Best Programming Master

OpenAI has just made a number of announcements that developers working with its products ought to know about.  First, the company announced that the API and ChatGPT now have access to the latest GPT-4o snapshot : gpt-4o-2024-11-20. This snapshot features better creative writing ability, with more natural, engaging, and tailored responses. Its ability to work with uploaded files has also been improved. Next, the company announced the ability to use the Evals tool directly in the OpenAI dashboard. Evals is a framework for evaluating LLMs or the systems built around them for different criteria. “When developing with AI models, it’s essential to continuously test their outputs to ensure they are accurate and useful. Regularly running evaluations (often called evals) on your model’s outputs using test data helps you build and maintain high-quality and reliable AI applications,” OpenAI’s documentation reads .  And finally, OpenAI is introducing the ability to test audio capabilitie

With all the potential benefits promised by the use of AI, it’s no wonder companies are wanting to get in on the action. But a new survey from Capital One reveals a stark disconnect between how confident business leaders are in their company’s ability to implement AI and how the technology professionals actually implementing the technology feel.  According to the report — which surveyed almost 4,000 leaders and technology professionals — 87% of leaders believe their company has a data ecosystem equipped to handle AI, 82% are confident in their ability to mobilize resources for AI, and 78% are confident in their ability to handle the growing complexity and volume of data associated with AI.  Eighty-four percent of leaders also believe that their company has the necessary processes, tools, and platforms to properly manage their data. Eighty percent of them said the data they need to do their jobs is easy to find, 78% say it is easy to understand, and 77% say it is easy to understand.

CData Software  (“CData”), the leading provider of data connectivity solutions, today introduced CData Connect Spreadsheets, a new tool designed to streamline bringing data into the most popular analytics platform: spreadsheets. Available now for free, Connect Spreadsheets enables users to access and work with data from over 250 sources directly within Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, making data management simpler, faster, and more efficient. Spreadsheets remain a cornerstone for data analysis, with millions of users across industries turning to Excel and Google Sheets for their daily tasks. Despite the rise of advanced business intelligence tools, spreadsheets’ familiar, flexible, and versatile nature makes them a preferred choice for quick, actionable, easy-to-analyze insights. Additionally, with companies spending significant time and money to build complicated data strategies and data stacks, spreadsheets remain a low-cost option that more than meets the data analytics needs of

GitHub is launching a new program to fund open source projects to improve their security and sustainability. The GitHub Secure Open Source Fund will invest $1.25 million into 125 different projects ($10,000 each). Applications are being accepted on a rolling basis through January 7th, 2025. According to GitHub, the funding is possible thanks to contributions from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, American Express, Chainguard, HeroDevs, Kraken, Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, 1Password, Shopify, Stripe, Superbloom, Vercel, Zerodha, and others. GitHub is also continuing to accept partners interested in contributing.  In addition to financial support, maintainers of chosen projects will run through a three-week program to get security education, mentorship, tooling, and certifications. “For some maintainers, being able to get funding would help them free up the time to focus on security; for others, it’s the learnings, experts, and community that can help,” GitHub wrote in a blog post .  Progr

Since releasing Android 15 in September, the Android development team has been hard at work on the next major release, and today it is announcing the first developer preview for Android 16 . According to the team, this release marks the start of a faster release cycle for Android APIs. Previously, the major API release would happen in Q3, but next year it will happen in Q2. This better aligns with the device launch schedule and will allow more devices to get the Android release sooner, the team explained. Due to the API being released earlier, the Android team recommends developers do compatibility testing a few months earlier to ensure apps are ready in time.  After the Q2 release, there will be another major API release in Q4 that will include developer APIs and feature updates, optimizations, and bug fixes, but won’t include new behavior changes that would affect apps.  Additionally, there will still be quarterly Android releases, and the Q1 and Q3 updates that come between the

Microsoft’s annual development and IT conference, Microsoft Ignite, kicked off this morning, with announcements ranging from updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot to a new bug bounty event for AI vulnerabilities.  Here is a list of some of the highlights from the event:  Microsoft 365 Copilot updates The company announced several new capabilities across Microsoft 365 Copilot. Now in private preview, Copilot Actions is a new feature that allows users to automate everyday tasks, such as getting a daily summary of meeting actions in Microsoft Teams, or getting an email that summarizes what was missed upon returning from a vacation. The company also announced several new agents in Microsoft 365, such as agents in SharePoint that are tailored to each SharePoint site, and are grounded on that site’s files and folders.  A new Teams agent called Interpreter allows for real-time, speech-to-speech translation in Teams meetings. This agent also features the option to simulate the user’s own voice

The no-code automation company Nintex today announced Nintex Apps , which allow users to create and deploy customized business-critical apps that leverage Nintex workflows.  “The launch of Nintex Apps is a meaningful step forward in our long-term vision of providing a single platform and integrated experience for end-to-end process automation powered by AI,” said Niranjan Vijayaragavan, chief product officer at Nintex. Like other similar no-code platforms for creating apps, Nintex Apps features a drag-and-drop interface for adding and arranging over 25 components and connecting data from various sources.  Nintex Apps connect with Nintex’ other workflow and document generation products, which allows users creating new apps to easily consolidate data from different systems and connect their app to other workflows. For instance, a user could pull data from SQL, REST, and OData and have it all available in a single view in their new app. It also features branding capabilities so tha

Lightbend has announced a new version of Akka , its platform for building responsive distributed apps.  Akka 3 has been in development since 2018, according to the company, and it utilizes many other Lightbend projects, such as Lagom, Play Framework, Cloudstate, Cloudflow, Akka Streams, and Kalix. There are three main themes in the Akka 3 release. First, it has multi-master replication, which allows a single entity to have instances running in multiple locations. This is achieved by using replicated event logging, CRDTs, and a protocol that runs on gRPC to guarantee delivery of events. Second, and building on top of multi-master replication, developers can migrate apps to different clouds without downtime or disruption. “These features also mean that operations can do upgrades of the application, individual services, or data model without any disruption,” Jonas Bonér, founder and CTO of Lightstep, wrote in a post .  And finally, Akka 3 also has an app resilience guarantee where L

Anthropic is making it easier for developers to leverage best practices of prompt engineering by adding a feature for improving prompts and allowing example responses to be managed within the Anthropic Console .  According to Anthropic, while prompt quality is important, it can be time-consuming to implement best practices, and those best practices might also vary between different model providers. With this new prompt improver feature, Anthropic is giving developers the ability to take existing prompts — either new ones or previous prompts written for other models — and refine them using Claude. The prompt improver uses a variety of methods to improve prompts, such as chain-of-thought reasoning, which adds a dedicated section where Claude can systematically think through prompts before responding; example standardization, where examples are converted into XML format for overall consistency; example enrichment, where existing examples are augmented using chain-of-thought reasoning;

While one might anticipate that the more complex an application is, the more likely it is to have security vulnerabilities, a recent analysis from Black Duck found the opposite to be true.  Its 2024 Software Vulnerability Snapshot report analyzed data from 200,000 dynamic application security testing scans for 1,300 applications across 19 different industry sectors.  The report categorizes small complexity apps as those with minimal interactivity and a simple crawl tree, while higher complexity apps are those that have many interactive elements and dynamically generated content.  The results show that small and medium complexity applications were more likely to have critical vulnerabilities than larger complexity ones. 2,039 vulnerabilities were found in small complexity apps, 1,679 were found in medium complexity apps, and 505 were found in large complexity apps.  “This metric suggests that many organizations are underestimating the security needs of sites containing fewer comp

The Android development team took a break from adding major features to the Android Emulator over the last six months to focus on an initiative called Project Quartz, the goal of which was to improve the stability, speed, and performance of the platform. Now, the team is reporting the improvements it was able to make to the Android Emulator, which can now be experienced either by downloading the latest version of Android Studio or updating to the latest version of the Emulator in the SDK Manager. The first goal was to improve stability and reliability, which the team accomplished by fixing issues that were causing backend and UI crashes, updating the UI framework, updating the hypervisor framework, updating graphics libraries, and eliminating technical debt. Specifically, they moved to a newer version of Qt, its platform for building the user interfaces in the Emulator; updating its graphics rendering system gfxstream ; and adding over 600 end-to-end tests to the pytests suite. The

JetBrains has announced the 2024.3 releases of its AI Assistant and several of its IDEs. AI Assistant 2024.3 adds support for Gemini models, enabling users to now choose between models from Gemini or OpenAI, or use local models. The assistant also now offers advanced code completion, enhanced context management, and inline prompt generation.  “We’re excited to introduce the 2024.3 updates, which bring powerful new capabilities to our IDEs and JetBrains AI Assistant,” said Vladislav Tankov, director of AI at JetBrains. “By integrating advanced models like Google Gemini, OpenAI, and local models, and enhancing code completion with our Mellum model, we’re empowering developers to work smarter and faster. Other IDE updates are also designed to provide deeper insights into code structure, streamline debugging, and improve overall efficiency, ultimately enhancing productivity across our entire product suite.” The company’s Java and Kotlin IDE, IntelliJ IDEA , was updated with a Logical

ActiveState today announced it is rebranding and relaunching its product as an open source management platform to help enterprises manage open source complexities, ensure supply chain security, and streamline DevSecOps. The platform, which integrates with existing tools, aims to proactively manage open-source risks by providing tools for discovery, analysis, remediation, and governance.  It offers a centralized dashboard to track open-source usage, policy enforcement, and vulnerability management. The platform also ensures reproducible builds and streamlines upgrades, reducing the burden on developers. Scott Robertson, ActiveState’s CTO, explained that most people know of ActiveState for its management of open source dynamic programming languages. “That usually became the way they got introduced to ActiveState’s real core vision, which is helping enterprises manage open source, the complexities of open source at scale that included managing licenses, vulnerabilities and doing very co

LaunchDarkly has come out with a new solution to help improve release confidence and reduce the risks associated with releasing new software. The new offering, Guarded Releases, establishes benchmarks for performance, latency, and availability for each stage of a rollout.  This enables development teams to more proactively detect and address issues before they become issues for customers, and allows for easy rollback to previous stages.  “Guarded Releases bring together real-time monitoring, automated recovery, error tracking, and user insights to resolve issues faster, elevate the user experience, and accelerate innovation,”  said Cody De Arkland, senior director of Product Incubation at LaunchDarkly. “With Guarded Releases, teams can ship, knowing each deployment is smarter, safer, and fully optimized for success.” It provides visibility down to the feature flag level, and can track key metrics, like latency or error rates, that are important when it comes to understanding the su

The  Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering  (ECE) is expanding its collaboration with Apple by joining the company’s New Silicon Initiative (NSI) – a program that aims to prepare students for careers in hardware technology, computer architecture, and silicon chip design. As part of the  Apple NSI program , ECE students will receive various types of support to enhance their skills in microelectronic circuits and hardware design. This includes scholarship and fellowship opportunities, along with expanded coursework for both undergraduate and graduate students. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to connect with Apple engineers through mentorships, guest lectures, and networking events. The expanded curriculum support will benefit integrated circuit (IC) design and tapeout-to-silicon courses that enable students to prepare for a career in hardware engineering across different focus areas, including circuit technology, electronic devices, computing hardw

.NET 9 is now available, and with it comes a number of performance improvements and new functionality to support developers building with AI.  According to Microsoft, this release features over 1,000 performance updates, one of which is that the Server GC has been altered to adapt to application memory requirements instead of the resources available in the environment. This change has resulted in a 15% increase in requests per second compared to .NET 8 and a 93% reduction in memory usage.  “This change in approach has a profound impact in high core-count environments, where application memory is small or changes dramatically over time,” the .NET Team explained in a blog post .  In addition, the .NET 9 runtime added support for Arm64 SVE and Intel AVX10, and in this release, the JIT compiler received improved performance for Arm64, loops, PGO, and bounds checks.  .NET 9 also features updated Dynamic Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) to provide optimizations for more code patterns. 

The data platform Snowflake is hosting its annual user conference, BUILD 2024, bringing together data scientists and developers and sharing new functionality across its platform that will enable customers to get more value from their data and build AI functionality on top of it. New updates across Snowflake platform enable greater collaboration, flexibility, and security First, the company announced several new capabilities for its flagship platform that will enable customers to better collaborate around their data.  The new Snowflake Internal Marketplace allows users to discover data, apps, and AI services created by different teams in the company. The marketplace also facilitates sharing of fine-tuned LLMs, which improves cross-team collaboration on generative AI use cases.  Listings in the marketplace benefit from AI via Copilot for Listings, an assistant that can answer questions on structured data to help users understand if shared data is relevant to them.  Additionally,

KubeCon + Cloud Native Con is happening this week in Salt Lake City, UT, bringing together the Kubernetes community in one location, and providing the opportunity for companies in the space to launch new offerings and update their products.  We’ve collected the news announcements from those companies all in one place so you can stay up to date. Keep checking back here, as we will be updating this list as new news comes in.  Last updated: 11/12 at 9:45 AM ET Red Hat adds new AI capabilities for Red Hat Developer Hub Red Hat today announced new capabilities and enhancements for Red Hat Developer Hub, the company’s  enterprise-grade internal developer platform based on the Backstage project.  The new features are designed to help organizations, whether already implementing an AI strategy or just coming to grips with its possibilities, more quickly and easily harness the power of AI to deliver smarter applications and services to their customers and end-users. To help accelerate deve

Elastic is implementing a new approach for storing vectorized data that will require 95% less memory.  Better Binary Quantization, or BBQ, is based on a technique called RaBitQ , which was developed earlier this year by researchers at Nanyang Technological University Singapore.  According to Elastic, the biggest differences between BBQ and native binary quantization are that: All vectors get normalized around a centroid  Multiple error correction values are stored Asymmetric quantization increases search quality without increasing storage costs The way that query vectors are quantized and transformed enables more efficient bit-wise operations “Elasticsearch is evolving to become one of the best vector databases in the world, and we see our users wanting to put more and more vectorized data in it,” said Ajay Nair, general manager of Platform at Elastic. “Better Binary Quantization is our latest innovation to reduce the resources needed to store vectorized data and provide free