lips, flitting his eyes up and down your figure before he summarised, “Huh — I guess you do look the type for a good romance.” 

As much as you tried to remain composed, your mind apparently had decided that was the time to throw your filter out the window. “I can’t say the same for you.” 

Your mouth instantly fell open in shock, mortified at your audacity. The embarrassment of your own awkward nature forced you to slap your hand over your mouth. 

Quick to want to rectify your mistake, you stuttered, falling over your own words as you attempted to say your apologies. “Oh my god. I didn’t— I didn’t mean it like that, I swear! Just— just with the tattoos and— and the— the um…” your words trailed off as you gawked at his nose ring in awe.

You were too busy lost in this man’s invisible spell to notice the laugh he tried to keep in. All you paid attention to was his teeth biting into his plump bottom lip. 

However, it was the sudden realisation of the position the two of you hadn’t moved from that shook you out of your haze — now hyper aware of the proximity against each of your chests. The way this walking, tatted sin on legs, plucked straight from your dreams held eye contact astounded you. Your legs were almost forced to cross over each other, to stop the flutter between them as his breath tickled your neck and the scent of mint and leather permeated your senses. 

Outwardly shaking your head to snap out of your brain fog, you stepped back to lean against the bookshelf, out of this unusual hold of a stranger so you could actually think properly. 

You undoubtedly expected him to bid you farewell, for him to take offense to your quip (rightfully so)  and never see him again — your chance flushed down the drain already due to your own inability to socialise like a human being. 

The world would be that cruel to you, you figured. To dangle the most gorgeous man you had ever seen in front of you only to rip him away because of your lack of grace. Why not after your so called luck with dating? 

So it was to your pleasant surprise that instead, this stranger wasn’t repelled by you and in fact took a step closer towards you, eyes homed onto yours intensely with a glint of mischief. “While my looks may be deceiving,” he rested his hand on the shelf beside you and leaned down to your height. “I sure don’t mind the element of surprise if it captures the attention of a pretty girl.”

The charm and the charisma that seeped from his pores had you releasing a giggle. And the delight of being the cause of that twinkle in his cerulean eyes was unlike anything else.

Testing the waters, you teased him, praying you didnt mess up the second chance you had been graciously gifted. “Do you normally pick up girls in bookstores?”

The bewitching stranger didn’t let up on his allure though. “This is actually my first time, is it obvious how bad I am at this?”

“You’re not doing so bad.” You shrugged, a smile edging its way into your face. 

“Well, thank god for that.” He dramatically clasped his hand to his heart, blowing out a breath. “I was hoping that would work because I had no more pick up lines to win you over.”

Your laughter filled the aisle. His endearing nature — just the right balance of wit and appeal — attracted you even more. 

A calm broke over the two of you as your joint amusement naturally settled. You both continued to gaze at the other before your companion introduced himself. “I’m Bucky.”

Bucky. You finally had the stranger’s name and it suited him, you figured. Hearing it gave you a warm feeling in your chest and an itch to test it on your tongue. 

“Can I have the pleasure of knowing your name too?” he asked smoothly.

The subtle cock of his head and that damned sparkle in his eye, finished off with a tongue in cheek smile almost had you giving in. Bucky was patient as the tension brewed in the air and he looked at you as though all of his problems would have been answered if he knew what to call you. 

However, a sudden defiant nature within you wanted to test him. Make him work for something so personal. “I think I’ll stick with keeping it to myself for now,” you granted him instead.

Bucky was visibly surprised with your comeback, eyes widening the slightest as he stood tall and slid his hands into his jean pockets, but the glint in his eyes told you he liked your sass — a mystery stood in front of him that he was desperate to unravel. 

“Elusive, I like it.” He cocked his hip and grinned, giving you an appreciative once over before he declared, “Doll it is then, sweetheart.” 

Your heart swooped. Like you were on a rollercoaster, about to drop from the highest point. The rush you experienced from one small interaction was addictive and you wanted more. 

“So,” Bucky said. “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he squeezed his eyes shut and winced as a flush crept up his neck. 

Discreetly, you covered your mouth with your hand to hide the laughter lodged in your throat. You actually thought his dorkiness was adorable, but you wanted to let him suffer for a little longer. “Is that really what you’re going with?” You sniggered. “I knew you said you were out of pick up lines, big guy, but you’re scraping the barrel with that one.”  

Bucky squinted his eyes open and sighed. “I know — I know — that one was awful.” Surprisingly, he managed to pull you back in with his dreamy smile. “I swear I got better game than that.” 

“Oh really?” You challenged, crossing your arms over each other. “I don’t believe it.”

But as quick as a whistle, he retorted. “Go out with me and you’ll soon know how I could win you over.”

It was your turn to stifle the heat rising to your cheeks. There was a hopefulness in his gaze, desperately pulling you in. The hopeless romantic in you could have fallen in love with him right there and then, but you knew that wasn’t at all reasonable or realistic. 

“Okay, I’ll give you that one,” you laughed. Turning on your heels to pluck the very book that had been the cause of your bump in with your beautiful stranger, you waved the book over your shoulder, “But I think I better go pay for this.” 

“Ah, you beat me to it, Doll.” He clicked his tongue, a bout of sadness to his tone. “Would you mind if I walked with you? I’ve already got everything I hoped for.” Bucky’s eyes never left yours as he reached over the top of your head, once again trapping you, and taking a book from the shelf. 

Had your mind been any less fuzzy, you would have noticed he hadn’t even looked at which book he was reaching for, picking one at random to gently wave in the air between you, too.

You cleared your throat. “Y—yeah, of course! Not a problem whatsoever.” 

After Bucky had stepped back, he gestured for you to go first and the two of you silently walked over to the counter. You tried to discreetly glance over your shoulder, unable to resist looking at him. But your cheeks heated up when he met your gaze and winked. 

Once you reached the counter, you offered a bright smile to Teddy, who was already grinning back at you. Placing your chosen book on the wood between you for him to scan, he raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Just the one for you today, little one?” 

“Just the one this time, Ted.” You confirmed. 

“That’s unlike you.” Teddy hummed in thought. “Didn’t find anything else you like back there?” 

You mumbled under your breath, quiet enough that Teddy struggled to hear, “You could say that.”

Aware that Bucky was literally right behind you, you swiftly changed the subject. “How’s that husband of yours getting on anyway?”

George, said husband of Teddy, had been away for a trip overseas to collect rare editions of books on his wish list (along with a few surprise items for Teddy that you knew of) and as much as Teddy loved to keep up his beloved, bubbly personality alive in the shop, you knew he missed him deep down. The pair of them were two peas in a pod — incomplete without the other. 

So, you were shocked to see a grin crawl on his face as he scanned your book. “You can ask him yourself.”

You were confused until another figure popped their head around the doorway of the back room with a flourish. You gasped and ran towards him, throwing your arms around his neck for a hug. “George! I wasn’t expecting you back so soon!”

George rocked you side to side with a big squeeze before he held you at arms length with fondness to check you over. Your face scrunched up when he booped the tip of your nose. “Yeah well, you can’t keep me away for too long, sweetheart.” Playfully side eyeing Teddy, he brought you closer and whispered loud enough for his husband to hear him say, “Besides, someone has to keep this troublemaker in check, don’t they?” 

“Haven't got the slightest idea what you could mean, Georgie.” Teddy overheard and put on his most innocent face. You giggled into George, amused by his husband’s antics. “I’m an angel.”

Their love encompassed everything you wanted from a life partner. You longed for their banter and their care and the passionate fire that was still raging all these years later between them. 

Looking over to Bucky, you were caught off guard to find him gazing at you already, a smile on his face that slightly scrunched up his nose. 

You stepped back to the counter, heated under the spotlight just as Teddy rang you up with a price. Though, you didn’t miss the seemingly casual glance he made behind you. “Mornin’, Buck. Got any nice plans for today?” 

You frowned, surprised that they were familiar with each other. Bucky cleared his throat before he spoke from behind you, “Just a small visit here today I’m afraid, Ted.”

Teddy still continued to speak over your shoulder as he took a suspiciously long time to bag up your book. “Right,” he murmured. “No plans for the rest of the day then?” 

“Nah.” Bucky's voice rumbled at your back, as if he had taken a step closer to you. “Nothing else, unfortunately. Can’t go anywhere without a pretty date now, can I, Teds?”

Almost immediately, Teddy looked at you, a glint in his eye of excitement before he innocently offered, “I may know someone.” 

You choked, causing all three men to look at you; Teddy had a shit eating grin on his face, while George tried to hide his laughter in his hand — unsuccessfully. You could even feel Bucky’s stare locked in on you from behind. 

“Don’t you dare,” you muttered under your breath to Teddy. 

But you knew by his wicked smile your threat wouldn’t stop him from meddling. “Why don’t you walk little one home after this? Get to know each other,” he said to Bucky. 

Amazed by the man’s audacity, you scolded him. “Teddy!”

“Nonsense, girl,” Teddy rounded the counter to you and slid his arm around your shoulders, turning you towards Bucky before he continued. “Besides, you heard the boy. He needs some company and I know for a fact you’ve got no plans apart from locking yourself at home.” Teddy looked proud of himself as he shrugged. “Problem solved.” 

He wasn’t lying. Although you were a little embarrassed he would out you like that, you in fact did not have any other plans. Traitor. 

“As lovely as Bucky seems, I don’t know him, Ted.” Quickly you glanced at Bucky and shyly uttered, “I mean no offense by that.”

“Don’t worry, dollface,” he said and you just knew by the grin on his face he was about to tease you. “I think I’m used to it by now.” 

Bucky snorted at your mouth falling open in shock.  Cheeky bastard. 

“Oh, dating back in my day was so easy.” Teddy sighed. “You liked the look of someone? You speak to them. You want to get to know them? Great! Ask them out.”

You shook your head in exasperation. The complexities of modern dating weren't as simple as Teddy’s reasoning. Respectful, charming men didn’t just fall from the sky, unfortunately, and fairytales didn’t just happen. 

Looking at Bucky, you gave him an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry about him.” You threw a lighthearted glare at Teddy while you admonished him. “Someone doesn’t know how to keep their mouth shut.”

Bucky waited until you looked at him and shrugged with a lopsided smile. “Eh, I don’t mind the old man so much.” Scratching the back of his head, he admitted, “Especially when he sets me up with pretty girls in bookstores.” 

Okay, maybe a few charming men fell from the sky. 

You clasped your hands together tightly, repressing the urge to squeak from giddiness.

Bucky stepped forward and placed his single book onto the counter before he offered his arm to you. “What do you say, Doll? Fancy humoring me?” 

While Bucky was still technically a stranger, Teddy knew him and one thing you were sure of was that he would never let any harm or danger come to you — you would be safe. 

Sighing lightheartedly, you stepped out of Teddy’s hold and stood before Bucky. You observed the slight bob of his Adam’s apple, taking pleasure in the small victory of his nerves and decided to put him out of his misery. “I guess you wouldn’t be the worst company on my way home.” 

Hooking your arm through Bucky’s, the glee that overtook his adorable face was worth your decision alone. He looked over to Teddy and gave him a single nod. “I'll take good care of her, Ted.”

“You better boy, because now I’m in trouble.” 

You grabbed your book from Teddy, already bagged and paid for. “Me and you will talk next time,” you warned. 

Teddy tightened his lips, hiding his laughter as he saluted you. “Yes, ma’am.” 

Rolling your eyes, you looked to Bucky, “You’re sure you don’t mind? Please don’t feel as though you have to do this.” 

But he just smiled earnestly, subtly pulling you closer towards him. “Believe me when I say I absolutely want to do this.”

Your cheeks warmed, flustered beyond belief. You were relieved as he started to usher you towards the coat rack, helping you pull your coat over your shoulders and wrapping your scarf around you.  

With a departing wave, you said goodbye to both George and Teddy as you began to exit the store. Teddy’s shout of, “Have fun kids, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” was the last thing you both heard before the door closed.

George rounded the counter, having witnessed the whole exchange and curled up to his husbands side. He squinted his eyes in suspicion. “What are you up to, mister?”

Teddy continued to watch the two of you walk into the distance out the window, both jittery, arm in arm and a joint hidden excitement to be together. He just smiled as he shrugged. “Oh, nothing much, dear.”

“Little one, huh? Very cute.”

“Oh, god,” you groaned, ducking your head in embarrassment.  

Bucky wasn’t deterred by your timidness, however as he gently nudged your shoulder and playfully whispered, “Almost suits you as much as Doll, sweetheart.” 

Your huff of breath froze over in the cold air and you looked up at him with a shy smirk before shaking your head. “You’re good, you know. The women must love this — you stealing them from their daily life and whisking them away on dates.”

Bucky just laughed before he brought you closer to him, slinging an arm over your shoulder as he said, “Oh, so you're admitting this is a date, Doll?” 

You couldn’t help gazing into his stormy blue eyes that lit up in the sunrise above you. He was carved by angels, you swore by it. 

Walking forward, you detached yourself from Bucky’s hold, letting his arm drop, and spoke over your shoulder, “Play your cards right, handsome and we’ll see what this is by the end of the walk.”

You caught the redness creeping up Bucky’s face before you turned your head forward, though you did miss his goofy fist pump in the air. 

The thud of his heavy footsteps neared as he caught up to you and you decided to play dumb when he sneakily snaked his arm through yours. 

“So, Bucky,” you began. “Since we’re still practically strangers, let’s get to know each other.” 

He quickly recovered and nodded in agreement, “Great idea, Doll. What do you wanna know?”

“Tell me what you do for work,” you said. 

Bucky cheekily smiled before asking, “Any guesses before I tell you? No offense will be taken.” 

“Wow,” you laughed. “You’re really making me work for forgiveness aren’t you?” You hummed in thought before saying aloud, “Okay, I have something.” 

He raised his eyebrow. “Hit me with it, Doll.” 

You hesitated a second before you muttered, “A drummer.”

“What?!” Bucky laughed in shock and stared at you, eyes wide. “A drummer?”

Giggling, you held your defense. “Oh, come on! You can’t blame me with the tattoos and the jewelry.” You gestured to his form before shrugging. “You just have this classic rockstar look to you — nothing wrong with that of course.” 

Bucky held his free bare hand out, red from the cold and decorated with black ink. With a smirk, he leaned over to whisper in your ear, “The tattoos doin’ it for ya, Doll?” 

His Brooklyn drawl caused a shiver to run down your spine and you lightly gasped. He chuckled, overly satisfied to have made you flustered while you attempted to keep your dignity in tact. 

You bumped his hip with yours, ignoring his laughter. Brushing his flirtations off to try and keep your composure, you asked, “What is it you do then?”

A proud smile on his face, he answered, “I’m the owner of a vintage bike shop.” 

You turned to look at him, taking in his appearance for the umpteenth time and cocked your head. “Hm… I can see that actually. You got the whole biker aesthetic going for you.” 

You were pleased to see a small dust of red coat his cheeks. “Thanks, Dolly. Got anything else for me?” he asked, squeezing your hand. 

“Do you have any family?” you asked tentatively, worried it may be a sensitive topic. 

But Bucky’s face lit up at the mention and he turned to you, resembling an excited puppy. “I have the best family, Doll. My mom—Winnie, she raised me and my sister, Becca. They’re both amazing women and—“ 

As he went on, you stared at him and admired the way he spoke about the two most important women in his life — so full of love and awe for them that you felt like you knew them yourself. Your own mother had always taught you to take notice of a way a man speaks about other women in order for you to know how he would treat you. You were happy that Bucky did not disappoint. 

Along your walk, you had learnt how Bucky had a secret passion for pottery, something that allowed him to create beauty and art from his calloused and worn hands that years of oil and mechanical work had damaged. You were also over the moon to hear he was an avid reader. Of course you knew he must have a knack for reading if you met him at a bookstore. But, his detailing of certain stories he enjoyed and quotes that had stuck with him from authors he loved had your heart melting even more. 

The two of you continued to ask questions back and forth, learning more about the other as you walked together.  

“So,” Bucky started. “Hypothetically speaking of course, since this isn’t our first date, what would your perfect one look like?” 

You looked at him from the corner of your eye, watching as his eyes suspiciously darted around — whether he was digging for key information or not was a mystery to you. But you decided to answer the question anyway. 

“I think,” you began. “I think I’d enjoy an active date — maybe like a trip to Coney Island? You know the one with the—“

“The cyclone!” Bucky said enthusiastically. “Oh man, I haven’t been there since me and Stevie were kids.” 

“A good friend I take it?” You smiled, secretly enthralled by the way his eyes lit up. 

“The best,” he nodded. “Sorry, Doll. I got a little carried away there.” Sheepishly, he rubbed the back of his neck with the hand that was free. “Carry on.” 

“Don’t worry about it, it was cute.” you assured, before quickly clearing your throat once he started to smirk. “Anyway —  after a couple of rides and games where my date wins me a stuffed bear, a romantic little trip on the ferris wheel would be next and he would pay to stop at the top so we can see the whole of Brooklyn.” 

You feel Bucky’s stare on you as he said, “And then?” 

“Then he would walk me home and kiss me goodnight.” You finished quietly. 

“Interesting,” he mumbled. You didn’t miss the tone of his voice, one that made you skeptical of his antics. “So, kinda like I’m doing now?” 

Smartass, you thought internally. 

“Don’t be getting any ideas, Bucky,” you scolded lightheartedly. “This isn’t a first date, remember? You’re just walking me home.” 

He thinned his lips, trying to contain his smirk. “Of course, of course.” A moment passed in peaceful silence before he muttered, “There’s still time though, right?” 

Bucky ran away and out of your reach before you could land a playful whack to his arm. 

“Come on, Doll — I’m a dateless man!” he shouted. “Are you really gonna leave a poor man high and dry?” 

You scoffed, unable to contain the growing smile on your lips. “In your dreams, Bucky!” 

In hindsight, you should have known his retort wasn’t going to be anything other than cheeky — especially, with his sinful grin that made butterflies flutter in your stomach. “That you will be, Doll.” 

Beams of light from the sun, breaking through the clouds of the cold day, casted down over Bucky, creating the most heavenly glow over his features. Those ocean blue eyes that starstruck you from the very first look shone bright as ever and his piercings and rings that glistened had you entranced, wondering how they would feel against your body. 

The walk home, while not long, had given you a fair insight to this man you had met not only an hour ago. Bucky was unlike anyone you had met before — sweet but mischievous and the biggest flirt you had ever known. 

Not that you were complaining. 

The two of you were shortening the distance to your apartment. Admittedly, you felt a small ache in your chest, disappointed that the walk had to end so soon. However, the steps to your apartment that you reached signified the end of your time with him. 

Your hands twitched in anticipation. Was it inappropriate to want to see him again? Would you look desperate if you asked for a real date with him? An array of thoughts rushed through your mind until Bucky spoke over the scrambled mess in your head. “Okay. I have a confession to make.” 

You looked up, frowning to witness him twirling the rings around his fingers, dare you say looking as nervous as you felt.  

He had been making you stumble over yourself since your first bump in with his shameless flirtations and smooth moves. But now he was reduced to a man on edge. 

Intrigued, you wished for him to keep talking, curious to know the cause of his unease. “Go on,” you urged, softly.

Bucky nodded and took a deep breath. “I may have seen you. In that same bookstore. A couple of weeks ago.” He ran a hand through his hair, wincing at his inability to formulate his sentences coherently. “I um—found it after wandering around one day. I was in the far corner when I saw you walk in for the first time.” 

Your mouth fell agape, and your eyes widened while you listened intently. Though the shock of his confession rendered you speechless, you were rooted to the spot, hanging onto every word he said. 

Then, he gazed straight into your eyes, stepping closer and you gulped. “I swear I had never seen someone so beautiful in my life. I couldn’t take my eyes off you, Doll.” He shook his head and laughed earnestly. “You’ve had me in a chokehold for the longest time.” 

“But— But earlier?” You tried to get the words out to explain your confusion regarding the way he acted as though you met for the first time. 

Bucky closed the distance between you, tentatively closing his hands over yours. “I’ve seen you every week, walking into that store with your bright eyes, taking in everything like it’s the first time all over again. And every week I found myself in that far corner, obsessing over you and falling for you a little more each time.” He sighed before finishing, “I’d been building up the courage to come up to you until I finally did — Today.”

You could only imagine how you must have looked — a deer in headlights most likely, about to run away. Honestly, you were floored and you weren’t quite sure your mind had caught up yet. 

Attempting to settle your nerves, you cleared your throat. “You’re telling me,” you paused. “You’re telling me you planned on reaching for the same book as me? How did you even know which one I was going for?”

Bucky looked ultimately relieved that you hadn’t slapped him across the face just yet. His fingers twitched against yours while he laughed apprehensively. “Actually, I may have had a tiny bit of help with that one.” 

The cogs turned in your head and after a while the realisation struck you from his suspicious antics this morning. “Teddy!” you gasped. 

“Guilty as charged.” Bucky sheepishly smiled. “I asked him if he thought I had a chance with you the first time I saw you and he gave me some pointers.” 

You couldn’t help the huff of laughter that spilled from your lips. The whole situation was incredulous, something that would never happen to you. 

The tension slipped from Bucky’s shoulders, but his eyes still held on to some hope. Easing his worries, you grinned. “That was brave of you.”

Confidence visibly returned to him as he cockily shrugged, lips curving into his familiar smirk. “It was a risky move to take.”

Placing your hands on his chest, over his black leather jacket, you gave Bucky a run for his money as you caught his shudder with your eagle eye and decided to play him at his own game. “Some might even say creepy.”

“Oh yeah?” Bucky licked his lips and smoothed his hands over your hips. “Is that why you’re grinning like you’ve just found your future husband, Doll?”

This man, you thought to yourself. “You’re cheeky,” you replied aloud while you gripped his jacket. 

“And you like it.” He squeezed your hips.

There was hardly any distance between you; eyes glued to the others like neither of you could bear to look away. 

His eyes hooded as he joked playfully, “You gonna invite me up?” 

You smacked his chest, watching the crows feet by his eyes crinkle with amusement in the sweetest way. “I don’t put out on the first date,” you batted back. 

You weren’t prepared for the sudden shiver that rippled down your spine as he whispered, “Clever girl.” 

The charged air heightened your senses, you could feel every minute movement his fingers made, the way his thumb rubbed back and forth over your waist. 

“Can I have your name now?” Bucky disrupted the silence between you as his gaze flicked between your eyes. 

The rebellious nature from earlier had only come back tenfold. Coming within a hair's breadth away from his lips, you daringly muttered, “I’ll give it to you on our next date.”

His eyes lit up, like a kid on Christmas. “Next date?”

Pushing him away with a smirk, you held your hand out while he dazed at you longingly. “Phone,” you said confidently. 

You held in your laughter as Bucky quickly fumbled over himself, patting each of his pockets to find his mobile. Once located, he quickly slid it out of his leather jacket and into the palm of your hand. 

The glow of his screen lit up your face while Bucky tried sneaking a peek. But you shoo’d him away and carried on typing into his phone. 

Finally, you were finished and handed the phone back to him. With eagerness he grabbed it and instantly smiled with joy once he saw the screen. “Your number?” 

“Use it wisely, handsome,” you purred. Leaving him staring at you in his own haze, you walked up the steps to your apartment, a sway to your hips. You couldn’t be completely sure whether you heard Bucky stifle a choke from behind you, but you ignored it for the sake of his ego. 

Reaching the door to the lobby, you spun around on your feet and raised an eyebrow in question. “See you soon?” 

Bucky grinned from ear to ear. “Absolutely, Doll.” 

With that, you waved him goodbye and swung the door open, missing his besotted stare following you until you were out of sight. 

You raced up the stairs, holding in your excitement while you entered your apartment. As soon as your apartment door was shut behind you, you released the squeal that had been trapped in your throat while you danced on the spot. 

And at midnight, as you laid in bed thinking about Bucky, your phone chimed and you instantly grabbed with haste. The bright screen stung your eyes but once you saw who had texted you, they shot open — a thrill causing you to bite your lip and squeak.

Unknown Number: I was supposed to be asleep by 12 but you’re still on my mind. 

A few weeks later…

Teddy and his husband, George were readying the shop to open again after closing because of maintenance. The early morning was quiet yet peaceful; the only thing to be heard were the birds singing their song as the sun rose and shone into the shop windows. 

George leaned his elbow on the counter and sighed with nostalgia as he reminisced back to the beginning of their relationship. “Do you remember our first date, honey?”

Teddy spun around from his task of shelving the newly released books and smiled lovingly. “How could I forget?” 

The two gazed over the space between them, lost in their own bubble of harmony when the chime of the bell above the door snapped them out of their reverie. They both knew it was the usual time you would visit the shop, precise to a fault. 

With bright smiles, the pair looked towards the door, ready to greet you as was routine. But George gasped loudly when they found something a little extra glued to your side. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Teddy, however, kept quiet — no vocal response to be heard, only the visible large grin on his face once he caught you looking at him with a sheepish smile. 

“Well, good mornin’, little one,” he said teasingly.

You hid behind the tall frame next to you, embarrassed from being the center of attention. “Hi, Teds. Hi George,” your mousy voice spoke up. 

Easing the attention of you, Teddy glanced to your side and raised his eyebrow with a smirk. “Bucky.”

Your new boyfriend smiled and nodded his head in greeting to both men. “Good to see you, fellas.” Gently, Bucky grabbed your hand and pulled you with him as he began to lead you away. “Catch up with you shortly.”

Giggles and laughter echoed through the shop as you followed him down the closest aisle of books and away from prying eyes. 

George rounded the counter and came to his husband’s side, looking at him with a sneaking suspicion. “You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that would you, honey?”

Teddy thinned his lips, hiding his smile as he glimpsed at the two of you disappearing from his sight before getting back to shelving the books in his hand. He spoke over his shoulder, with all the innocence he could muster. “Me? Not at all, George — That’s nothing but a little bit of magic from Cupid.”

[techit-rp]

The Rise of Digital-Only Banks: Transforming the Financial Landscape in 2025

In 2025, the global banking industry is undergoing a major shift with the rapid emergence of digital-only banks, also known as neobanks. These banks operate exclusively online without any physical branches, offering streamlined, user-centric financial services through apps and web platforms. This evolution is redefining how people interact with banking, emphasizing speed, convenience, and personalization.

For professionals seeking to thrive in this changing landscape, enrolling in an investment banking course in Bangalore can provide the skills and knowledge needed to stay ahead of the curve.

What Are Digital-Only Banks?

Digital-only banks are financial institutions that provide banking services entirely through digital channels. Unlike traditional banks, they have no physical branches, which enables them to reduce operational costs and pass on those benefits to customers in the form of lower fees and better rates.

Core services often include:

Real-time payments and account management

Mobile-first banking features

AI-driven customer service

Instant loan approvals and credit facilities

These banks focus on delivering a seamless user experience, backed by automation, machine learning, and cloud infrastructure.

Why Digital-Only Banks Are Booming in 2025

1. Rapid Technological Adoption

With growing smartphone penetration, fast mobile internet, and rising comfort with online financial tools, digital-only banks are gaining traction across demographics—especially among tech-savvy Gen Z and millennial users.

2. Demand for Personalization

Consumers now expect financial services that understand their behavior, spending habits, and goals. Neobanks use advanced analytics to offer personalized products, credit scores, and budgeting tools.

3. Cost Efficiency

Without the overhead of branches and large physical teams, neobanks can offer more competitive interest rates and reduced fees, making them attractive to budget-conscious users.

4. Global Expansion of Fintech Infrastructure

India’s fintech ecosystem is maturing rapidly, supported by government policies like the India Stack and Unified Payments Interface (UPI). This makes it easier for digital banks to integrate payment and verification services quickly and securely.

Key Challenges

Despite the benefits, digital-only banks face several hurdles:

Trust Barrier: Many users still prefer traditional banks for large savings, loans, or long-term financial planning.

Regulatory Compliance: As financial entities, neobanks must navigate complex regulations, which vary across jurisdictions.

Cybersecurity Threats: With everything online, these banks are prime targets for digital fraud and hacking attempts.

These challenges highlight the need for trained professionals who understand both traditional banking principles and modern fintech innovations.

How This Affects Investment Banking Careers

As neobanks continue to reshape finance, investment bankers and financial analysts must adapt to new valuation models, partnership opportunities, and regulatory dynamics. The rise of these banks is opening new verticals for IPOs, mergers, and venture capital investments.

Professionals who understand fintech trends, digital banking metrics, and consumer behavior will have a distinct edge. Taking an investment banking course in Bangalore can help build this expertise—especially in a tech-forward city like Bangalore, where fintech and banking ecosystems overlap.

Courses from institutions like the Boston Institute of Analytics offer hands-on experience, real-world case studies, and exposure to topics like:

Fintech M&A and deal structuring

Digital asset valuation

Risk modeling for online banking

Regulation and compliance in digital finance

Bangalore: The Fintech Hub of India

Bangalore is not just India’s IT capital—it’s also home to a vibrant fintech ecosystem. The city hosts startups, digital banks, blockchain innovators, and major investment firms. Studying in Bangalore means being close to industry leaders, live projects, and a network that can shape your career.

By enrolling in an investment banking course in Bangalore, students gain:

Access to internships and mentorships

Exposure to fintech use cases

Opportunities to work on cross-functional projects with startups

Skills in investment analytics and digital transformation strategies

Conclusion

Digital-only banks are no longer a niche—they're the future of banking. As consumers shift towards mobile-first solutions and businesses adapt to meet those needs, the demand for professionals who understand both finance and technology is only increasing.

Whether you're a student, working professional, or entrepreneur, now is the time to build the skills that align with the future of finance. A well-designed investment banking course in Bangalore can give you the foundation to succeed in this exciting new era of banking

[govindhtech]

Pasqal’s Neutral-Atom QPU On Google Cloud Marketplace

Google Cloud Marketplace now offers Pasqal's Neutral-Atom Quantum Computer.

World leader in neutral-atom quantum computing is Pasqal. The business announced a cooperation with Google Cloud to sell their Neutral-atom QPU on the Marketplace. This cooperation seeks to expand quantum computing access.

The publication indicates that Google Cloud users can now use the all-in-one Pasqal Cloud platform. This standalone platform improves computer performance and adds quantum capabilities to operations.

How many qubits does Pasqal's QPU have?

The cooperation lets users compute with Pasqal's 100-qubit QPU. Users can quickly run and track computations. The platform optimises post-process results and quantum processes with advanced capabilities.

Google Cloud Marketplace's flexible, pay-as-you-go model benefits Pasqal and Google Cloud users worldwide. This idea aims to reduce infrastructure costs for enterprises testing neutral-atom quantum computing hardware.

Pasqal's open-source software stack lets Google Cloud users define quantum workloads. This technique attempts to make cloud-based quantum computing accessible to beginners and experts. The software stack includes low-level libraries that control the QPU fully.

Pasqal also offers high-level libraries to handle computational problems without quantum computing knowledge. These high-level libraries support graph machine learning. Pasqal plans to release more quantum simulation and optimisation work in 2025.

Putting the QPU on Google Cloud Marketplace will help Pasqal get more useable quantum. With its availability, researchers and enterprises can get quantum runtime from their cloud settings. Pasqal's frictionless paradigm for scalable quantum computing meets modern hybrid infrastructure needs. Dai Vu, Google Cloud's Managing Director Marketplace & ISV GTM Programs, said Pasqal's QPU will let customers swiftly deploy, manage, and grow the solution on Google Cloud's trusted, global infrastructure.

This Google Cloud Marketplace availability enhances Pasqal's hardware, cloud, and software capabilities. Pasqal focusses on Manufacturing & Materials Science, Government & Public Sector, Aerospace & Defence, Banking & Finance, Energy & Utilities, Pharma & Healthcare, and Transportation & Mobility.

Understanding Pasqal's Neutral-Atom QPU

Pasqal specialises on neutral-atom quantum computing. Pasqal says its team co-invented neutral atom technology. Growing on this base, they are building quantum computers and commercialising scientific breakthroughs.

The company's quantum computers use neutral atoms. A Google Cloud Marketplace-sold Pasqal 100-qubit QPU. Pasqal's technological overview emphasises “Neutral Atoms Technology”.

The sources do not explain how a neutral-atom QPU works, including its physical principles, qubit definition, gate implementation, and atom trapping and manipulation. Pasqal's technological skills and future goals are revealed by the sources.

Their roadmap describes Pasqal's technology development. Both 2022 and 2023 had 200 Qubits. By 2024, they planned 1,000 Qubits with atom shuttling, 3 Hz, and Z + X addressability. By 2025, 1,000 qubits, one addressable 1Q and 2Q gate, 13 Hz, and ultra-high fidelity gates are planned. Pasqal has “1000+ ATOMS” according to reports.

Pasqal concentrates on digital, analogue, and error correction. According to a blog series on fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC), quantum defects are unavoidable, analogue and digital paradigms manage them differently, and fault tolerance is necessary for scaling quantum systems. Pasqal and Riverlane also pursue Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing.

The sources don't detail the neutral-atom QPU's operation, but they suggest that Pasqal pioneered this type of quantum computing technology and provides cloud-based access to its systems.

FAQs

Neutral-atom QPU?

A neutral one QPUs are quantum computers that use neutral atoms as qubits. Using intense laser light, optical tweezers place these atoms. Neutral-atom QPUs offer quantum computing potential in scalability, coherence, and flexibility.

The price of neutral atom qpu?

No price is listed for Pasqal's neutral-atom QPU hardware. Quantum computers like Pasqal's in the Google Cloud Marketplace are often accessed via cloud services. Depending on usage and source, cloud access prices vary substantially.

[tokensbossh]

Does Marvel Rivals Have Cross Progression? Here's What We Know So Far

The gaming world is buzzing with the arrival of Marvel Rivals, a fast-paced, team-based PvP shooter that throws your favorite Marvel characters into an Overwatch-style arena. From Iron Man to Storm, and even lesser-known fan-favorite Moon Knight, the lineup is stacked with heroes and villains, each equipped with unique powers and slick visuals. The game is hyped not just for its gameplay mechanics but for how it lets you live out superhero battles in 3v3 and 6v6 formats across multi-dimensional maps. It’s pure chaos—Marvel-style.

The Next-Gen Marvel Brawler Changing the Game

Marvel Rivals is shaping up to be the next hot multiplayer PvP shooter with a hero-based twist. Developed by NetEase in collaboration with Marvel Games, this 6v6 team shooter is drawing comparisons to Overwatch, thanks to its vibrant art style, ability-based combat, and an expansive roster of iconic Marvel characters like Iron Man, Scarlet Witch, and Spider-Man. And with its competitive structure and upcoming cross-platform play features, it’s no surprise fans are already asking: does Marvel Rivals support cross progression? In an age where players are gaming across multiple platforms—PC, console, mobile—the ability to sync your progression seamlessly is no longer a luxury; it’s an expectation. Cross progression means that your in-game achievements, character unlocks, skins, and rankings follow you, whether you're grinding matches on your PC at home or jumping on your PlayStation at a friend’s house. Let’s break down whether Marvel Rivals delivers on that promise and what it means for competitive synergy across the board.

Cross Progression: What It Means in 2025 Gaming Culture

Cross progression is more than a feature—it’s part of the Gen Z gamer identity. In a digital ecosystem where interoperability rules, players expect flexibility. Titles like Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Apex Legends have nailed this integration, allowing users to pick up right where they left off—regardless of device. Key Benefits of Cross Progression: - Platform Agnosticism: Freedom to switch between PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. - Cloud Syncing: All progression, cosmetics, and achievements are tied to your account, not your hardware. - Social Mobility: Play with friends on different platforms and never lose your spot. So, the question becomes: Is Marvel Rivals up to date with this expectation?

Does Marvel Rivals Support Cross Progression?

As of April 2025, Marvel Rivals is in its early development and beta testing phase. Official sources, including developer insights and press releases from NetEase, have not yet confirmed full support for cross progression. However, there are strong indicators that it’s on the roadmap. 🚨 Developer Hint: During the closed alpha announcement in March 2025, NetEase representatives hinted at a “unified Marvel Rivals account system” that may allow players to sync progress across platforms. While this doesn’t confirm cross progression outright, it suggests internal groundwork is being laid. Current Status Table: FeatureStatus (As of April 2025)NotesCross Platform Play✅ ConfirmedPC players can match with each other during Alpha.Cross Progression🚧 In Development / Not ConfirmedExpected in full release but not in Alpha.Unified Account System⚠️ Hinted, Not PublicDeveloper mentions suggest it's being tested internally.

Why Cross Progression is Crucial for Marvel Rivals’ Longevity

Does Marvel Rivals Have Cross Progression Here's What We Know So Far If Marvel Rivals is to stay competitive in the modern multiplayer arena, cross progression needs to be a day-one feature. Here’s why: ✨ Player Retention and Growth Gamers hate redundancy. Nobody wants to grind their battle pass from scratch on a different platform. Cross progression reduces friction, boosting engagement. 💼 Esports and Streamer Flexibility Cross progression supports content creators and esports pros who play across setups. It lets them practice anywhere and sync seamlessly for live events. 🌍 Global Ecosystem Marvel’s fanbase spans demographics and devices. A fluid system that allows users to build and preserve their digital identity regardless of device creates a stronger, more loyal community.

Tips for Players Looking to Future-Proof Their Progress

While we wait for official confirmation, here’s how to stay ready: - 🔒 Create a NetEase Account Early If the game uses a central login system, this will likely be the core of your progression data. - 💻 Stick to One Platform During Early Access Until cross progression is fully confirmed, stick to one platform to avoid losing progress. - 🧠 Follow Official Channels Subscribe to Marvel Rivals’ Twitter, Discord, and newsletter to get updates on account integration and sync options.

FAQs: Marvel Rivals Cross Progression

Q: Can I carry over my progress from the Closed Alpha to full release? A: NetEase has not confirmed whether Alpha progress will carry over. Most games wipe progress post-beta, but watch for updates. Q: Will there be cross progression between consoles and PC? A: It’s not yet confirmed. However, considering industry standards, it’s highly likely if Marvel Rivals supports console release. Q: How can I prepare for cross progression? A: Register with a central Marvel Rivals account (if offered), and follow developer channels for announcements.

Marvel Rivals Has the Vision—Now It Needs the Follow-Through

Cross progression isn’t just a checkbox feature; it’s foundational for the modern gamer. While Marvel Rivals has not fully confirmed support yet, all signs point toward its inclusion in future phases of development. As players, staying informed and prepared ensures we make the most of this fast-evolving brawler. Keep your eyes on official channels, and don’t sleep on setting up your unified account early. ✅ Next Step: Sign up for beta access, follow the dev blog, and get ready to squad up—on your terms, on your platform. References: - NetEase Games, Developer AMA (March 2025) - Marvel Rivals Alpha Test FAQ, Official Discord - IGN First Look: Marvel Rivals Gameplay Preview (2025) 🚀 Next Steps: Follow the official Marvel Rivals Twitter and Discord server for live updates. And maybe don’t max out your wallet on cosmetics until cross progression is a lock. Let me know if you'd like this optimized for a WordPress post or broken down into a tweet thread. Read the full article

[mikesfulton]

IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack Introduction

IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack is here! Take 5 and get the highlights

IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack Today, IBM announced the general availability of IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack. It’s an amazing software collection that truly integrates Z and Cloud, enabling our ISVs, business partners, and customers to accelerate their application modernization. Our documentation is hot off the press for those that want to read more. What is IBM Z and Cloud…

[brookee-bee]

Karasuno High as Aesthetics and Playlists

3rd Year, Wing Spiker, Captain : Daichi Sawamura # 1

Earth tones, Dark Academia, Leather bound notebooks, wicker furniture, beige and dark green t-shirts, dark colored sweaters and hoodies, fitted brown pants and leather belts, black details, a few dark leafy house plants, simple meals of rice, avocado, clean sneakers, gym bag in the back of his car, protein powder on the counter, coffee mugs and matcha tea, encouragement and validation one-on-one, probably posts gym thirst traps on his story

Harder Than You Think - Public Enemy

Winner’s Circle - Anderson.Paak

Fell in Love With a Girl - The White Stripes

No Church in the Wild - Jay Z

Chelsea Dagger - The Fratellis

3rd Year, Setter : Koshi Sugawara # 2

Sky tones, light blue and bright white clouds, organized stationary and notepads, laying in the sun on a hammock, underneath a seashell, a warm cup of tea, making video compilations of memories, thrift stores, would do the dishes/laundry for you if you’re feeling stressed 

Shampoo Bottles - Peach Pit

Close to You- Day Glow

Loving You is a Mountain - Isaia Huron

Honey - Kehlani

At My Worst - Pink Sweat$

3rd Year, Ace : Asahi Azumane # 3

Beige and white, oat milk lattes, long flowing wheat grass, a hike through the mountains, weekend camping trips, ambitious baking, large bulky hands and calloused fingers, doodling through class, wants to be the little spoon sometimes, enjoys when you do face masks together at night

Fire Escape - Foster the People

The Bakery - Arctic Monkeys

Ain’t No Rest For the Wicked - Cage the Elephant

She Moves In Her Own Way - the Kooks

Ivy - Taylor Swift

2nd Year, Libero : Yu Nishinoya # 4

E-boy, short sleeve printed shirts and acid washed jeans, striped long sleeve shirts, hot orange flames, throws shit off bridges, likes to piss people off, loves spicy ramen, tattoos, embraces rejection, chipped painted finger nails, would record both of you doing internet challenges, his email notifications are in the thousands, sporadic texting 

Evil Fantasy - Freddie Dredd 

Wet Dreamz - J. Cole

Power Tools - Jack Harlow

REEL IT IN - Amine

Best Friend - Saweetie, Doja Cat

2nd Year, Wing Spiker : Ryunosuke Tanaka # 5

Skater, collection of worn beanies, silver chains and rings, tattoos scattered up the arm, overcast skies, dirty puddles in the city, thick well made army jacket, in class even though others are talking the teacher yells at him, accidentally punches the wall, sends horny memes from Twitter, really good listener, somebody you’d like to get drunk or high with

Beverly Hills - Weezer

Panic Station - Muse

Somebody Told Me - The Killers

Nice Guys Finish Last - Green Day

acting like that - Yungblud, Machine Gun Kelly

1st Year, Setter : Tobio Kageyama # 9

Alternative, midnight drives through a city, modern art museums, clean white collared shirts, black trench coats, quiet meditation in the morning, worn down combat boots, hates being pranked, tangled headphones, has a lot of pet peeves he complains about, likes to be away from technology to be in the moment, takes note of what song is playing so he can send it to you later

Yeah Right - Joji

Die Alone - FINNEAS 

Show Me How - Men I Trust

Places We Won’t Walk - Bruno Major

Sharing Beds - The Japanese House

1st Year, Middle Blocker, Decoy : Shoyo Hinata

Soft Boy, loves wildflowers, picnic dates, walks through a nature reserve,  collects seashells and rocks for his windowsill, tried to make bread but failed, sends you goodnight/morning texts everyday, bike riding dates, plays with your hair because why else is it there

Feel Special - TWICE

Daydreamer - MYLK

Only a Fool - Galantis

Kill vs Main - Grimes

Treat People with Kindness - Harry Styles

1st Year, Middle Blocker : Kei Tsukishima

Grunge, white collared shirts, simple healthy meals, messy notes with scribbled and poorly drawn diagrams, books with lots of tagged places he wants to remember, existentialism, organized bookshelves with smart decor, CD collection organized by genre, probably a Frank Ocean stan, listens to podcasts about space and quantum physics, is probably a huge star wars fan, planetarium and natural history museum dates, surprises you with overpriced coffee

Love It if We Made It - the 1975

Bonfire - Childish Gambino

Godspeed - Frank Ocean

Kelso - Matty Wood$

STFU! -Rina

1st Year, Pinch Server : Tadashi Yamaguchi

 Light academia, cozy socks, big blankets, lots of plants and a cat around the house, stacks of books on the floor, experiments with makeup and fashion, on weekends will work on a DIY project, needs constant reassurance but hates attention, drinks tea with honey and cream, wants to spend time with you whenever but doesn’t want to be a bother

A Phone Call in Amsterdam - Valley

Moon Song - Phoebe Bridgers 

Tired - bebadoobee

Brazil - Declan McKenna

Tonight (I Wish I was Your Boy) - The 1975

3rd Year, Manager : Kiyoko Shimuzi

Minimalism, oversized hoodies with tights, white sneakers, ripped light wash jeans, probably works at a retail store in the mall, likes to buy name brand clothing, big fan of the olympics, detail oriented, really good at budgeting, fan of stationary, fresh haircuts, would write you notes and surprise you with your favorite meal every now and then

Tomboy - Princess Nokia

Check- Queen Herby

Who’s Gonna Save U Now? - Rina Sawayama

Fuck Me in Shibuya - Ashnikko

Baby Girl - Chloe x Halle

1st Year, Manager : Hitoka Yachi

Pastel, pink clouds, runs a secret stan account, wears lots of trendy and stylish clothing, doodles on napkins, dewy makeup, lots of pink blush, fake lashes, cat eyed liner, makes her lunch aesthetically pleasing, cool edits for her pictures, sends the best memes in the group chat, if it reminds her of you she’ll buy it and surprise you the next day, loves to be matching with you, makes you learn kpop dances with her, has a fuzzy keychain

NASA - Ariana Grande

Ice Cream Cake - Red Velvet

Do Me - Kim Petras

The Boys - Girl’s Generation

FANCY- TWICE

Coach Ukai

Does not know what it means to have an aesthetic, messy hair, cigarettes, canned coffee, white t shirts, baggy sweatpants, cheap meals, likes newspapers but won’t pay for it, probably borrows cash from you a lot but never pays you back, constantly watching sports clips on twitter, likes old cars and guitars, probably used to draw dicks in bathroom stalls, hates the government, has lots of stories from his twenties, makes a great breakfast when he has the time, wants you to get a matching tattoo with him, 

Habit - Still Woozy

Cool With You - Her’s

Lover’s Rock - TV Girl

 Outta My Mind - Monsune

You’re Gonna Live Forever In Me - John Mayer

Coach Takeda

Minimalism, sweaters over collared shirts, clean sneakers, morning meditation and workouts, fresh laundry, loves warm sheets after a wash, bonsai tree, great at making drinks, goes out of his way to make sure you’re heard and respected, knows how to knit and sew, believes in karma, annoyed if you are one your phone when with them

Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) - Looking Glass

 Come and Get Your Love- Redbone

She’s So High- Tal Bachman

Wonderwall- Oasis

Vienna- Billy Joel

@brookemasterson on spotify if you’d like the playlist ♡

[udemyfc]

Saturday (17-7-2021)

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[t-baba]

Bootstrap 5 Alpha arrives, Chrome experiments with (not) displaying URLs

#445 — June 17, 2020

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

Bootstrap 5 Alpha Released — It’s early days but the first useful glimpse of Bootstrap 5 is here, including a new logo. Bootstrap continues to be a very popular CSS framework, not least because it keeps taking useful steps forward. v5 drops jQuery, starts to use CSS custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables), and has overhauled its form components and styling.

The Bootstrap Team

Google Confirms Experiment to Remove Full Address From URL Bar in Chrome — Folks from Google have already discussed how changing the way a URL is displayed could work. Now, one such test is live in Chrome Dev/Canary 85. The move has attracted a fair bit of criticism, but you can opt out.

Corbin Davenport

Redefining What’s Possible with Embedded Analytics — Built on a cloud-ready microservices architecture, Logi Composer features stunning visualizations, flexible self-service, high performance queries on big data, and smart connectivity to modern data sources. Get a free demo or trial today.

Logi Analytics sponsor

How The Most Popular Chrome Extensions Impact Browser Performance — Anything you add to a browser is going to have performance repercussions in terms of memory consumption, any JavaScript to be run, effects on page rendering, etc. These results demonstrate the costs pretty well but there’s one nice exception: the effect of ad blockers on ‘noisy’ pages!

DebugBear

Web Engine Diversity and Ecosystem Health — Over the past few years we’ve seen plenty of chatter around ‘browser engine diversity’. Here, Brian offers his “slightly tilted view of this” based instead on ‘the health of the ecosystem’, explaining why this may be a more valuable way to discuss these topics.

Brian Kardell

⚡️ Quick bits:

💥 We're finally here. Adobe has shared end of life plans for Flash. It will be gone from their site by the end of the year.

👋 Basecamp launced a new email service this week (Hey), and interestingly the UI is 100% HTML.

⚠️ Chrome 84 will organize console warnings in a new DevTools Issues tab.

📚 Last week I mentioned how the Internet Archive was facing legal action due to its ebooks program. This program will now be shuttered.

💻 Jobs

Senior Software Engineer — Save Lives & Make an Impact — We use Node/TS/React & ML to provide crisis support via SMS. Help us scale globally with a focus on privacy and security.

Crisis Text Line

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

ℹ️ Interested in running a job listing in Frontend Focus? There's more info here.

📙 News, Tutorials & Opinion

Learn Z-Index Using a Visualization Tool — Ever been stumped as to why setting a z-index to 99999 didn’t solve your positioning issue? This interactive guide to using both Z-Index and Stacking Contexts may prove handy.

Thiru Manikandan

CSS Custom Properties Fail Without Fallback — Yup. Matthias shares how using supports() or a media-query can help deal with this quirk.

Matthias Ott

Unicode Support. What Does That Actually Mean? 😃 — This Hacker News thread goes into the weeds on this, and well….it’s complicated.

Ben E. C. Boyter

The History of Search Engines — This is an exhaustive look at the history of the search engine, covering everything from the DMOZ index to Duck Duck Go.

Carl Hendy

How Web Accessibility Works — A quick introduction to the inner workings of web accessibility.

Segun Ola

How I Fixed Accessibility On My Website and How You Can Fix Yours — Daniela shares the steps taken to fix certain accessibility issues (contrast, screen reader experience, alt tags) on her website.

Daniela Matos de Carvalho

Five Myths About Jamstack — There have been a growing number of posts criticizing Jamstack. Brian takes on some of the common misconceptions that often underly these critiques (via our Jamstack newsletter).

Brian Rinaldi

Flow Browser Passes The Acid Tests — The work-in-progress browser Flow has just reached a development milestone, passing all three Acid tests. Plenty of in-depth browser chat sprung up around this news over on HN.

Piers Wombwell

🔧 Code, Tools and Resources

Josh.js: A Library to Animate Content on Page Scroll — This effect feels a little overdone nowadays, but this library is small, efficient, and it feels performant to me too.

Al Mamun

PageWatch: Check Your Web Pages for Errors — This tool does a fairly basic check for things like broken links, broken images, spelling errors, and potential layout errors (e.g. something overflowing a container). Example test.

pagewatch

MongoDB Is Easy. Now Make It Powerful. Free Download for 30 Days — Using MongoDB Atlas? Studio 3T is the professional GUI and IDE that unlocks the power you need.

Studio 3T sponsor

SVGuitar: Create SVG-Based Guitar Chord Charts — As simple as that, really :-)

Raphael Voellmy

Blush: Customizable Illustrations — The site allows you to mix, match, and customize a whole slew of different illustrations that you can download in PNG or SVG format (requires sign-up for large versions).

Blush Design

Postcards: HTML Email Template Builder with Drag & Drop — A free to start ‘no-code’ platform for building responsive HTML email templates. Uses a drag-and-drop UI and includes lots of pre-built components.

Designmodo

Web Font of the Week

Poppins

From the Indian Type Foundry — this is an 'internationalist take' on the geometric sans-serif typeface with support for both Latin and Devanagari writing systems. The glyphs sport a practical, monolinear look which works well in many settings.

by via Frontend Focus https://ift.tt/2Y89WN5

[jwkaiqi-blog]

Project 4 - Option 3

I choose option three for this project, how to interact a digital art beyond a computer screen. My goal is to find a way to represent a digital image in a 2d computer monitor in a 3d real-life format.

As I explore with different options and ideas, I decide to create a lightbox for this project. Lev Manovich pointed out “Deep Remixability” in his paper “Understanding Hybrid Media”, the idea of hybrid revolution in the modern society is not simply the remix of the content from different media but also their fundamental techniques, working methods, ways of representation and expression. This inspired me to find a way that combines the long-standing tradition of a lightbox in fine art and advertising with techniques that's being used for modern digital art. I normally use Photoshop for digital drawing, and to me, one of the most important and fundamental technique is using layers to draw independent components.

In brief, I used a digital drawing of mine as the base image, I choose this image because it has an interesting composition and it has many "dreamy-like" elements. There are total eight layers in this drawing: the background, cloud, moon (jellyfish), tree, telescope, people, and goldfish. I printed and cut each of the layers, then I stacked them together in their z-index order with some distance in between. This gives an illusion of 3D, and depth of field. I also added some lights to the box for decoration (making a lightbox at the end). Finally, I painted the interface of Photoshop and stacked it on top of the whole thing. A lightbox inspired by Photoshop digital drawing is now completed.

Reference: Lev Manovich, Understanding Hybrid Media. Betti-Sue Hertz, ed., Animated Paintings. San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2007.

Screenshot of Photoshop

Layers

Lightbox

[un-enfant-immature]

With the acquisition closed, IBM goes all in on Red Hat

IBM’s massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat closed a few weeks ago and today, the two companies are now announcing the first fruits of this process. For the most part, today’s announcement further IBM’s ambitions to bring its products to any public and private cloud. That was very much the reason why IBM acquired Red Hat in the first place, of course, so this doesn’t come as a major surprise, though most industry watchers probably didn’t expect this to happen this fast.

Specifically, IBM is announcing that it is bringing its software portfolio to Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based container platform that is essentially available on any cloud that allows its customers to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In total, IBM has already optimized more than 100 products for OpenShift and bundled them into what it calls “Cloud Paks.” There are currently five of these Paks: Cloud Pak for Data, Application, Integration, Automation and Multicloud Management. These technologies, which IBM’s customers can now run on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform or IBM’s own cloud, among others, include DB2, WebSphere, API Connect, Watson Studio and Cognos Analytics.

“Red Hat is unlocking innovation with Linux-based technologies, including containers and Kubernetes, which have become the fundamental building blocks of hybrid cloud environments,” said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, in today’s announcement. “This open hybrid cloud foundation is what enables the vision of any app, anywhere, anytime. Combined with IBM’s strong industry expertise and supported by a vast ecosystem of passionate developers and partners, customers can create modern apps with the technologies of their choice and the flexibility to deploy in the best environment for the app – whether that is on-premises or across multiple public clouds.”

IBM argues that a lot of the early innovation on the cloud was about bringing modern, customer-facing applications to market, with a focus on basic cloud infrastructure. Now, however, enterprises are looking at how they can take their mission-critical applications to the cloud, too. For that, they want access to an open stack that works across clouds.

In addition, IBM also today announced the launch of a fully managed Red Hat OpenShift service on its own public cloud, as well as OpenShift on IBM Systems, including the IBM Z and LinuxONE mainframes, as well as the launch of its new Red Hat consulting and technology services.

With $34B Red Hat deal closed, IBM needs to execute now

[holytheoristtastemaker]

There are way too many JVM arguments for anyone to digest and comprehend. The grand total might easily be more than 1,000 JVM arguments! In this article, we are highlighting seven important JVM arguments that you may find useful and what their positive impacts are.

At the time (March 2020) of writing this article there are 600+ arguments that you can pass to JVM just around Garbage collection and memory. If you include other aspects, total JVM arguments count will easily cross 1000+. 😊 It’s way too many arguments for anyone to digest and comprehend. In this article, we are highlighting seven important JVM arguments that you may find useful.

1. -Xmx and -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize

-Xmx is probably the most important JVM argument. -Xmx defines the maximum amount of heap size you are allocating to your application. (To learn about different memory regions in a JVM, you may watch this short video clip). You can define your application’s heap size like this:

-Xmx2g

Heap size plays a critical role in determining your:

Application performance

Bill, that you are going to get from your cloud provider (AWS, Azure,…)

This brings the question, what is the right heap size for my application? Should I allocate a large heap size or small heap size for my application? The answer is: ‘It depends’. In this article, we have shared our thoughts on whether you need to go with large or small heap size.

You might also consider reading this article: Advantages of setting -Xms and -Xmx to same value.

Metaspace is the region where JVM’s metadata definitions, such as class definitions, method definitions, will be stored. By default, the amount of memory that can be used to store this metadata information is unlimited (i.e. limited by your container or machine’s RAM size). You need to use -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize argument to specify an upper limit on the amount of memory that can be used to store metadata information.

-XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=256m

2. GC Algorithm

As of this date (March 2020), there are 7 different GC algorithms in OpenJDK:

Serial GC

Parallel GC

Concurrent Mark & Sweep GC

G1 GC

Shenandoah GC

Z GC

Epsilon GC

If you don’t specify the GC algorithm explicitly, then JVM will choose the default algorithm. Until Java 8, Parallel GC is the default GC algorithm. Since Java 9, G1 GC is the default GC algorithm.

The selection of the GC algorithm plays a crucial role in determining the application’s performance. Based on our research, we are observing excellent performance results with the Z GC algorithm. If you are running with JVM 11+, then you may consider using the Z GC algorithm (i.e. -XX:+UseZGC). More details about the Z GC algorithm can be found here.

The below table summarizes the JVM argument that you need to pass to activate each type of Garbage Collection algorithm.

3. Enable GC Logging

Garbage Collection logs contain information about Garbage Collection events, memory reclaimed, pause time duration, … You can enable the Garbage Collection log by passing following JVM arguments:

From JDK 1 to JDK 8:

-XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps -Xloggc:{file-path}

From JDK 9 and above:

-Xlog:gc*:file={file-path}

Example:

-XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps -Xloggc:/opt/workspace/myAppgc.log

-Xlog:gc*:file=/opt/workspace/myAppgc.log

Typically GC logs are used for tuning garbage collection performance. However, GC logs contain vital micro metrics. These metrics can be used for forecasting application’s availability and performance characteristics.

In this article we would like to highlight one such micrometric: ‘GC Throughput’ (to read more on other available micrometrics, you may refer to this article). GC Throughput is the amount of time your application spends in processing customer transactions vs the amount of time it spends in processing GC activities. Say if your application’s GC throughput is 98%, then it means the application is spending 98% of its time in processing customer activity, and the remaining 2% is spent in GC activity.

Now let’s look at the heap usage graph of a healthy JVM:

Fig: Healthy JVM’s heap usage graph (generated by https://gceasy.io)

You can see a perfect saw-tooth pattern. You can notice that when Full GC (red triangle) runs, memory utilization drops all the way to bottom.

Now let’s look at the heap usage graph of a sick JVM:

Fig: Sick JVM’s heap usage graph (generated by https://gceasy.io)

You can notice towards the right end of the graph, even though GC repeatedly runs, memory utilization isn’t dropping. It’s a classic indication that the application is suffering from some sort of memory problem.

If you take a closer look at the graph, you will notice that repeated full GC’s started to happen right around 8 am. However, the application starts to get OutOfMemoryError only around 8:45 am. Till 8 am, the application’s GC throughput was about 99%. But right after 8 am, GC throughput started to drop down to 60%. Because when repeated GC runs, the application wouldn’t be processing any customer transactions and it will only be doing GC activity. As a proactive measure, if you notice GC throughput starts to drop, you can take out the JVM from the load balancer pool. So that unhealthy JVM will not process any new traffic. It will minimize customer impact.

Fig: Repeated Full GC happens way before OutOfMemoryError

You can monitor GC related micrometrics in real-time, using GCeasy REST API.

4. -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError, -XX:HeapDumpPath

OutOfMemoryError is a serious problem that will affect your application’s availability/performance SLAs. To diagnose OutOfMemoryError or any memory-related problems, one would have to capture heap dump right at the moment or few moments before the application starts to experience OutOfMemoryError.

As we don’t know when OutOfMemoryError will be thrown, it’s hard to capture heap dump manually at the right around the time when it’s thrown. However, capturing heap dumps can be automated by passing following JVM arguments:

-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError and -XX:HeapDumpPath={HEAP-DUMP-FILE-PATH}

In ‘-XX:HeapDumpPath’, you need to specify the file path where the heap dump should be stored. When you pass these two JVM arguments, heap dumps will be automatically captured and written to a defined file path, when OutOfMemoryError is thrown.

Example:

-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -XX:HeapDumpPath=/crashes/my-heap-dump.hprof

Once heap dumps are captured, you can use tools like HeapHero and Eclipse MAT to analyze heap dumps.

More details around the OutOfMemoryError JVM arguments can be found in this article.

5. -Xss

Each application will have tens, hundreds, thousands of threads. Each thread will have its own stack. In each thread’s stack following information are stored:

Methods/functions that are currently executed

Primitive datatypes

Variables

Object pointers

Return values.

Each one of them consumes memory. If their consumption goes beyond a certain limit, then StackOverflowError is thrown. More details about StackOverflowError and its solution can be found in this article. However, you can increase the thread’s stack size limit by passing the -Xss argument.

Example:

-Xss256k

If you set this -Xss value to a huge number, then memory will be blocked and wasted. Suppose you are assigning -Xss value to be 2mb whereas, it needs only 256kb, then you will end up wasting a huge amount of memory, not just 1792kb (i.e. 2mb – 256kb). Do you wonder why?

Say your application has 500 threads, then with -Xss value to be 2mb, your threads will be consuming 1000mb of memory (i.e. 500 threads x 2mb/thread). On the other hand, if you have allocated -Xssonly to be 256kb, then your threads will be consuming only 125mb of memory (i.e. 500 threads x 256kb/thread). You will save 875mb (i.e. 1000mb – 125mb) of memory per JVM. Yes, it will make such a huge difference.

Note: Threads are created outside heap (i.e. -Xmx), thus this 1000mb will be in addition to -Xmx value you have already assigned. To understand why threads are created outside the heap, you can watch this short video clip.

Our recommendation is to start from a low value (say 256kb). Run thorough regression, performance, and AB testing with this setting. Only if you experience StackOverflowError then increase the value, otherwise consider sticking on to a low value.

6. -Dsun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout and -Dsun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout

Modern applications use numerous protocols (i.e. SOAP, REST, HTTP, HTTPS, JDBC, RMI…) to connect with remote applications. Sometimes remote applications might take a long time to respond. Sometimes it may not respond at all.

If you don’t have proper timeout settings, and if remote applications don’t respond fast enough, then your application threads/resources will get stuck. Remote applications unresponsiveness can affect your application’s availability. It can bring down your application to grinding halt. To safeguard your application’s high availability, appropriate timeout settings should be configured.

You can pass these two powerful timeout networking properties at the JVM level that can be globally applicable to all protocol handlers that uses java.net.URLConnection:

sun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout specifies the timeout (in milliseconds) to establish the connection to the host. For example, for HTTP connections, it is the timeout when establishing the connection to the HTTP server.

sun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout specifies the timeout (in milliseconds) when reading from the input stream when a connection is established to a resource.

Example, if you would like to set these properties to 2 seconds:

-Dsun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout=2000 -Dsun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout=2000

Note, by default values for these 2 properties is -1, which means no timeout is set. More details on these properties can be found in this article.

7. -Duser.timeZone

Your application might have sensitive business requirements around time/date. For example, if you are building a trading application, you can’t take the transaction before 9:30 am. To implement those time/date related business requirements, you might be using java.util.Date, java.util.Calendar objects. These objects, by default, pick up time zone information from the underlying operating system. This will become a problem; if your application is running in a distributed environment. Look at the below scenarios:

a. If your application is running across multiple data centers, say, San Francisco, Chicago, Singapore – then JVMs in each data center would end up having different time zone. Thus, JVMs in each data center would exhibit different behaviors. It would result in inconsistent results.

b. If you are deploying your application in a cloud environment, applications could be moved to different data centers without your knowledge. In that circumstance also, your application would end up producing different results.

c. Your own Operations team can also change the time zone without bringing to the development team’s knowledge. It would also skew the results.

To avoid these commotions, it’s highly recommended to set the time zone at the JVM using the -Duser.timezone system property. Example if you want to set EDT time zone for your application, you will do:

-Duser.timezone=US/Eastern

Conclusion

In this article, we have attempted to summarize some of the important JVM arguments and their positive impacts. We hope you may find it helpful

[toomanysinks]

Oracle turns to innovation hubs to drive cultural and business shift to cloud

Oracle was founded in 1977. While it’s not exactly IBM or GE, both of which date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries respectively, it is old enough to be experiencing a fair bit of disruption in its own right. For a good part of its existence, it sold databases to some of the biggest companies in the world, but today as the market changes and shifts from on-prem data centers to the cloud, how does a company like Oracle make that transition?

Of course, Oracle has been making the shift to the cloud for the last several years, but it would be fair to say that it came late. Plus, it takes more than building some data centers and pushing out some products to change a company the size of Oracle. The company leadership recognizes this, and has been thinking at the highest levels of the organization about how to successfully transform into a cloud company from a cultural and business perspective.

To that end, Oracle has opened 5 innovation hubs over the last several years with locations in Austin, Texas; Reston, Virginia; Burlington, Massachusetts; Bangalore, India and Santa Monica, California. What are these centers hoping to achieve, and how will it extend the lessons learned to the rest of the company? Those are big questions Oracle must answer to make some headway in the cloud market.

Understanding the problem

Oracle seems to understand it has to do something different to change market perception and its flagging market position. Synergy Research, a firm that tracks cloud marketshare reports that the company is struggling

“For cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, hosted private cloud services) — Oracle has a 2 percent share,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst and managing director at Synergy told TechCrunch. He added, “It is a top ten player but it is nowhere near the scale of the leading cloud providers; and its market share has been steadily eroding.”

The news is a bit better when it comes SaaS. “Along with SAP, Oracle is one of the leaders in the ERP segment. But enterprise SaaS is much broader than ERP and across all of enterprise SaaS it is the number 4 ranked provider behind Microsoft, Salesforce and Adobe. Oracle worldwide market share in Q4 was 6 percent,” Dinsdale said.

The company knows that it will take a vast shift to change from an organization that mostly sold software licenses and maintenance agreements. It pushed those hard, sometimes so hard that it left IT pros with a sour taste in their mouths. Today, with the cloud, the selling landscape has changed dramatically to a partnership model. The company knows that it must change too. The question is, how?

That will take an entirely new approach to product development, sales and marketing; and the innovation hubs have become a kind of laboratory where engineers can experiment with more focussed projects, and learn to present their ideas with goal of showing instead of telling customers what they can do.

And the young shall lead

One way to change the culture is to infuse it with fresh-thinking, smart young people and that’s what Oracle is attempting to do with these centers, where they are hiring youthful engineers, many right out of college, to lead the change with the help of more seasoned Oracle executives.

They are looking for ways to rethink Oracle’s cloud products, to pull the services together into packages of useful tools that helped solve a specific business problems from prescription opioid abuse to predicting avocado yields. The idea isn’t just to have a some section of the company where people work on dream projects. They want them to relate to real business problems that results eventually in actual sales and measurable results.

Hamza Jahangir, group vice president for the cloud solution hubs at Oracle says they look for people who want to dig into new solutions, but they want a practical streak in their innovation hub hires. “We don’t want just tinkerers. If the only problem you’re solving is that of your own boredom, that’s not the type of person we are looking for,” he said.

Oracle could be feeling cloud transition growing pains

Executive buy-in

The idea of the innovation center actually began with co-CEO Mark Hurd, according to Jahangir. He had been working for several years to change the nature of the sales force, the one that had a reputation of strong-arming IT pros, with a new generation by hiring people right out of college with a fresh approach.

Hurd didn’t want to stop with sales though. He began looking at taking that same idea of hiring younger employees to drive that cultural shift in engineering too. “About two years ago, Mark challenged us to think about how can we change the customer-facing tech workforce as the business model was moving to the cloud,” Jahangir said.

Hurd gave him some budget to open the first two centers in Austin and Reston and he began experimenting, trying to find the right kinds of employees and projects to work on. The funding came without of a lot of strings or conditions associated with it. Hurd wanted to see what could happen if they unleashed a new generation of workers and gave them a certain amount of freedom to work differently than the traditional way of working at Oracle.

Changing expectations

Jahangir was very frank when it came to assessing customer’s expectations around Oracle moving to the cloud. There has been a lot of skepticism and part of the reason for the innovation centers was to find practical solutions that could show customers that they actually had modern approaches to computing, given a chance.

The general customer stance has been, “We don’t believe you have anything real, and we need to see true value realized by us before we pay you any money,” he said. That took a fundamental shift to focussing on actual solutions. It started with the premise that the customers shouldn’t believe any of the marketing stuff. Instead it would show them.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison keeps poking AWS because he has no choice

“Don’t bother watching a Powerpoint presentation. Ask us to show you real solutions and use cases where we have solved real material problems — and then we can have a discussion.”

Even Chairman and company founder Larry Ellison recognizes the relationship and selling model needed to change as the company moves to the cloud. Jahangir relayed something he said in a recent internal meeting, “In the cloud we are now no longer selling giant monolithic software. Instead we are selling small bites of the apple. The relationship between the vendor and the buyer is becoming more like a consumer model.” That in turn requires a new way of selling and delivering solutions, precisely what they are trying to figure out at the innovation hubs.

Putting the idea to work

Once you have a new way of thinking, you have to put it to work, and as the company has created these various hubs, that has been the approach. As an example, one that isn’t necessarily original, but that puts Oracle features together in a practical way, is the connected patient. The patient wears a Fitbit-like monitor, uses a smart blood pressure cuff and a smart pill box.

The patient can then monitor his or her own health with these tools in a consolidated mobile application that pulls this data together for them using the Internet of Things cloud service, Oracle Mobile Cloud and Oracle Integration Cloud. What’s more, that information gets shared with the patient’s pharmacy and doctor, who can monitor the patient’s health and get warnings when there is a serious issue, such as dangerously high blood pressure.

Oracle’s database service offerings could be its last best hope for cloud success

Another project involved a partnership with Waypoint Robotics, where they demonstrated a robot that worked alongside human workers. The humans interacted with the robots, but the robot moved the goods from workstation to workstation acting as a quality control agent along the way. If it found defects or problems, it communicated that to the worker via a screen on the side of the unit, and to the cloud. Every interaction between the humans, goods and robot was updated in the Oracle cloud.

Waypoint Robotics Robot inspecting iPhones. Information on the display shows it communicating with the Oracle cloud. Photo: Ron Miller

One other project worked with farmers and distributors to help stores stay stocked with avocados, surely as good a Gen Z project as you are likely to find. The tool looks at weather data, historical sales and information coming from sensors at the farm, and it combines all of that data to make predictions about avocado yields, making use of Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Oracle Analytics Cloud and other services from Oracle cloud stack.

Moving beyond the hubs

This type of innovation hub has become popular in recent years as a way to help stave off disruption, and Oracle’s approach is actually in line with this trend. While companies sometimes isolate them to protect them from negativity and naysayers in an organization, leaving them isolated often prevents the lessons learned from being applied to the broader organization at large, essentially defeating the very purpose of creating them in the first place.

Jahangir says that they are attempting to avoid that problem by meeting with others in the company and sharing their learnings and the kinds of metrics that they use in the innovation center to measure success, which might be different from the rest of the company.

He says to put Oracle on the customer agenda, they have to move the conversation from from religious battles, as he calls how people support or condemn tech from certain companies. “We have to overcome religious battles and perceptions. I don’t like to fight religion with more religion. We need to step out of that conversation. The best way we have seen for engaging developer community is to show them how to build really cool things, then we can hire developers to do that, and showcase that to the community to show that it’s not just lip service.”

The trick will be doing that, and perhaps the innovation centers will help. As of today, the company is not sharing its cloud revenue, so it’s hard to measure just how well this is helping contribute to the overall success of the company, but Oracle clearly has a lot of work to do to change the perception of the enterprise buyer about its cloud products and services, and to increase its share of the growing cloud pie. It hopes these innovations hubs will lead the way to doing that.

Jahangir recognizes that he has to constantly keep adjusting the approach. “The Hub model is still maturing. We are finding and solving new problems where we need new tooling and engagement models in the organization. We are still learning and evolving,” he said.

Digital Transformation Requires Total Organizational Commitment

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/23/oracle-turns-to-innovation-hubs-to-drive-cultural-and-business-shift-to-cloud/

[govindhtech]

Mastering Wazi: Your Guide to Successful Adoption

An overview of the services offered by Wazi

Staying ahead of the curve in today’s fiercely competitive digital market requires the quick development of innovative digital services. But when it comes to fusing contemporary technology with their core systems including Mainframe applications many firms encounter formidable obstacles. Modernizing core enterprise apps on hybrid cloud platforms requires this integration. Remarkably, 33% of developers do not have the required resources or expertise, which makes it difficult for them to produce high-quality goods and services.

Additionally, 36% of developers find it difficult to collaborate with IT Operations, which causes inefficiencies in the development pipeline. To make matters worse, polls indicate time and time again that “testing” is the main reason project timeframes are delayed. To meet these issues and spur business process change, companies such as State Farm and BNP Paribas are standardizing development tools and methodologies across their platforms.

In what ways does Wazi as Service promote modernity?

Among the solutions that are gaining traction in this environment is “Wazi as a Service.” By supporting safe DevSecOps methods, this cloud-native development and testing environment for z/OS apps is transforming the modernization process. It offers on-demand access to z/OS systems with flexible consumption-based pricing. By speeding up release cycles in safe, regulated hybrid cloud environments like IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services (FS Cloud), it significantly increases developer productivity.

Software quality is improved by shift-left coding techniques, which enable testing to start as early as the code-writing phase. By utilizing the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center service, the platform may be automated using a standardized architecture that has been validated for Financial Services (SCC). IBM Z modernization tools include CI/CD pipelines, Wazi Image Builder, Wazi Dev Spaces on OpenShift, z/OS Connect for APIs, zDIH for data integrations, and IBM Watson for generative AI enable innovation at scale.

What are the advantages of using IBM Cloud’s Wazi service?

Wazi as a Service offers a significant speed advantage over emulated x86 machine environments because it runs on IBM LinuxONE, an enterprise-grade Linux server. It is 15 times faster thanks to this special feature, which guarantees quick and effective application development. Wazi also fills in the gaps in the developer experiences on mainframe and distributed systems, making it easier to create hybrid applications with z/OS components.

Through the integration of secure DevOps principles with the strength of the z-Mod stack, a smooth and effective development process is produced. The service may be safely installed on IBM FS Cloud, which has integrated security and compliance capabilities, and enables easy scalability through automation, lowering support and maintenance cost. As a result, data security and regulatory compliance may be guaranteed by developers who design and implement their environments and code with industry-grade requirements in mind.

Furthermore, Wazi VSI on VPC architecture within IBM FS Cloud creates a segregated network to strengthen the perimeter of the cloud infrastructure against security breaches. Secure integration of on-premises core Mainframe applications with cloud services like API Connect, Event Streams, Code Engine, and HPCS encryptions is also made possible by the strong security and compliance controls offered by IBM Cloud services and ISVs verified for financial services.

This shift makes it possible for outdated, dispersed solutions to replace centralized core systems, enabling organizations to remain competitive and adaptable in the current digital environment. All things considered, Wazi as a Service is revolutionary in that it speeds up digital transformation while guaranteeing security, compliance, and a smooth transition between old and new technology.

How does the IBM Cloud Financial Service Framework support solutions for the industry?

The Financial Services IBM Cloud Framework, often known as The sturdy IBM FS Cloud solution was created especially to meet the special requirements of financial institutions. It guarantees regulatory compliance, excellent security, and resilience throughout both the initial deployment phase and continuous operations. By defining a set of standards that all parties must adhere to, this framework streamlines communications between financial institutions and ecosystem partners that offer software or SaaS products.

The main elements of this framework are cloud best practices and an extensive set of control requirements that cover security and regulatory compliance needs. By implementing a shared responsibility model that covers financial institutions, application suppliers, and IBM Cloud, these best practices make sure that everyone contributes to keeping an environment that is safe and compliant.

The IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services also helps financial organizations comply with the strict security and regulatory standards of the financial sector by offering comprehensive control-by-control implementation assistance and supporting data. Reference architectures are offered to help with the implementation of control needs in order to further improve compliance. The deployment and configuration process can be streamlined by using these architectures as infrastructure as code.

In order to enable stakeholders to effectively monitor compliance, handle problems, and produce proof of compliance, IBM also provides a variety of tools and services, such as the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center. In addition, the framework is subject to continuous governance, which guarantees that it stays current and in line with new and developing rules as well as the shifting requirements of public cloud environments and banks. The IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services is essentially a comprehensive solution that streamlines financial institutions’ relationships with ecosystem partners and enables them to operate securely and in accordance with industry norms.

Discover Wazi as a Service

Wazi as a Service, which operates on the reliable IBM LinuxONE infrastructure, allows for the easy development of hybrid applications by bridging the gap between distributed and mainframe platforms. Businesses can flourish in the digital age thanks to the platform’s scalability, automation, and compliance features, which enable developers to manage the complex web of security and laws.

Businesses may advance into the future of modern, distributed solutions by securely integrating cutting-edge cloud services with their on-premises core systems using Wazi. In conclusion, Wazi as a Service emphasizes the significance of technology in attaining security, compliance, and the peaceful coexistence of historical and contemporary technologies, and serves as an excellent example of how technology may accelerate digital transformation.

Read more on Govindhtech.com

[fmservers]

Oracle turns to innovation hubs to drive cultural and business shift to cloud

Oracle was founded in 1977. While it’s not exactly IBM or GE, both of which date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries respectively, it is old enough to be experiencing a fair bit of disruption in its own right. For a good part of its existence, it sold databases to some of the biggest companies in the world, but today as the market changes and shifts from on-prem data centers to the cloud, how does a company like Oracle make that transition?

Of course, Oracle has been making the shift to the cloud for the last several years, but it would be fair to say that it came late. Plus, it takes more than building some data centers and pushing out some products to change a company the size of Oracle. The company leadership recognizes this, and has been thinking at the highest levels of the organization about how to successfully transform into a cloud company from a cultural and business perspective.

To that end, Oracle has opened 5 innovation hubs over the last several years with locations in Austin, Texas; Reston, Virginia; Burlington, Massachusetts; Bangalore, India and Santa Monica, California. What are these centers hoping to achieve, and how will it extend the lessons learned to the rest of the company? Those are big questions Oracle must answer to make some headway in the cloud market.

Understanding the problem

Oracle seems to understand it has to do something different to change market perception and its flagging market position. Synergy Research, a firm that tracks cloud marketshare reports that the company is struggling

“For cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, hosted private cloud services) — Oracle has a 2 percent share,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst and managing director at Synergy told TechCrunch. He added, “It is a top ten player but it is nowhere near the scale of the leading cloud providers; and its market share has been steadily eroding.”

The news is a bit better when it comes SaaS. “Along with SAP, Oracle is one of the leaders in the ERP segment. But enterprise SaaS is much broader than ERP and across all of enterprise SaaS it is the number 4 ranked provider behind Microsoft, Salesforce and Adobe. Oracle worldwide market share in Q4 was 6 percent,” Dinsdale said.

The company knows that it will take a vast shift to change from an organization that mostly sold software licenses and maintenance agreements. It pushed those hard, sometimes so hard that it left IT pros with a sour taste in their mouths. Today, with the cloud, the selling landscape has changed dramatically to a partnership model. The company knows that it must change too. The question is, how?

That will take an entirely new approach to product development, sales and marketing; and the innovation hubs have become a kind of laboratory where engineers can experiment with more focussed projects, and learn to present their ideas with goal of showing instead of telling customers what they can do.

And the young shall lead

One way to change the culture is to infuse it with fresh-thinking, smart young people and that’s what Oracle is attempting to do with these centers, where they are hiring youthful engineers, many right out of college, to lead the change with the help of more seasoned Oracle executives.

They are looking for ways to rethink Oracle’s cloud products, to pull the services together into packages of useful tools that helped solve a specific business problems from prescription opioid abuse to predicting avocado yields. The idea isn’t just to have a some section of the company where people work on dream projects. They want them to relate to real business problems that results eventually in actual sales and measurable results.

Hamza Jahangir, group vice president for the cloud solution hubs at Oracle says they look for people who want to dig into new solutions, but they want a practical streak in their innovation hub hires. “We don’t want just tinkerers. If the only problem you’re solving is that of your own boredom, that’s not the type of person we are looking for,” he said.

Oracle could be feeling cloud transition growing pains

Executive buy-in

The idea of the innovation center actually began with co-CEO Mark Hurd, according to Jahangir. He had been working for several years to change the nature of the sales force, the one that had a reputation of strong-arming IT pros, with a new generation by hiring people right out of college with a fresh approach.

Hurd didn’t want to stop with sales though. He began looking at taking that same idea of hiring younger employees to drive that cultural shift in engineering too. “About two years ago, Mark challenged us to think about how can we change the customer-facing tech workforce as the business model was moving to the cloud,” Jahangir said.

Hurd gave him some budget to open the first two centers in Austin and Reston and he began experimenting, trying to find the right kinds of employees and projects to work on. The funding came without of a lot of strings or conditions associated with it. Hurd wanted to see what could happen if they unleashed a new generation of workers and gave them a certain amount of freedom to work differently than the traditional way of working at Oracle.

Changing expectations

Jahangir was very frank when it came to assessing customer’s expectations around Oracle moving to the cloud. There has been a lot of skepticism and part of the reason for the innovation centers was to find practical solutions that could show customers that they actually had modern approaches to computing, given a chance.

The general customer stance has been, “We don’t believe you have anything real, and we need to see true value realized by us before we pay you any money,” he said. That took a fundamental shift to focussing on actual solutions. It started with the premise that the customers shouldn’t believe any of the marketing stuff. Instead it would show them.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison keeps poking AWS because he has no choice

“Don’t bother watching a Powerpoint presentation. Ask us to show you real solutions and use cases where we have solved real material problems — and then we can have a discussion.”

Even Chairman and company founder Larry Ellison recognizes the relationship and selling model needed to change as the company moves to the cloud. Jahangir relayed something he said in a recent internal meeting, “In the cloud we are now no longer selling giant monolithic software. Instead we are selling small bites of the apple. The relationship between the vendor and the buyer is becoming more like a consumer model.” That in turn requires a new way of selling and delivering solutions, precisely what they are trying to figure out at the innovation hubs.

Putting the idea to work

Once you have a new way of thinking, you have to put it to work, and as the company has created these various hubs, that has been the approach. As an example, one that isn’t necessarily original, but that puts Oracle features together in a practical way, is the connected patient. The patient wears a Fitbit-like monitor, uses a smart blood pressure cuff and a smart pill box.

The patient can then monitor his or her own health with these tools in a consolidated mobile application that pulls this data together for them using the Internet of Things cloud service, Oracle Mobile Cloud and Oracle Integration Cloud. What’s more, that information gets shared with the patient’s pharmacy and doctor, who can monitor the patient’s health and get warnings when there is a serious issue, such as dangerously high blood pressure.

Oracle’s database service offerings could be its last best hope for cloud success

Another project involved a partnership with Waypoint Robotics, where they demonstrated a robot that worked alongside human workers. The humans interacted with the robots, but the robot moved the goods from workstation to workstation acting as a quality control agent along the way. If it found defects or problems, it communicated that to the worker via a screen on the side of the unit, and to the cloud. Every interaction between the humans, goods and robot was updated in the Oracle cloud.

Waypoint Robotics Robot inspecting iPhones. Information on the display shows it communicating with the Oracle cloud. Photo: Ron Miller

One other project worked with farmers and distributors to help stores stay stocked with avocados, surely as good a Gen Z project as you are likely to find. The tool looks at weather data, historical sales and information coming from sensors at the farm, and it combines all of that data to make predictions about avocado yields, making use of Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Oracle Analytics Cloud and other services from Oracle cloud stack.

Moving beyond the hubs

This type of innovation hub has become popular in recent years as a way to help stave off disruption, and Oracle’s approach is actually in line with this trend. While companies sometimes isolate them to protect them from negativity and naysayers in an organization, leaving them isolated often prevents the lessons learned from being applied to the broader organization at large, essentially defeating the very purpose of creating them in the first place.

Jahangir says that they are attempting to avoid that problem by meeting with others in the company and sharing their learnings and the kinds of metrics that they use in the innovation center to measure success, which might be different from the rest of the company.

He says to put Oracle on the customer agenda, they have to move the conversation from from religious battles, as he calls how people support or condemn tech from certain companies. “We have to overcome religious battles and perceptions. I don’t like to fight religion with more religion. We need to step out of that conversation. The best way we have seen for engaging developer community is to show them how to build really cool things, then we can hire developers to do that, and showcase that to the community to show that it’s not just lip service.”

The trick will be doing that, and perhaps the innovation centers will help. As of today, the company is not sharing its cloud revenue, so it’s hard to measure just how well this is helping contribute to the overall success of the company, but Oracle clearly has a lot of work to do to change the perception of the enterprise buyer about its cloud products and services, and to increase its share of the growing cloud pie. It hopes these innovations hubs will lead the way to doing that.

Jahangir recognizes that he has to constantly keep adjusting the approach. “The Hub model is still maturing. We are finding and solving new problems where we need new tooling and engagement models in the organization. We are still learning and evolving,” he said.

Digital Transformation Requires Total Organizational Commitment

Via Ron Miller https://techcrunch.com

[mikesfulton]

IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack Uncovered

See how IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack streamlines software installation and configuration

IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack In my last article, I introduced the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack. In this article, I’ll dig into installation, configuration, and usage of the installed software. Installing Software on z/OS with z/OS Cloud Broker To install software with z/OS Cloud Broker on a z/OS endpoint, you first need to install the z/OS Package Manager, which runs natively on…

[t-baba]

How to align things with CSS, and Houdini's advantages

#385 — April 3, 2019

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

How To Align Things In CSS — There are a few ways to align elements in CSS. In this article, Rachel Andrew explains what they are with some tips to help you remember which to use and why.

Smashing Magazine

CSS Houdini Could Change the Way We Write and Manage CSS — Indeed, that's entirely why Houdini (a group of developers working on a group of cutting edge CSS-related APIs) exists :-) Here's a look at how Houdini will open the door to more modularity & configurability of your CSS.

Yangguang Li

Deploy Only the Parts of Your Application That Have Changed — Unlike most Continuous Integration (CI) solutions, Buddy only re-builds the parts of your application that have changed and deploys your updates in seconds to any cloud. Start building better frontend apps faster with Buddy.

Buddy sponsor

Managing z-index in a Component-Based Web Application — The z-index property, despite all that’s written about it, is still widely misunderstood and mishandled. Stacking issues in a complex single-page web application can become a major pain. Adhering to some principles, however, we can easily avoid these issues.

Pavel Pomerantsev

Firefox's Plan to Reduce Notification Permission Prompt Spam — Permission prompts are a common sight on the web today and while they can be useful in some situations, they are clearly overused. Mozilla are using Firefox Nightly (only) to conduct some experiments in improving the situation.

Mozilla

What Does Dark Mode’s supported-color-schemes Actually Do? — Thomas Steiner shares his understanding of the recently proposed supported-color-schemes meta tag and the corresponding CSS property.

Chromium Dev Channel

💻 Jobs

Frontend Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

Find A Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in dev roles and is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📘 Articles, Tutorials & Opinion

Stop Using So Many DIVs: An Intro to Semantic HTML — Considering the HTML5 spec reads that “authors are strongly encouraged to view the div element as an element of last resort, for when no other element is suitable”, this article is a handy reminder of the semantic alternatives.

Ken Bellows

Enforcing Accessibility Best Practices with Automatically-Generated IDs — A technique that renders it impossible for users of a design system to omit an important attribute and accidentally create an inaccessible experience.

Brad Frost

▶  React in 7 Minutes — If you’ve been intimidated by React so far, this is a neat, code-driven whirlwind tour showing the creation of an app in just 7 minutes.

John Lindquist

You Probably Don't Need That Hip Web Framework — “The obsession with finding better frameworks is killing ideas before they reach the world.”

Owen Williams opinion

Browser Rendering Optimizations for Frontend Development — Explores the conditions that can enable (and prevent) a web app to run (optimally) at 60 frames per second.

Jordan Irabor

Learn to Build Blockchain Apps in 60 Minutes

Blockstack sponsor

How Web Pages Can Now Detect When Chrome’s Window Is Covered by Another Window — Supported on Chrome OS and macOS, with Windows support in progress.

Web Platform News

Creating a Reusable Pagination Component in Vue.js

Mateusz Rybczonek

🔧 Code and Tools

stepper: Animated Numeric Stepper Component — ..which can be used to increment or decrement a value by clicking arrows. Demo here.

Valery Alikin

yall-js: Yet Another Lazy Loader — An SEO-friendly lazy loader for <img>, <picture>, <video> and <iframe> elements, as well as CSS background images. It works in all modern browsers, including IE 11.

Jeremy Wagner

Input Type Sandbox: Test Different HTML Input Types — A quick tool that lets you dynamically select different types of form input and validation type for testing on your own browser(s).

Aaron Ladage

Typetura: Fluid Typesetting Tool — This tool, still in beta, will help you set up text transitions between breakpoints.

Scott Kellum & Sal Hernandez

Google Webfonts Helper — A ‘hassle-free’ way to self-host Google Fonts.

Mario Ranftl

Accessible Brand Colors — Shows you how ADA compliant your colors are in relation to each other.

Use All Five

React Particles WebGL: A 2D/3D Particle Library Built on Three.js

Tim Ellenberger

   🗓 Upcoming Events

IMAGECON, May 1–2 – San Francisco, CA — A two-day conference with a dozen workshops and seven speakers focused on all things images on the web.

CityJS Conference, May 3 — London, UK — Meet local and international speakers and share your experiences with modern JavaScript development.

Frontend United, May 16-18 — Utrecht, Netherlands — A yearly, non-profit, developer-first, community-focused conference.

CSSCamp 2019, July 17 — Barcelona, Catalunya — A one-day, one-track conference for web designers and developers.

by via Frontend Focus https://ift.tt/2FZ91FX