Imagine you’re an inventory manager for a retail business and you need to quickly verify stock levels for an unexpected large order while away from your computer. Instead of logging into a dashboard, navigating through menus, and analyzing spreadsheets, you simply send a text message: "Do we have enough iPhones to fulfill an order for 100 units?" Within seconds, you receive a reply: "You have 157 iPhones currently in stock, so you can fulfill this order. Based on your current sales rate of...

The rise in popularity of open-source software has made the usage of third-party libraries nearly universal. Projects often use dozens of them and those, in turn, use dozens more. We want to avoid reinventing the wheel and if someone else has already solved a problem, it doesn't make sense for us to solve it again. The Good and the Not-So-Good At its best, open-source software provides solutions that have been thoroughly vetted by hundreds or thousands of users. Bugs have been...