With how cutthroat and competitive the HVAC market is, contractors must leverage data-driven insights and technological advancements to drive growth, attract ideal customers, and optimize customer satisfaction.

Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors–National Association members from around the country gathered this month for educational sessions, networking, and industry awards.

If used correctly, AI can potentially enhance efficiency and accuracy across multiple industries, including HVACR.

Daikin Applied’s recently introduced SiteLine Building Controls gives building owners and operators the tools and insights needed to optimize performance, improve IAQ, and trim energy use and carbon emissions.

Posted by Gordon Fyodor Lyon on Sep 01

As people around the world prepare to celebrate Earth Day, it’s a good time to incorporate renewable energy solutions, like Thermal Energy Networks (TENs), into the ongoing conversation.

Industry figures are estimates that are derived from the best available figures supplied by a sample of AHRI member companies.

Industry figures are estimates that are derived from the best available figures supplied by a sample of AHRI member companies.

Two major HVAC industry organizations have weighed in on a DOE proposal that would phase out noncondensing gas furnaces for consumer use beginning in about six years.

Residential gas furnaces must all have a minimum AFUE of 95% beginning in five years. Some in the HVAC industry say the new Department of Energy rule will ultimately hurt homeowners.

This winter, HVAC contractors might be dealing with a wetter winter than years past, coupled with more snowfall than maybe most people would like.

Posted by Ariel Otilibili on Sep 15

Posted by Ariel Otilibili on Sep 15

Posted by CISA on Mar 21

Posted by CISA on Mar 28

This is another episode on concurrency. We talk to two experts in the field, Brian Goetz and David Holmes about aspects of concurrency we hadn't really covered before. We start out by discussing liveness and safety and then continue to talk about synchronizers (latches, barriers, semaphores) as well as the importance of agreeing on protocols when developing concurrent applications. We then talked about thread confinement as a way of building thread-safe programs, as well as using functional programming and immutable data. The next set of topics covers various ways of how compilers can optimize the performance wrt. to concurrency, talking about techniques such as escape analysis as well as lock elision and coarsening. We then covered how to test concurrent programs and the consequences of the Java memory model on concurrency. We then went on to look at some more advanced topics, namely, lock-free programming and atomic variables. We also briefly discussed the idea of transactional memory. Finally, we looked at how better language support - specifically, a more declarative style of concurrent programming as e.g. in the Fortress language - can aid in improving the quality of concurrent programs.

This episode features a discussion with Dan Grossman about an essay paper he wrote for this year's OOPSLA conference. The paper is about an analogy between garbage collection and transactional memory. In addition to seeing the beauty of the analogy, the discussion also serves as a good introduction to transactional memory (which was mentioned in the Goetz/Holmes episode) and - to some extent - to garbage collection.

This episode is an interview with Dave Thomas (OTI Dave or Smalltalk Dave, not PragDave). We started our discussion with a look at the (non-)success of objects and components. We then discussed some history behine Eclipse and Dave's role in OTI. We then compared Smalltalk and Ruby and looked at the promises of small and powerful languages such as Lisp. We also discussed the role of (static) type systems and the role of tool support for languages. We then switched gears and looked at what is necessary to scale agile development to the level of large organizations and how techniques from lean production and manufacturing as well as product management can play an important role. In the last part of the interview we looked at the state of research today, and especially the relationship between industry and academia in this area. We concluded the interview with Dave's opinion on what it takes to be a good developer.

In this espisode we take a closer look at relational database systems and the concepts behind them. We start by discussing the relational paradigm, its concepts and ramifications, and go on to architectural aspects.

In this episode we're talking to Linda Rising about retrospectives. We start by defining what a retrospective is and discuss some of the logistics of making it work for software projects. We then look at the different phases of a retrospective. The main part then is a discussion about some of the practices or games that are used to facilitate the retrospective. We conclude the retrospective discussion with destroying some of the prejudices against it and the relationship to process improvement and CMM. At the end of the interview we talk a little about Linda's current interest: how does the brain work?

In this episode we look at SUN's open source strategy for the OpenJDK. We discuss challenges in creating such a big open source project, and ways to keep it focused and organized. We discuss what it means for the Java runtime to be adopted as the technological foundation for other programming languages.

In this episode, Dirk talks with David Frankel, resident Metamodeller and MDA expert at SAP Labs LLC, SAP's subsidiary in the Silicon Valley. Dave's extensive experience provides a big picture, from the early days of CORBA all the way to current issues that are bugging most enterprise architects' work with MDA.

This episode is once again with Linda Rising, this time on the book she coauthored with Mary Lynn Manns on introducing ideas into organizations. The talk is another one of the SE Radio Live sessions recorded at OOP 2009 - thanks to SIGS Datacom and programme chair Frances Paulisch for making this possible.

Dave explains why reading source code is at least as important a skill as writing source code. He shares approaches for how to get to grips with unknown and undocumented source code even if it is non-trivial in size. He finishes with advice for how to get started reading code.

This episode is part of our series on agile software development. We talk with David Anderson about Kanban, an agile software development method that is quite different from most of the other agile methods out there. We discuss the basic ideas behind Kanban, the differences between Kanban and Scrum and when and why projects can benefit from using Kanban. This episode is done in cooperation with the German magazine ObjektSpektrum (thanks for sharing this interview with us).

This episode is a conversation with Ramnivas Laddad about aspect-oriented programming (AOP), Aspect J, and Spring AOP. We review the fundamental concepts of AOP, discuss AspectJ (an open source compiler that extends java with support for AOP), and cover the Spring Framework's proxy-based AOP system. Laddad also gives his thoughts on the use cases for AOP and where we are in the technology adoption curve, and updates on the state of the AspectJ project itself.

This episode is an update on the developments around the Scala language.

Recording Venue: Skype Guest: Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage In this episode, we talk with Pramod Sadalage and Martin Fowler about database evolution and agile database development. We discuss the basic challenges for working with a database in an agile development culture and how to include database design and most of all, database evolution, in […]

Recording Venue: Skype Guest: Michael Hunger Michael Hunger of Neo Technology, and a developer on the Neo4J database, joins Robert to discuss graph databases. Graph databases fall within the larger category of NoSQL databases but they are not primarily a solution to problems of scale. They differentiate themselves from RDBMS in offering a data model built […]

Recording Venue: Skype Guest: Michael Stonebraker Dr. Michael Stonebraker, one of the leading researchers and technology entrepreneurs in the database space, joins Robert for a discussion of database architecture and the emerging NewSQL family of databases. Dr. Stonebraker opens with his take on how the database market is segmented around a small number of use […]

Guest Udi Dahan talks with host Robert Blumen about the CQRS (command query responsibility segregation) architectural pattern. The discussion begins with a review of the command pattern. Then a high-level overview of CQRS, which consists of a separation of a command processing subsystem that updates a write model from one or more distinct and separate, […]

Senior performance architect and author of *Systems Performance* Brendan Gregg talks with Robert Blumen about systems performance: how the hardware and OS layers affect application behavior. The discussion covers the scope of systems performance, systems performance in the software life cycle, the role of performance analysis in architecture, methodologies for solving performance problems, dynamic tracing and tracing tools such as DTrace, the disk and file subsystems, the CPU and memory subsystems, and the challenges virtualization poses for performance analysts.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and a partner at the software development company Basecamp, talks to Stefan Tilkov about the state of Ruby on Rails and its suitability for long-term development. He addresses some of its common criticisms, such as perceived usefulness for only simple problems, claimed lack of scalability, and increasing complexity. David also talks about the downsides of building JavaScript-centric, “sophisticated” web UIs, and why he prefers well-structured, “majestic” monoliths to microservices.

Armon Dadgar speaks to Matthew Farwell about Secrets Management.

Felienne interviews Jeroen Janssens about data science, examining the basic concepts, as well as the skills and tools needed to be(come) a data scientist.

Péter Budai and Kim Carter discuss End to End Encryption (E2EE), backdoors, the scenarios where E2EE can be and should be used. IM, VoIP, Email scenarios, interservice communication scenarios such as securing data in use.

Jeremy Jung talks with David Calavera about zero-downtime migrations and rollbacks with Kubernetes. In this episode we define migrations, rollbacks, and discuss how Netlify was able to migrate to Kubernetes and roll back off of it multiple times without impacting their users. David explains how developers can run old and new systems simultaneously, the importance of defining errors in your system, and when to apply fixes vs rolling back. We also discuss their decision to move to Kubernetes, and the benefits they received.

Guest Daniel Corbett discusses how to scale your application with the help of load balancing. Hear details on HAProxy and the load balancing ecosystem as a whole.

Max Neunhoffer of ArangoDB discusses about multi-model databases in general, and open source ArangoDB, in specific, with show host Nishant Suneja. The show discussion covers motivation behind deploying a multi-model database in an enterprise setting, and deep dives into ArangoDB internals.

Tim Coulter, the founder of Truffle (Ethereum DApp development framework) discusses the Truffle framework for Ethereum SmartContracts and Decentralized App development. Kishore Bhatia spoke with Tim Coulter about: Ethereum Decentralized Apps (DApps)...

Felienne interviews Adam Barr about code quality? Why do programmers pick up bad habits about programming and what can be done to improve that?

Dr. Andrii Gakhov, author of the book Probabilistic Data Structures and Algorithms for Big Data Applications talks about probabilistic data structures and their application to the big data domain with host Robert Blumen.

Daniel Berg, a distinguished Engineer at IBM cloud unit, talks with host Nishant Suneja, about Istio service mesh and how it lets developers deploy microservices into the cloud in a secure, efficient fashion by taking away the burden of devops...

Peter Zaitsev explains: avoiding vendor lock-in, judging what databases are bad at, why not to copy the big players, when to "go with the crowd", when to use cloud services vs. running your own infrastructure, and the role of containerization.

Howard Chu, CTO of Symas Corp and chief architect of the OpenLDAP Project, discusses the key technical features of the Lightning Memory-mapped Database (LMDB) that make it one of the fastest, most efficient and safest embedded data stores in the world.

Joshua Davies discusses TLS, PKI vulnerabilities in the PKI, and the evolution of the PKI to make it more secure, with host Robert Blumen.

Pat Helland talks to host Akshay Manchale about Data Management at scale in a Microservices world. Pat talks about trends in managaging data in a distributed microservices world, immutability, idempotence, inside and outside data, descriptive...