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Showing posts from December, 2021

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Mattermost

Mattermost is a platform that enables collaboration throughout the software development life cycle.  It offers integrations with several other tools — such as GitHub, Jira, and PagerDuty — so that developers can collaborate without needing to switch between different applications.  According to the Mattermost team, nearly 40% of the work week on average is wasted as a result of tool fragmentation, manual tasks, and fragile workflows. The goal of Mattermost is to align teams, tools, and processes to help regain some of that time.  The platform consists of three key components: Channels, Playbooks, and Boards.  Channels provide messaging capabilities in both one on one and group capacities, such as voice and video conferencing; file, image, and link sharing; markdown formatting; and a fully searchable message history.  Playbooks are configurable checklists that define repeatable processes. According to the Mattermost team, Playbooks enable development teams to define, streamline an

How to choose a coding bootcamp

The basic hallmarks for a coding bootcamp are to provide practical competencies to people who want to start a new professional coding career within a very short period of time. It means the high speed of knowledge transfer and a high degree of condensation of educational material.  Full-time bootcamps last about 3-4 months, and you have to commit your time and energy, as these courses are usually very intensive. Part-time courses can last even longer than six months, but you don’t have to give up your job and the time to absorb knowledge is not as strained. Think thoroughly about what will suit your needs best. How to prepare? First, read the manual. Before enrolling on a coding bootcamp read thoroughly what is offered, as some courses are for total beginners, others will require you to have the basic knowledge of English language and basic mathematics. The most important is to know if you will have to do pre-work or an introductory course — you need this information to plan your

2021 Year in Review: Microsoft

This year, Microsoft went all in on open-source and security and launched a plethora of new solutions aimed at bettering the lives of developers working remotely and on-premises.  Microsoft launched its flagship Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6. in November. .NET 6 is a follow-up to the notable .NET 5, which merged .NET Framework and .NET Core in 2019. .NET 6 is a long-term support release meaning it will be supported for three years.  .NET 6 dunked Microsoft into the world of macOS’s Apple Silicon, in addition, to its support on Windows Arm64. The open-source platform now includes Hot Reload which allows code changes to be viewed without needing to restart the app, OpenTelemetry and dotnet monitor support, and much more .  Meanwhile, Visual Studio 2022 received a feature called IntelliCode, an AI-assisted tool that can complete whole lines of code and spot repeated edits and suggest similar fixes throughout the codebase, and many other features.  The new version of the IDE also incl

2021 Year in Review: Security

2021 was a tumultuous time for security, marking both massive breaches — a trend that sped up during the pandemic — and widespread action for trying to fix the problem.  On May 7, 2021, the Colonial Pipeline, an American oil pipeline system, suffered a ransomware cyberattack that impacted computerized equipment managing the pipeline. In response, President Biden issued an Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity that includes sweeping measures on how cybersecurity in the federal government is handled. The order requires contracts with IT and OT service providers to conduct an array of day-to-day functions on Federal Information Systems. The government plans to take “decisive steps to modernize its approach to cybersecurity, including by increasing the Federal Government’s visibility into threats, while protecting privacy and civil liberties.” However, security initiatives at organizations will still need to evolve to gain wholesale developer support.  According to

Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Intelligence? Zainab Sutarwala The Crazy Programmer

Artificial Intelligence is a science of making intelligent and smarter human-like machines that have sparked a debate on Human Intelligence Vs Artificial Intelligence. There is no doubt that Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms are made to make these machines learn on their own and able to make decisions like humans. With an attempt of making smarter and intelligent machines, we are overlooking the real impact of Artificial Intelligence takeovers on our future careers? Will Human Intelligence face an existential crisis? To understand more about it, let us go ahead and check the entire post. Various technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Neural Networks, Cognitive services, Robotics Processing, AR/VR, and many more make machine learning highly intelligent. Thus, machines systems will make a decision as we do in day-to-day lives. The decision-making system of this machine is increasing various debates like Artificial Intelligence Vs Human Intelligence! Developmen

9 Best Games for Programmers to Improve Programming Skills Zainab Sutarwala The Crazy Programmer

Learning coding can be a little tough initially, especially when you’re getting started, however when you get into the detail, it becomes very fun and enjoyable. Besides games are the best way you can do that. Today, the gaming sector has undergone a huge change with new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, IoT, etc integrated with video games. Furthermore, it can help you empower your problem-solving and creativity skills as you want to solve different challenging problems and compete with different proficient programmers around the world. Can Games Teach Coding? Definitely! And for this, you do not need any science degree. You may just play coding games and learn coding skills – which includes all types of programming languages. With the best coding games, you can sharpen your programming and problem-solving skills, enhance your concepts, as well as enjoy your learning process. Whereas the coding game probably will not teach you everything that you want

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: SafeLog4j

SafeLog4j is an open-source tool that can detect and verify vulnerable Log4j applications and protect them. This project comes after a 0-day exploit in the Java logging library, Log4j (version 2) was discovered on December 9. The vulnerability resulted in Remote Code Execution by logging a certain string. SafeLog4j works inside an application, blocking the actual vulnerability from occurring. It does not rely on signatures and applications can safely log any data. It uses the instrumentation approach of Contrast Assess and Protect, but scoped to the single Log4j 2 CVE. According to Contrast Security, the company behind the project, the approach is more accurate than file-based scanners that just look for a Log4j library. It supports multiple copies of Log4j 2, a common occurrence with Java application servers and servlet containers that run many independent applications on a single Java instance. “When applying application defenses, we encourage those who manage applications and a

SD Times news digest: GrapeCity Documents v5 release, Tempo acquires ALM Works; Microsoft Graph Bookings API update

GrapeCity, provider of enterprise software development tools, today announced the GrapeCity Documents v5 release. This latest version brings users new features in all products in GrapeCity’s document API suite.  The GrapeCity Documents APIs are supported in .NET 6 applications without extra steps to generate documents. Additionally, The GrapeCity Documents API supports features that do not have a dependency on Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft Word. This release brings new SVG support in GrapeCity Documents for PDF and GrapeCity Documents for Imaging, allowing developers to have more control over the image appearance in SVG format. With this, users can create, load, inspect, and modify the internal structure of an SVG image.  Tempo acquires ALM Works    Tempo Software, provider of team time management and productivity-enhancing solutions, recently announced the acquisition of ALM Works, a project management solution and developer of the Structure for Jira software suite.

2021 Year in Review: Testing

Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 has been a year of acceleration and enhancements in the technology industry. In the testing space, we have seen a strong pull towards testing automation and the overall modernization of the way software teams conduct tests. This year, financial services teams have felt this push towards automation and modernization of testing in response to increasing customer expectations. Back in January, an SD Times story showed that several financial services teams made the move to an open-source, technology-agnostic, test automation framework with the capability to span the entirety of the DevOps life cycle.  The primary reasons financial services organizations found themselves flocking towards modernizing testing are the improvements in performance and efficiency that came as a result. It was reported that modernizing and automating testing led to a 10% improvement in developer efficiency as well as a significant improvement in application performance. 

SD Times news digest: Skillsoft to acquire Codecademy; JetBrains introduces kotlinx.coroutines 1.6.0; Snyk and Dynatrace announce workshop

Skillsoft, a corporate digital learning organization, today announced a definitive agreement to acquire the online learning platform for technical skills, Codecademy. The acquisition is estimated at $525 million in cash and stock. The acquisition provides many benefits, including: Expands immersive learning platform with new ways of learning  Creates substantial cross-selling and upselling opportunities by adding a strong brand and powerful digital sales and marketing engine to global enterprise sales force  Strengthens Skillsoft’s existing technical skills offerings JetBrains introduces kotlinx.coroutines 1.6.0 With the recent release of Kotlin 1.6.0, the 1.6.0 version of the kotlinx.coroutines library is out now. A few highlights of the release include:  A new API and multiplatform support for kotlinx-coroutines-test  Support for the new Kotlin/Native memory manager  The new dispatcher views API  The introduction of CopyableThreadContextElement  Migration to the Java 8

The top 10 stories of the year on SD Times

It’s not always easy to read every new article on trends in software development throughout the year. It’s a rapidly changing space, and to read it all would be quite an impressive feat. In case you missed out on some of the big ones, though, we’ve put together a list of our top 10 trending stories of the year. Happy reading!  The top 7 advanced features of Cypress to know about Data is leaking as employees leave in “Great Resignation” How you organize your development teams matter 2021: The year of low code 6 steps to upskill developers What’s all the fuss about Rust? Hybrid remote dev teams perform best asynchronously Measuring developer productivity isn’t as simple as it sounds From 1x to 10x engineering with low code Google recommits to the Python ecosystem The post The top 10 stories of the year on SD Times appeared first on SD Times . from SD Times https://ift.tt/3yQEBiJ

2021 Year in Review: DevOps

As the workplace we once knew changed over the past two years, so did the way DevOps teams worked.  While the initial goal of DevOps was to facilitate greater collaboration between developers and operations teams, a lot of recent focus has been on how DevOps teams can measure the value they are providing to the business. New trends like value stream management and BizOps have begun to gain popularity as a means to this end.  Another interesting trend is the declaration by GitLab that we are now in the fourth wave of DevOps . According to GitLab, the four phases of DevOps include:  Silo DevOps, where each team selects their own tools Fragmented DevOps, where organizations utilize the same set of tools for different life cycle stages DIY DevOps, where teams use toolchains built with parts not designed to work together Platform DevOps, where tools have advanced capabilities that allow developers to build software with velocity, trust, and visibility “There’s an old expression, ‘

Top 3 predictions for value stream management in 2022

Digital transformation remains critical for today’s enterprises. According to a recent survey, 96% of organizations are in the midst of a digital transformation initiative. The problem is that about the same percentage of organizations are contending with a significant challenge that stifles these transformations. Digital transformations place a significant onus on optimized product delivery, which is a problem: 92% percent of respondents report that they are encountering product challenges due to poor visibility and inefficiencies across the product lifecycle. These and other statistics are drawn from an extensive survey conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Broadcom. The results from this research are now available in a 2022 Value Stream Management Predictions Report which offers compelling insights that business and IT leaders can draw from as they chart their organization’s path for 2022. Based on these findings, in the following sections, we provide our top three

SD Times news digest: Facebook releases Create React App 5.0; Elementary OS 6.1 available now; JetBrains Qodana updates

Facebook recently announced the release of Create React App 5.0, a major release bringing users numerous new features and the latest version of all major dependencies. A few highlights of the release include webpack 5, Jest 27, ESLint 8, and PostCSS 8. With this, react-scripts@5.0.0 also contains several breaking changes. These changes include dropped support for Node 10 and 12. Node 10 has now reached End-of-Life. And Node 12 will be End-of-Life in April of 2022. Moving forward, only support for the latest LTS release of Node.js will be provided.  For a full list of updates and bug fixes, see here .  Elementary OS 6.1 available now The team at Elementary OS, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu LTS, recently unveiled the release of Elementary OS 6.1. This release is available to download for new users, as an upgrade for current users, and is shipping on numerous computers. With this release, there is a more concentrated focus on Addressing feedback with features and fixes Mak

Year in Review 2021: Java

This year, there were two major releases of Java — Java 16 and Java 17. Java 17 is also a long-term support (LTS) release, the last of which was Java 11. The next LTS release of Java will be in 2023 with Java 21. This will change the LTS release cadence from three to two years. Java 16 introduced a number of new enhancements , such as an incubator model for expressing vector calculations that are compiled at runtime (JEP 338), C++14 support (JEP 347), warnings for value-based classes (JEP 390), and more. Additions to Java 17 included a new macOS rendering pipeline (JEP 382), strong encapsulation for JDK internals (JEP 403), sealed classes (JEP 409), and more.  Another major change to the programming language this year is that Oracle updated the Java license. Starting with Java 17, releases will be provided under a free-to-use license until one year after the next LTS release.  RELATED CONTENT: 2021: An Unsettled Year Oracle also announced Java Management Service in order to acce

2021: An unsettled year

This year started out in much the same way 2020 ended — with people still uncertain about the future of work, whether or not their offices would reopen, and figuring out how to work from remote offices in their homes. To address these issues, we’ve seen huge growth in certain market segments — collaboration tools such as Slack, Zoom and Teams; new digital platforms for hosting conferences replete with virtual exhibit halls, meetup rooms and other experiences (SD Times produced two this year, on value stream management and low code/no code development); and more digital transformations that include big moves to the cloud. Once development teams got the work part of it down, those people had to manage their time — what hours should they work, what hours are family time, as part of the work-life balance people seek. What we’ve seen is that people are actually working more hours from home than they would at an office in an attempt to keep pace with the organizational demands for software

For reduced development cost and accelerated code delivery, try TypeScript

While JavaScript is frequently the language of choice for all sizes of frontend and backend applications, it’s not the only option. Nor is it necessarily the most efficient or cost-effective. Increasingly, TypeScript is becoming the go-to language for app development ─ particularly for larger apps. The time- and cost-saving benefits are significant enough that some organizations are even taking projects initially started in JavaScript and migrating them to TypeScript.  What is TypeScript? While the number of programs written in JavaScript has grown exponentially, the programming language’s ability to express the relationships between different units of code and mitigate coding errors early on hasn’t kept pace. Along with JavaScript’s inconsistent semantics, this makes JavaScript-driven app development difficult to manage at scale. Released in 2012, TypeScript was created to address JavaScript’s deficiencies in developing large-scale apps. It’s an open source, strongly typed programm

SD Times news digest: Adobe Developer App Builder now available; ReactOS 0.4.14 release; Progress announces Fiddler Everywhere 3.0

The team at Adobe recently announced the availability of Adobe Developer App Builder, the unified third-party extensibility framework for integrating and creating custom experiences for Adobe applications. It is available for all Adobe Experience Manager customers and soon to be available for Adobe Commerce. Adobe Developer App Builder provides users with a more unified experience of extending and customizing Adobe tools for developers. Additionally, it reduces the time it takes to create apps down to 15-30 minutes according to past Adobe hackathons. To get started with App Builder, sign up for the free trial program , open to all enterprise customers. For more information on this release, visit here .  ReactOS 0.4.14 release The ReactOS team recently announced the release of version 0.4.14, which brings users improvements such as FreeLoader fixes, Shell features, kernel fixes, NetKVM VirtIO bringup, and support for NEC PC-9800.  A key highlight of this release is the improvemen

Solving the challenges of shifting security left

Amidst the “Shift Left and Extend Right” security trend, developers find themselves needing to implement more robust security practices into their processes. Idan Plotnik, co-founder and CEO of Apiiro, provider of an application risk management platform, discussed the ways in which developers can mitigate critical security risks in order to better protect themselves and their organization. According to Plotnik, it is a myth that developers will be able to handle security all on their own. “I don’t think that this will happen in the next five to 10 years. What will happen is that you have something like a security champion in the development group and you have an application security program or leader across business units that is putting the security and compliance controls in place,” he said. Plotnik explained that the reason it is very challenging to completely shift security left is that it will result in too many noisy tools sending too many alerts with a lack of context. “We need

SD Times news digest: Microsoft updating feedback system for Visual Studio; Nim 1.6.2 release; Open Application Group announces Express Pack

Microsoft recently announced that they are updating their feedback system in order to provide users with a higher quality experience. With this, older versions of Visual Studio will no longer be compatible to provide feedback. To continue submitting feedback, upgrade to version 16.7 or any LTSC service release after April 2021. This update brings users an enhancement to the Send Feedback options available in the help menu and feedback center. The new system is designed to make it easier for Microsoft’s engineering teams to track, organize, and transfer tickets. This works to provide a higher level of communication between users and the Visual Studio engineering teams. To learn more about this update, visit here . Nim 1.6.2 release The team at Nim, the statically typed compiled systems programming language, today announced the release of Nim 1.6.2, the first patch release for Nim 1.6. 1.6.2 contains 41 commits and fixes over 15 reported problems as well as brings users some general