Today is April Fools Day in the US, and it is easily the worst news day of the year. Hopefully, I don’t share something that is actually a prank. With that being said, there is one epic prank, the GMail Mic Drop. In the normal reading, we have The Next Web reporting on Toshiba’s recall of over 100,000 faulty laptop batteries. This is very bad, because the batteries tend to melt. There are only a handful of reported cases, but definitely check out the information if you have a Toshiba. Microsoft continues to gives us goodies this week, now with the announcement of Azure Functions as reported by TechCrunch. This is definitely a different Microsoft than we have seen in the recent past and they are making things very interesting. In addition, TechCrunch also reports on Microsoft making DocumentDB compatible with MongoDB. Yeah, this is a different Microsoft. Continuing the Microsoft news, VentureBeat reports that Xamarin will be included in Visual Studio for free and the Xamarin runtime will be open source. Lastly, From the Canyon Edge talks about the Ubuntu Userspace for Windows developers, which digs deeper into the “bash on windows” idea.

As always, enjoy today’s items, and please participate in the discussions on these sites.

Top Stories

• Toshiba just recalled over 100,000 faulty laptop batteries | The Next Web

Startups, Career and Process

• Why Aren’t You Writing Online? | DZone Agile
• The corporate shitwork | Paris Kasidiaris

Design and Development

• Ubuntu on Windows — The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers | From the Canyon Edge
• The Importance of Algorithms as Microservices | Algorithmia
• RESTful Web Services With Python Flask | DZone Integration
• Five Agile Testing Approaches That You Should Know About | DZone Agile
• Vaadin Widgetset Example | Java Code Geeks
• NPMGate == Supply Chain Fail | DZone Agile
• Microsoft integrates Xamarin into Visual Studio for free, will open source Xamarin runtime | VentureBeat
• Retry handling with Spring-Retry | Java Code Geeks
• Microsoft gives developers new options to plug into Office 365 | TechCrunch

AI, Machine Learning, Research and Advanced Algorithms

• Ernest: Efficient Performance Prediction for Large-Scale Advanced Analytics | the morning paper

Big Data, Visualization, SQL and NoSQL

• Using Spark and Zeppelin to process big data on Kubernetes 1.2 | Kubernetes
• Documents Update By Query with Elasticsearch | DZone Integration
• The Rise of Dark Data and How It Can Be Harnessed | KD Nuggets
• Microsoft’s DocumentDB now lets you use your mad MongoDB skills | TechCrunch

Infrastructure, Operations and DevOps

• Global Cloud – Active-Active and Beyond | The Netflix Tech Blog
• How to choose the right DevOps tools | Atlassian Blogs

Security, Encryption and Cryptography

• Mutual Problems | Java Code Geeks

IaaS, PaaS, Saas and *aas

• Microsoft answers AWS Lambda’s event-triggered serverless apps with Azure Functions | TechCrunch
• Platforms as Business Models of the Future: Theory and Practical Application | DZone Integration
• Google Cloud Datastore simplifies pricing, cuts cost dramatically for most use-cases | Google Cloud Platform

Link Collections

• Dew Drop – March 31, 2016 (#2220) | Morning Dew