Best Programming Master

Writing code is mentally intensive work, and just like if someone were working a physically demanding job and their body felt exhausted afterwards, mental work can be exhausting mentally. Many knowledge workers report experiencing “cognitive fatigue” after a number of hours, after which point their ability to do tasks significantly drops.  While most workers work 40 hour work weeks, experts say that most workers cannot do eight straight hours of deeply focused work everyday as they’d mentally exhaust themselves before getting to that point.  Recently on SD Times’ podcast, What the Dev? , we interviewed Hans Dockter, CEO of Gradle , about the impact of cognitive fatigue on software productivity. Here’s an abridged version of that conversation:  David Rubinstein, editor-in-chief of SD Times: To start us off, what exactly is meant by the term cognitive fatigue? Hans Dockter:   What cognitive science has discovered is that there are two types of cognitive work. So the first is lea

NVIDIA has announced a new solution, NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX, that can simulate physical sensors so that developers can work on software for autonomous machines, such as vehicles, humanoids, industrial manipulators, mobile robots and more, in test environments. The new offering enables developers to test sensor perception and other related AI software in a realistic test environment before they deploy their solutions in the real world.  It can be used to simulate different activities, like whether a robotic arm is operating correctly, an airport luggage carousel is running, a tree branch is blocking the road, a factory conveyor belt is in motion, or a person is nearby.  “Developing safe and reliable autonomous machines powered by generative physical AI requires training and testing in physically based virtual worlds,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX microservices will enable developer

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing software development by enhancing productivity, improving code quality, and automating routine tasks. Developers now have access to various AI-powered tools that assist in coding, debugging, and documentation. This article provides a detailed overview of the best AI programming tools in 2024. 1. GitHub Copilot It is one of the most popular AI-powered coding assistant tools developed by GitHub and OpenAI. It uses OpenAI’s Codex, a language model trained on a vast amount of code from public repositories on GitHub. Key Features Real-time Code Suggestions : Provides intelligent code completions as you type, suggesting whole lines or blocks of code. Multi-language Support : Supports a wide range of programming languages including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go. Integration with IDEs : Works seamlessly with Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains suite, Neovim, and more. Pros Enhanced Productivity : Helps develope

Are your developers on PagerDuty? That’s the core question, and for most teams the answer is emphatically “yes.” This is a huge change from a few years ago when, unless you did not have DevOps or SRE teams, the answer was a resounding “no.”  So, what’s changed? A long-term trend is happening across large and small companies, and that is the convergence of developers, those who code apps, and DevOps, those who maintain the systems on which apps run and developers code. There are three core reasons for this shift – (1) transformation to the cloud, (2) a shift to a single store of observability data, and (3) a focus of technical work efforts on business KPIs. The impending impact on DevOps in terms of role, workflow, and alignment to the business will be profound. Before diving into the three reasons shortly, first, why should business leaders care?  The role of DevOps and team dynamics – The lines are blurring between traditionally separate teams as developers, DevOps, and SREs incr

Unity Catalog is an open source governance catalog for data and AI, developed by Databricks and open sourced earlier this week at the company’s Data + AI Summit .  Companies can use it to govern structured and unstructured data, and machine learning models, notebooks, dashboards, and files.  It offers interoperability with any data format and compute engine and supports all of the major cloud platforms. With Unity Catalog, companies can manage data from a number of sources in one place, including sources like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Azure SQL, Azure Synapse, and Google BigQuery, to name a few. Companies can define access policies once and then apply them across different clouds and platforms, simplifying access management and governance.   Unity Catalog was first created at Databricks in 2021 as an offering for its customers, and it is being open sourced so that more companies can benefit from it.  “We’re excited to open source Unity Catalog and release

Microsoft has announced that the .NET MAUI extension for Visual Studio Code is now generally available, allowing developers to now build cross-platform apps using .NET MAUI within their editor.  A number of new features were also announced alongside this general availability release, including an improved editing experience with XAML. When it was in preview, the extension only had basic syntax highlighting and completions, but it’s since been updated to work with Copilot and take advantage of intelligent autocompletion, tooltips, and easy code navigation. Hot Reload is also now available for both XAML and C# files. This highly awaited feature allows developers to make changes while an app is running and see those changes reflected automatically, without needing to restart the app.  XAML Hot Reload comes enabled, but as the C# version is still considered experimental, developers will have to enable it in the VS Code settings.  “Today’s release is a great milestone in our VS Code jou

There’s really but one topic that most of our industry is talking about – artificial intelligence. They talk about how it will remove menial, repetitive tasks to free up developers to work on higher value projects. They talk about LLMs, and model training, and GenAI, and trust. Our view from the cheap seats is seeing how AI touches just about every piece in the software development and delivery life cycle. It’s seen in code, where it helps developers avoid creating errors and adhere to governance, and spotting fixes before the code is deployed. It’s in test automation, where low-code tools and AI are creating tests and recommending fixes to where tests fail. It’s in CI/CD pipelines, where it manages code changes, catching errors early and predicting what tasks need to be done. And it’s in security, where it can detect bad actors targeting your applications, locate vulnerabilities and offer remediation guidance. In this year’s SD Times 100, we’ve included an AI category, listing the

The Linux Foundation Europe has announced the launch of Open Mobile Hub (OMH), a new framework for cross-platform mobile development.  A main effort of the project will be to develop a unified codebase that allows applications to be built once and then deployed across different mobile operating systems.  The project was formed by five mobile development companies: Amaze, BharOS, Futurewei, Meetkai, and Squid.  Open Mobile Hub will release several open-source SDKs and tools, including the Login & Authentication SDK, Maps & Location SDK, Storage SDK, and Core Gradle Plugin.  Extensibility is also a main goal of the project; Third-party developers will be to create their own plugins for Open Mobile Hub, which will allow for more flexibility in the development process.  Preston Lau, technical steering committee chair of the project, explained that, for example, the OMH Maps API abstracts away the features of mapping services to allow developers to easily switch between Google

Gradle has announced a new reporting feature to its developer productivity platform Develocity (previously called Gradle Enterprise). The new dashboard can provide developers quicker insights than previously accessible in the platform, and it’s now easier to navigate. Develocity Reporting and Visualization provides information such as the number of projects using each supported build tool, the number of builds in CI vs local, the number of failed vs successful builds, JVMs used across all builds, which Git repositories are being built in which environment, and more.  “Some of this data was previously available within Develocity’s dashboards, but now there’s much more data available and it’s much easier to explore from within Grafana. Since Grafana itself is a data visualization tool that many are already familiar with, we hope our customers can easily begin exploring this data right away,” Trisha Gee, lead developer advocate for Gradle, wrote in a blog post .   This new feature

While most founders are quite confident in their product development capabilities, when it comes to product scaling, many of them are fundamentally unclear about how to go about it. Many entrepreneurs believe that scaling products is something they must consider from the beginning. Whether it is their MVP or a major milestone release, I often see most of them scurrying over the product scaling quandary from day one. Unfortunately, this approach leads most of them to failure. Product scaling isn’t something you do initially and in one go. It is a continuous process that begins after you have stabilized your MVP or a major product enhancement and continues until the next big milestone. The very title of Nathan Furr’s bestselling book “Nail It Then Scale It” is a warning for entrepreneurs, advising them to steer clear of the temptation to scale before it is time. At Talentica Software , I frequently lead the product development process for various customers. In one notable project,

AWS has created two new certifications in AI to help job seekers who are trying to secure jobs that require those in-demand skills.  According to a study from AWS , jobs that require AI skills offer a 47% higher salary in IT, 43% higher in sales and marketing, and 42% higher in finance.  The first certification is AWS Certified AI Practitioner , which is a beginner-level certificate that validates a person’s knowledge of AI, ML, and generative AI concepts and applications. The exam topics include fundamental AI concepts and terminology, use cases, design considerations for foundation models, model training and fine tuning, prompt engineering, foundation model evaluation criteria, responsible AI, and security and compliance. The second is AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate , and is more advanced and meant for people who have been building AI and ML solutions on AWS for at least a year.  Topics on this exam include data preparation for ML models, feature engineer

At its annual developer conference, Apple WWDC, Apple unveiled its new AI platform, Apple Intelligence , which will be integrated across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. “At Apple, it’s always been our goal to design powerful personal products that enrich people’s lives by enabling them to do the things that matter most as simply and as easily as possible,” said Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, during the livestream. “We’ve been using artificial intelligence and machine learning for years to help us further that goal. Recent developments in generative intelligence and large language models offer powerful capabilities that provide the opportunity to take the experience of using Apple products to new heights.” According to Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, the goal of Apple Intelligence is to combine the power of generative models with personalization based on Apple’s knowledge of a user.  “It draws on your personal context, to give you intelligence that’s most he

Sonar has announced a new integration of its code review tool, SonarCloud , with Amazon CodeCatalyst to help improve the development process for cloud-based applications.  Amazon CodeCatalyst is a platform that provides blueprints for setting up software development projects in AWS, including setting up project tools, managing CI/CD pipelines, provisioning and configuring development environments, and more. The goal of this integration is to improve the overall quality of application code by enforcing quality or “Clean Code” best practices throughout the software development life cycle for applications built using CodeCatalyst.  “An increasing number of developers are writing code and building apps in the cloud. We created SonarCloud to provide these developers an easy way to achieve a state of Clean Code, designing a tool that seamlessly integrates with DevOps platforms,” said Fabrice Bellingard, VP of products at Sonar. “Our growing collaboration with AWS will help more cloud-b

Cognition, the creator of the AI software developer, Devin , has announced several new features in the tool that will make it a “more collaborative, knowledgeable, and productive teammate.” The company introduced Playbooks, which are documents that provide instructions to Devin on common software development tasks. Developers can also specify success criteria and guardrails specific to their project.  Developers can create and share their own Playbooks, or browse Cognition’s gallery of common Playbooks, which include tasks like web scraping and converting Python notebooks to scripts.  “Playbooks minimize the back and forth needed to guide Devin to complete a task successfully, as they communicate the necessary instructions and details upfront,” Cognition wrote in a post . Another new feature that helps with onboarding Devin is the Knowledge feature that lets developers share documentation, tips, internal libraries, and other materials so that it can more effectively adapt to the

Microsoft has announced that OpenAI has created an official library for .NET for the OpenAI API. It includes full support for the OpenAI API, including Assistants v2 and Chat Completions, as well as the latest model, GPT-4o.  With the release of this library, developers will now be able to build their own libraries on top of it as well.  The library is currently in beta, and the companies will continue working with the community over the next several months to gather feedback for improving it.  “This official .NET library ensures a smooth and supported integration with OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. It also complements OpenAI’s official libraries for Python and TypeScript/JavaScript developers,” the .NET team wrote in a blog post .  In its announcement, Microsoft highlighted that the work of Roger Pincombe was instrumental in getting the library to where it is today. He created the first OpenAI package for .NET back in June 2020 and has been working closely with the Microsoft and O