Best Programming Master

Halfway through my 5 1/2 years at SpaceX, management decided to change the way we developed software by handing over the job of creating a product vision to the engineering team. They felt that the traditional way of putting product management in charge of the product roadmap was creating a layer of abstraction. So, they set out to eliminate the game of telephone played between people on the factory floor building a rocket and the people who were actually building the software for the rocket.  While the change was challenging, having engineers in charge of product visioning ultimately led to better products being designed. That’s why this way of doing things has influenced the way countless startups founded by former SpaceX engineers have structured their engineering departments – including ours. Are there challenges with setting up software development this way? Sometimes. Does every software engineer want to be in charge of product visioning? Probably not. It’s important for produc

Last month, the Rust Foundation announced the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium, a new group dedicated to advancing the use of Rust in safety-critical software, which is software that can severely impact human life or cause damage if it fails.  To talk more about the new group, Bec Rumbul, executive director and CEO of the Rust Foundation, joined us on the most recent episode of our podcast, What the Dev?   Here is an edited and abridged version of that conversation: Jenna Barron, news editor of SD Times: Can you tell me about this new consortium and why it was created? Bec Rumbul: Rust is a relatively young programming language compared to a lot of them out there, but it’s a language that has enormous potential; it has really great memory safety features, performance, it has an awful lot of great stuff to recommend it. So there’s a lot of people out there that are kind of Rust curious at the moment. They’re looking at it as a language that can smooth off some of those roug

The visual collaboration company Miro has announced the launch of Intelligent Canvas , an AI-based idea generation platform.  “Miro’s Intelligent Canvas is built to support business processes well beyond the brainstorming phase,” Jeff Chow, CPTO of Miro. “It combines AI, composable workflows, and a more intuitive, interactive experience to drive higher team productivity. Miro’s canvas is a central place where teams can focus on making critical decisions, accelerating their ability to bring new products and services to market faster than their competitors.” With the new platform, customers can use AI prompts to create documents, user stories, workflows, and more.  The AI can also turn objects like sticky notes into documents, such as research summaries or product briefs.  “Consider for a second that over 12M sticky notes are dropped into Miro every day. Somewhere in all that noise is the signal that will set you on the right path to your next breakthrough, but it can take hours, da

Infragistics, a provider of various UI controls and components, has announced several new features in its low-code platform App Builder .  The editor can now generate React code, which has been a highly requested capability by the community, according to Infragistics. With this addition, App Builder now covers all of the major web frameworks.  “Whether you are working with Angular, Blazor, or Web Components and now React, App Builder will generate code for pixel-perfect apps that are production-ready, performant, and maintainable,” said Jason Beres, SVP of developer tools at Infragistics.  Another new feature in this release is support for two-way data binding in the Select, Text-area, and Radio-group components. With this new feature, any changes to the UI are reflected in the underlying data model immediately and vice versa, which cuts down on manual updates and ensures data consistency across the app.  This release also includes improved Datasource notifications, which are noti

UserTesting has announced the latest release of its platform that helps developers gain insights into their customer base. The platform now offers branching logic, which allows developers to create surveys that adapt questions based on responses to previous questions.  Image tasks and matrix questions have also now been added as new question types in surveys, providing new ways for customers to give feedback. This release also adds a new tool called Screener that provides real-time suggestions on screening questions so that developers can improve the targeting of the survey before launching it, so that they can ensure they’re reaching the right people.  Additionally, UserTesting now integrates with Confluence whiteboards, allowing developers to share UserTesting videos, highlight reels, and clips directly within Confluence whiteboards.  The company also revealed that it will soon be adding a new tag management capability to provide developers with even more control over grouping

The advent of DevOps, cloud-native computing, API use and now AI have made creating software way more complex for developers. These factors have also impacted the developers’ experience and productivity – and how productivity is measured. No longer do software engineers simply write code and run some tests. Now, they have to manage API integration for required services, security through the use of software bills of materials, the maintenance of these complex applications, and now learn to use AI and understand the risks associated with all of the above. According to a study released Monday by Atlassian, of the 2,100 practitioners surveyed, the top five areas of developer role complexity are: Understaffing – this forces developers to take on responsibilities of other roles (48% of  respondents) Expansion of the developer role – bringing in testing, security, operations and maintenance (47%) New technology – developers need training on such things as AI and other new tech (47%)

OpenText is releasing a new static application security testing (SAST) tool called Fortify Aviator designed to change the way developers manage application security. Fortify Aviator uses AI to provide intelligent code fix suggestions based on analysis of the existing codebase, which significantly reduces the time developers need to spend on remediating issues. According to the company, Fortify Aviator differs from traditional SAST tools in that its suggestions are integrated directly into the development workflow, rather than presenting a disconnected list of vulnerabilities.  It also provides explanations of security issues, taking into account the context of the issue. This helps developers better understand the problems and enable them to write more secure code in the future, OpenText explained. Fortify Aviator itself also continuously improves based on past fixes and developer feedback, which enables it to become more accurate over time.  “Fortify Aviator is set to transform t

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to maintain its prevalence in business, with the latest analyst figures projecting the economic impact of AI to have reached between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually.  However, advances in the development and deployment of AI technologies continue to raise significant ethical concerns  such as bias, privacy invasion and disinformation. These concerns are amplified by the commercialization and unprecedented adoption of generative AI technologies, prompting questions about how organizations can regulate accountability and transparency.  There are those who argue that regulating AI “could easily prove counterproductive, stifling innovation and slowing progress in this rapidly-developing field.”   However, the prevailing consensus is that AI regulation is not only necessary to balance innovation and harm but is also in the strategic interests of tech companies to engender trust and create sustainable competitive advantages.    Let’s

GraphRAG is an open source research project out of Microsoft for creating knowledge graphs from datasets that can be used in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). RAG is an approach in which data is fed into an LLM to give more accurate responses. For instance, a company might use RAG to be able to use its own private data in a generative AI app so that employees can get responses specific to their company’s own data, such as HR policies, sales data, etc.  How GraphRAG works is that the LLM creates the knowledge graph by processing the private dataset and creating references to entities and relationships in the source data. Then the knowledge graph is used to create a bottom-up clustering where data is organized into semantic clusters. At query time, both the knowledge graph and the clusters are provided to the LLM context window.  According to Microsoft researchers, it performs well in two areas that baseline RAG typically struggles with: connecting the dots between information a

Yesterday Microsoft announced that it was giving up its observer board seat at OpenAI, a company it has invested over $10 billion in and whose AI models are heavily integrated across the Microsoft product line. Microsoft’s board seat was a nonvoting seat, meaning they were only on it to observe what the board was doing.  The seat was secured back in November 2023 when OpenAI went through an upheaval following the previous board’s sudden firing of CEO Sam Altman and the subsequent replacement of the entire board.  In a letter to OpenAI, Microsoft reasoned that it no longer needed the seat because it believed OpenAI had improved governance since obtaining the seat.  “Over the past eight months we have witnessed significant progress by the newly formed board and are confident in the company’s direction. Given all of this we no longer believe our limited role as an observer is necessary,” Microsoft wrote in its letter to OpenAI.  “We are grateful to Microsoft for voicing confide

Developers today are responsible for a lot more than the developers of 10 years ago were. Not only do they write code, but they’re managing quality, security, incidents, observability, infrastructure, and more. This has led to a lot of tool sprawl in development environments. Developers need an IDE to write the code, an incident management platform to fix issues, a platform for managing the infrastructure they are deploying to, an observability platform to track performance, and more. And sometimes, developers are reliant on people in other areas of the business to tackle some of those responsibilities, which can slow things down. Out of this complexity, in the past few years a new type of tool has emerged to help developers get a better handle on all of these different things: the Internal Developer Portal (IDP).  “Additional responsibilities are getting pushed to developers, and so they have just more and more on their plates, in architectures that are more and more complex, and a

Amazon hosted its annual AWS Summit today in NYC where it announced several updates related to its generative AI offerings. Here are the highlights from today’s event: AWS App Studio now in preview AWS App Studio is a no-code platform for building applications using generative AI, without having to have any software development knowledge. For instance, the prompt “Build an application to review and process invoices” will result in an application that does that, including the necessary data models, business logic, and multipage UI.  “The generative AI capability built into App Studio generated an app for me in minutes, compared to the hours or even days it would have taken me to get to the same point using other tools,” Donnie Prakoso, principal developer advocate at AWS, wrote in a blog post .  Amazon Q Apps enables users to build generative AI apps First announced as a preview in April of this year, this offering is now being announced as generally available. It will allow user

Many development teams are beginning to experiment with how they can use AI to benefit their efficiency, but in order to have a successful implementation, they need to have ways to assess that their investment in AI is actually providing value proportional to that investment.  A recent Gartner survey from May of this year said that 49% of respondents claimed the primary obstacle to AI adoption is the difficulty in estimating and demonstrating the value of AI projects.  On the most recent episode of our podcast What the Dev? , Madeleine Corneli, lead product manager of AI/ML at Exasol , joined us to share tips on doing just that. Here is an edited and abridged version of that conversation: Jenna Barron, news editor of SD Times: AI is everywhere. And it almost seems unavoidable, because it feels like every development tool now has some sort of AI assistance built into it. But despite the availability and accessibility, not all development teams are using it. And a recent Gart

Lekko , the company changing the way developers build software through dynamic configuration, today launches out of stealth with $4.5 Million in seed funding led by Addition and LUX Capital with participation from BoxGroup, SV Angel, and Abstraction Capital. Angel investors include Thomas Chen, Former CTO of Supaglue and creator of Flipr at Uber; Julianna Lamb, CTO of Stytch; Peter Edge, CEO of Buf Technologies; and other industry leaders.   Going beyond feature flags, Lekko is pioneering the concept of a “lekko” — a Polish adjective that means “light and easy” – which is a tunable aspect of a software product such as test code, a premium feature, or a regionally allowed service. Lekko gives developers the power to deploy multiple configurations, features, previews, tiers, and experiments directly within their code, unlike feature flags which must be hosted by a third party. This enables businesses to safely deploy updates, staged rollouts, and quick rollbacks through their exis

Anthropic’s developer Console now allows developers to generate, test, and evaluate AI prompts, allowing them to ultimately improve response quality.  Claude 3.5 Sonnet introduced a built-in prompt generator that allows a user to describe a task and have Claude convert it into a high-quality prompt. For example, they could describe that they need to triage support requests to Tier 1, 2, or 3 support or page an on-call engineer, and write “Please write a prompt that reviews inbound messages, then proposes a triage decision along with a separate one sentence justification.” Claude then takes that information to create a prompt for the task.  Now the company has added a new test case generation feature that can generate input variables for a prompt, such as an example inbound customer support message. Then users can run the prompt to see Claude’s response to the input.  And finally, the new Evaluate feature allows users to test prompts using multiple inputs directly within the Consol