HVAC contractors have to focus on recruiting and retaining technicians by focusing efforts on learning and then providing what the current workforce is looking for.

Sherry has held CFO positions for the past ten years. “His passion and expertise will be critical as we continue to expand our capabilities to solve the biggest pain points for contractors all across the country," said Ara Mahdessian, ServiceTitan co-founder and CEO.

While not often addressed, the air handler in an HVAC system has a significant role to play.

Engineers say that, designed properly, run strategically, and equipped with the right accessories, air-handling units can help save energy in a commercial HVAC system.

James Bowman, a 20-year industry veteran, has joined NAVAC North America as regional sales manager of HVAC tools. Bowman will oversee the company’s central sales region.

This is the first funding distributed from the players’ pledge through the social justice fund and continues the Ravens’ commitment to making a difference throughout Baltimore.

Struggling to grow revenue past $500K, Lavender transformed their operations with Sera, the all-in-one FSM solution.

While new technology can certainly help streamline certain aspects of HVAC business operations, like accounting and inventory management, it still needs to be viewed as a tool to augment the capabilities of employees, not replace them entirely.

Contractors can get more productivity from staff by letting software take care of the small things.

Packaged rooftop units are the workhorses of the commercial market, providing cooling to approximately 60% of U.S. commercial building floor area.

Polymer elements in cooling towers — or entire towers made of composite materials, like Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) — can reduce the weight by up to 50%.

In addition to taking up less space, smaller chillers can be more easily installed, weigh less, and pose fewer shipping, rigging, and building-construction challenges. They can also be more energy efficient, with the same or even greater cooling capacity.

Thermostat manufacturers say they have the studies to show that the use of their smart, connected thermostats can help homeowners save on their HVAC-related energy costs.

HVAC manufacturers share their latest heating products — including photos, specifications, warranty info, and more — in this detailed showcase.

AHRI launched an interactive US map showing state codes for A2L refrigerants, alongside a video series on low-GWP refrigerant transition.

New A2L-related code requirements will impact HVAC system installation and include warning labels, ventilation, leak detection, and limits on refrigerant amounts for comfort air conditioning.

Manufacturers are starting to introduce their A2L systems in the U.S., so contractors and technicians must learn how to service and install this new equipment.

The proposed new approach to chilled water HVAC systems promises to provide significant capital cost savings, energy cost savings, and a path to eliminate CO₂ emissions.

Just because an HVAC technician installs a system according to current codes and standards, it doesn’t always mean it’s safe.

Though geothermal systems can cost several times more than traditional HVAC units, the energy savings may be substantial.

Determining the right pump to save energy in a given application can be broken down into three general steps.

HVAC contractors could invest in all kinds of technology, ranging from tools to management systems, but often, the question lies with the payoff.

While cogeneration is still largely an industrial process, the market has significant potential for educational institutions coast to coast.

Every year, The NEWS introduces the latest heating equipment that is available for the upcoming winter season. The intent is to help contractors prepare for this busy period by doing the research that will help them to distinguish between brands.

Manufacturers are responding to the demand by offering a wide range of wireless tools they believe will help contractors and technicians do their jobs more accurately and efficiently.

HVACR technicians are special individuals. They have the intelligence, aptitude, and knack for problem-solving. In fact, they are expected to know how to diagnose and troubleshoot equipment of all types, sizes, and ages.

The Copeland-Enersponse collaboration offers a chance for food retailers to improve energy conservation efforts through involvement in demand-response initiatives that assist in stabilizing the power grid during times of high electricity consumption.

Dick Foster has been preaching the positives of zoning for years. As the owner of ZoneFirst, he has dedicated his life and career to this technology, and it has been a bit of an uphill battle.

Variable-speed heat pumps, which dominate the heat pump market in many countries, are getting more attention in the U.S. The NEWS asked several manufacturers about the benefits of the technology.

If contractors don’t have a plan in place to handle red tag furnace second opinions, they can expect some mistakes.

A homeowner in Pickering, Ontario works with an experienced HVAC pro to improve comfort, efficiency, and energy savings with a high-efficiency hydronic forced-air furnace upgrade.

A very important area for Java are Enterprise Systems. With the advent of new technologies like Ruby on Rails, Java EE 5 or EJB 3 the landscape for Enterprise Systems appears to be changing a lot at the moment. In this episode Markus talks with Eberhard about what Enterprise Java actually is, why and where it is used. Based on that they discuss what the future might look like and how to make Enterprise Java shine in the future.

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 is about OSGi, the dynamic module system for Java. Our guests are Peter Kriens (OSGI's Technical Director) and BJ Hargrave (OSGI's CTO). We'll discuss what OSGi is all about and why and in which contexts it is useful. Additionally we are having a look at the different layers of OSGI and where and how they are used. Other questions discussed are: What means dynamicity in an OSGI environment? Where is OSGI used? What’s the future of OSGI? How does OSGI interact with existing middleware solutions? How can I run several versions of the same JAR at the same time? Where are OSGI’s problems?

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 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.

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).

Robert talks to Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy of the Cambridge University (UK) Systems research group about the OCaml language and the Mirage cloud operating system, a microkernel written entirely in OCaml. The outline includes: history of the evolution from dedicated servers running a monolithic operating system to virutalized servers based on the Xen hypervisor to micro-kernels; […]

Johannes Thönes talks to Axel Rauschmayer about JavaScript and ECMAScript 6. They talk about the origin and version history. Then they dive into key JavaScript concepts and explain the features coming into the language with ECMAScript 6.

Monica Beckwith joins Robert Blumen for a discussion of java garbage collection. What is garbage collection? GC algorithms; history of GC in the java language; fragmentation and compaction; generational strategies; causes of pauses; impact of pauses on application performance; tuning GC; GC on multi-core and large memory machines; should production servers be implemented in non-GC languages?; going off heap and other programming techniques to avoid garbage; the future of java GC.

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.

Nate Black talks with Nicolai Parlog about Java 9. Topics include: a timeline of Java features; new patterns enabled by Java 8 lambdas, default interface implementations and how they enable code evolution; how Java 9 takes this further with private default methods; an introduction to Java modules: the Java Platform Module System (JPMS); “launch time” dependency validation; module “requires” and “exports”: documentation as code and a new topic for code reviews; how to migrate an existing codebase to Java 9 and modules; benefits of Java modules: reliable configuration and a smaller Java runtime; the new Java release schedule.

Kishore Bhatia talks with Travis Kimmel about Engineering Impact: In the age of data-driven decision making, how does one go about measuring, communicating, and improving engineering productivity? We’ll learn from Travis’ experience building data analytics tools in this space, with insights and best practices for engineering teams and business stakeholders for measuring value and productivity.

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.

Vivek Ravisankar, the CEO and founder of HackerRank spoke with SE Radio’s Kishore Bhatia about automated coding skills assessments and the HackeRank platform. Topics include: HackerRank as a coding skills assessment platform and how such platforms help in skills assessments and coding interviews - both for developers and employers. The interview also covers the journey from developer learning to getting assessed & recruited through these platforms. Learning from Vivek’s experience giving coding interviews and automating the process of technical screening for Hiring Software Engineers.

Avi Kivity of Scylladb deep dives into the internals of Scylladb and what makes it a high performant version of Cassandra, a distributed key-value datastore. The discussion covers the architecture of Scylladb, its relationship with high performance...