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A new report from Forrester on the rapid adoption and evolution of artificial intelligence reveals that organizations are being challenged to hire workers with the skills needed for AI-specific roles. While the role of the traditional developer will certainly change – and perhaps even be de-prioritized – the report found three areas in which skills will be prioritized. Those are AI developers and engineers, cloud-related roles and data-specific roles.  By and large, companies are confident that they can find the AI-specific skills they need, as well as find and retain workers skilled in cloud computing and systems administration, according to the report. This is ironic, as for years organizations have been saying they can’t find enough specific software development skills to help them achieve their business goals, yet they’re looking for more skills that are hard to find as of now. Fiona Mark, a principal analyst at Forrester and primary author of the report, told SD Times that ...

Microsoft has announced that DeepSeek R1 is now available through Azure AI Foundry and GitHub. DeepSeek is an open source AI model created in China that has been a topic of conversation over the past week after claims of how the model was seemingly trained for a fraction of what U.S.-based AI companies have spent training their models and how it uses less computing power to run.  Sales of Nvidia’s high performing chips were restricted in China, forcing DeepSeek to train these models on the lower-performance H800 chips. This has other companies considering the possibility that high-end chips may not be as necessary for AI development as previously thought. The R1 model competes on performance and capabilities with models from OpenAI, Meta, and Google, but with significantly lower costs.  “As part of Azure AI Foundry, DeepSeek R1 is accessible on a trusted, scalable, and enterprise-ready platform, enabling businesses to seamlessly integrate advanced AI while meeting SLAs,...

Yugabyte has announced the release of YugabyteDB 2.25, which offers complete compatibility with PostgreSQL 15 and introduces several new features . According to the company’s co-founder and co-CEO Karthik Ranganathan explained that this release is the culmination of a long-term project to bring YugabyteDB users the features that were added in more recent versions of PostgreSQL as well as enable YugabyteDB to easily adopt future PostgreSQL versions.  Yugabyte explained that while the most recent version of PostgreSQL is 17 (released in September), most companies are still running PostgreSQL 14 in production due to its compatibility with their existing tools and operating systems. “Although PostgreSQL remains the most popular database among developers, a factor that slows down adoption of newer PostgreSQL features or innovations is the risks upgrading can bring, especially the potential impact on existing applications,” Ranganathan said.  YugabyteDB now has access to featur...

Testing is an important part of the software development process, helping to ensure that applications are working as they’re intended. But what happens when those tests aren’t trustworthy? A “flaky test” is a test that sometimes passes and sometimes fails under the same exact circumstances, according to Trisha Gee, lead developer advocate at Gradle, in a recent episode of our podcast . “The most annoying thing about this is you’re not sure if it’s the passing thing that’s correct or the failing thing that’s correct,” she said. According to Gee, running a test multiple times can help identify if it’s a flaky test. A lot of build systems give you the option to rerun a test when it fails, so if you re-run a failed test and it passes the second or third time during the same build, then you’ll know it’s a flaky test.  Another way to identify flaky tests it to look at the same test across multiple builds, and if you determine it has the same inputs and outputs, including the same pr...

A new report from the Java vendor Azul claims that 88% of companies are considering moving off of Oracle Java to another alternative as a result of rising costs and restrictive policies from Oracle, among other issues.  Oracle changed its licensing model for Java two years ago to base the cost on the number of employees an organization has rather than the Java instances they have in use.  Since then, organizations have been contemplating alternatives, and 72% of respondents were already thinking about it when surveyed in 2023. The top five reasons for wanting to move on from Oracle include cost (42%), preference for open-source (40%), Oracle’s sales tactics (37%), uncertainty around changing licenses and pricing (36%), and restrictive Oracle policies (33%).  The report also found that Java workloads make up more than half of total cloud compute costs for almost two-thirds of respondents. Additionally, 71% of companies have more than 20% of unused cloud compute cap...

Organizations are looking to artificial intelligence to enhance their value stream initiatives, according to the fourth annual Value Stream Management survey sponsored by Broadcom and conducted by Dimension Research. According to 90% of respondents, AI can help in the advancement of value stream management, in the areas of improving predictive analytics, automating workflows and processes, and improving product quality.  “Some of the things I thought were kind of fascinating [in the survey] were, how much more percentage of AI is going to have an expectation in here? And where is that going to go?” asked Lance Knight, chief value stream architect at Broadcom.  Broadcom’s survey found that the top focus for 2025 is the customer life cycle, specifically attracting new customers and delivering more customer value . When asked why their companies are adopting VSM, participants said it was specifically to deliver more customer value . Those already using VSM stated that this i...

Integrations are nonnegotiable for SaaS companies. The average business’s SaaS portfolio encompasses 342 apps. Without integrations, these apps become data silos, and we all know the challenges with those.  Customers expect seamless connectivity. According to G2, B2B software buyers consider integration capabilities a top factor in their decisions. Another survey found more than half of respondents cited poor integration as a reason to explore new software vendors.  Every SaaS team knows they need integrations to connect their products to the other products their customers use, but that doesn’t make building them easy. Early on, many dev teams estimate the engineering time based on the complexity of the integration’s code. They may look at a request and think, “Writing this code should be straightforward; I can knock it out quickly.” Several missed deadlines later, they find themselves spending more time on integrations than on product innovation, and frustration mo...

Value Stream Management (VSM) was all the rage a few years ago, but now there’s a new contender for measuring how much value software is driving: Software Engineering Intelligence.  “While Value Stream Management continued to lose steam in 2024, we also saw the fast emergence of Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) to take its place,” Derek Holt, CEO of Digital.ai, told SD Times while making predictions for 2025 .  Holt was interviewed in the most recent episode of our podcast to talk more about this trend, explaining that SEI is the application of both data driven insights and predictive AI to measure and improve not only the process of delivering software, but also the outcomes of that software development. “This includes both rear view metrics of how things have trended in the past, but also looks at predictive insights to be able to identify areas for improvement, risk avoidance, etc,” he said. “There’s a reason why the rear view mirror is smaller than the windshi...

The Android development team today announced the first beta for the upcoming Android 16, which is expected to be released in Q2 of 2025. Currently, it’s expected that Android 16 will reach platform stability in March, at which point the Android team will deliver the final SDK and NDK APIs as well as final internal APIs and app-facing system behaviors. “This build includes support for the future of app adaptivity, Live Updates, the Advanced Professional Video format, and more. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, and thank you in advance for your continued help in making Android a platform that works for everyone,” Matthew McCullough, VP of Product Management for Android Developer at Google, wrote in a blog post .  To better support adaptive apps  — apps that change layouts based on the size of the screen — the Android team has decided to begin phasing out the ability for apps to restrict screen orientation and resizability for large screens. For screens that ar...

JetBrains has announced the launch of its new AI coding agent, Junie. Junie runs within JetBrains IDEs and can take on simple coding tasks or assist on more complex tasks with collaboration from the developer. “Thanks to the power of JetBrains IDEs, coupled with reliable LLMs, Junie already solves tasks that would otherwise require hours of work,” Andrew Zakonov, product leader at JetBrains, wrote in a blog post .  Developers can share prompts with the agent, review the results, and adjust as needed. Over time, it learns the context of code and the developer’s preferences and style. “This results in better code quality and control on how Junie performs tasks, ensuring reliability, making Junie a trusted collaborator on your team,” Zakonov wrote.  RELATED:  AI agents are transforming the software development life cycle It can also run code and tests, and can check the project state after making changes to verify that all tests have passed. “AI-generated code can be ju...

Postman is helping make it easier for developers to design, test, and deploy AI agents with the launch of its AI Agent Builder tool.  According to the company, the rise of AI agents represents a shift in how software systems are being built and run. “As agents gain traction, we could see a 10X–100X increase in API utility, enabling software systems to execute increasingly complex workflows. Today humans remain ‘in the loop’, but this will evolve where humans step out entirely depending on trust, and risk factors,” Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman, wrote in a blog post in December.  RELATED: AI agents are transforming the software development life cycle Postman’s AI Agent Builder provides a centralized platform for discovering LLMs and APIs. Developers can compare responses, cost, and performance of a variety of LLMs, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Cohere, and Meta’s Llama. The platform provides access to APIs from all of...

In his 2024 Nobel Prize banquet speech, Geoffrey Hinton, often described as the “godfather of AI,” warned the audience about a variety of short-term risks, including the use of AI for massive government surveillance and cyber attacks, as well as near-future risks including the creation of “terrible new viruses and horrendous lethal weapons.” He also warned of “a longer-term existential threat that will arise when we create digital beings that are more intelligent than ourselves,” calling for urgent attention from governments and further research to address these risks. While many AI experts disagree with Hinton’s dire predictions, the mere possibility that he’s right is reason enough for greater government oversight and stronger AI governance among corporate providers and users of AI. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing is the kind of fractured government regulation and industry foot-dragging we saw in response to privacy concerns nearly a decade ago, even though the risks related to AI ...

Containers have long been a popular way of packaging up and delivering software, but many developers have also begun to explore using containers in more ways than originally intended.   In a recent episode of the SD Times podcast , What the Dev, Scott McCarty, senior principal product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, sat down with us to discuss the trends he’s been seeing and also make predictions for what’s to come.  For example, he’s seen that developers are now using containers for cross-platform purposes, such as enabling x86 code to run on an Arm processor.  According to McCarty, cross-platform development is normally fairly complicated because you’re not only having to develop for different systems and architecture, but your CI/CD system also needs to be on that hardware platform, or at least be able to simulate it.  He explained that a developer that mostly works in the x86 world who is trying to develop for an Arm or RISC-V processor will need ...

ActiveState is revolutionizing open source management with a streamlined, secure, and scalable approach. In this microwebinar series, learn how ActiveState helps DevSecOps teams eliminate the complexities of managing open source, securing the software supply chain, and integrating with your CI/CD workflows. With experts like CTO Scott Robertson and Product Director Pete Garcin, discover how ActiveState is transforming open source management, helping people focus on innovation, not bottlenecks. Watch here . The post Streamlined Open Source: Innovation Without Bottlenecks appeared first on SD Times . from SD Times https://ift.tt/qFrCbng

In an internal meeting in October 2023 , Elon Musk announced to the team at X that a big change is ahead.  He said that Twitter, now X, was heading towards being an “everything app. An all-inclusive feature set that you can basically do anything you want on our system.”   What Musk was describing is often referred to as a super-app – an app that combines a multitude of services like messaging, social media, ecommerce, payments, etc. – and some predict that super-apps are the future. Their widespread adoption in several parts of the world has some proclaiming that these apps are poised to dominate the digital landscape and edge out any less robust, comprehensive competitors.  But is that actually true? There’s No I in WeChat The best-known super-app is China’s WeChat , which consolidates numerous functions into an all-in-one platform for users. But WeChat is a state-backed app that operates in a monopolized, protected market.  WeChat’s success shou...

The Linux-focused security company TuxCare is attempting to alleviate issues caused by .NET 6.0 end of life — which happened in November — by offering its Endless Lifecycle Support for .NET solution.  Available for both Windows and Linux, the new offering will enable development teams to keep working with .NET 6.0 in a secure and stable way. It supports .NET components such as .NET Installer, ASP.NET Core Runtime, .NET Runtime, .NET SDK, and WPF and Windows Forms.  Beyond continuing to provide security fixes for .NET 6.0, TuxCare’s new offering also helps development teams avoid code refactoring, maintain stability, and avoid rushed decisions around end of life software. Endless Lifecycle Support for .NET comes with 14-day SLAs for security fixes and also provides detailed SBOMs for every library.  “Bringing our open source security expertise into .NET for both Windows and Linux, ELS for .NET 6.0 illustrates our long-term commitment to enabling the use of legacy sys...

OpenAI is revealing a beta for a new feature in ChatGPT that enables users to set up one-time or recurring reminders within conversations.  A demo created by OpenAI shows a user chatting with ChatGPT about exercises, and then asking “Can you remind me to work out every day at 2pm and pump me up with a motivational speech?” ChatGPT then creates a task and will send the user notifications at the specified time. According to OpenAI, some other useful reminder tasks include setting a reminder that your passport expires six months from today, getting a daily weather report at 7 am everyday, or getting a list every Friday of things to do over the weekend based on location and the weather forecast.  ChatGPT can also suggest tasks based on conversations, and the user can choose whether or not to accept those suggestions.  To use this new feature, users will need to have “4o with scheduled tasks” chosen in the model picker, and from there they can ask to set reminders in natur...

President Biden today signed an Executive Order to facilitate building the infrastructure needed for AI. Its goal is to enable the country to set up the necessary infrastructure for AI while balancing environmental concerns.  “We will not let America be out-built when it comes to the technology that will define the future, nor should we sacrifice critical environmental standards and our shared efforts to protect clean air and clean water,” the White House wrote in a press release .  The Executive Order directs agencies such as the Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Energy (DOE) to make federal sites available for use by the private sector to build AI data centers and new clean power facilities.  RELATED CONTENT: Biden administration sets new rules for exporting AI chips According to the Biden Administration, building AI infrastructure within the country is crucial for ensuring national security, as it prevents foreign adversaries from accessing these AI s...

The Biden administration today announced new rules regarding exportation of AI chips to 120 countries, according to reports from the Associated Press (AP) .  The NY Times clarified that the framework divides countries into three categories: The U.S. and its 18 closest allies (including  Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan), countries already under a U.S. arms embargoes (like China and Russia) that will continue to face an existing ban on AI chip purchases, and all other countries, which would be subject to these new rules.  According to AP, under the new rules, the restricted countries would be able to purchase up to 50,000 GPUs. Government-to-government deals could increase the limit to 100,000 if a country’s renewable energy and security goals align with the U.S., and organizations in specific countries could also potentially apply for a status that enables them to buy up to 320,000 GPUs over two years. Additionally, chip orders equivalent to 1...

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has completed its acquisition of  Neural Magic , a pioneer in software and algorithms that accelerate generative AI (gen AI) inference workloads. With Neural Magic, Red Hat adds expertise in inference performance engineering and model optimization, helping further the company’s vision of high-performing AI workloads that directly map to unique customer use cases, wherever needed across the hybrid cloud. The large language models (LLMs) underpinning today’s gen AI use cases, while innovative, are often too expensive and resource-intensive for most organizations to use effectively. To address these challenges, Red Hat views smaller, optimized and open source-licensed models driven by open innovation across compute architectures and deployment environments as key to the future success of AI strategies. Neural Magic’s commitment to making optimized and efficient AI models a reality furthers ...

The artificial intelligence (AI) landscape is experiencing a transformative moment in voice technology. Anthropic’s recent release demonstrates breakthrough capabilities in natural conversation, with an enhanced ability to understand context and nuanced speech patterns. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s latest developments focus on more human-like voice synthesis and improved recognition across diverse accents and speaking styles. These advancements signal a shift from basic command-and-response systems to more sophisticated, context-aware voice interactions. As voice AI technology advances, integration into everyday applications has accelerated. The applications span countless industries, from healthcare systems requiring precise medical terminology recognition to financial services needing secure voice authentication. However, this rapid adoption brings new challenges for development teams, ensuring these systems work reliably and inclusively for all users. The complexity of human speech and the...

The Linux Foundation has launched the Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers initiative in an effort to fund open development of projects within the Chromium ecosystem. The initiative will offer a neutral space for tech companies, academia, developers, and the open source community to come together and work on these projects. The Linux Foundation hopes it will also remove barriers to innovation, expand adoption, and provide resources to those projects.  According to the organization, Chromium projects will remain under their existing governance structures. Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers will follow an open governance model and the Linux Foundation will also be working on forming a technical advisory committee to guide development of the initiative.  Several top tech companies have already pledged their support for this initiative, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera. Google is the primary developer and maintainer of Chromium, while Microsoft and Opera are a...