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A number of companies have announced major changes to their executive leadership last month. Here are a couple of the moves across the industry this past month. Intel names two interim co-CEOs after ousting of Pat Gelsinger It was reported that Intel’s board was unhappy with the results Gelsinger was bringing for the company, such as an inability to compete with NVIDIA.  David Zinsner and Michelle (MJ) Johnston Holthaus have been brought in as co-CEOs in the meantime while a permanent replacement is founded.  Both were already leaders in the company, with Zinsner as executive vice president and CFO and Holthaus as executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group.  Frank Yeary will step in as interim executive chair of the board during the transition period. The board has already formed a search committee to find a successor.  GitLab appoints Bill Staples as CEO Staples will replace Sid Sijbrandij, who also co-founded the company in ...

High-quality data is the key to a successful AI project, but it appears that many IT leaders aren’t taking the necessary steps to ensure data quality. This is according to a new report from Hitachi Vantara, the State of Data Infrastructure Survey , which includes responses from 1,200 IT decision makers from 15 countries.  The report found that 37% of respondents said that data was their top concern, with 41% of U.S. respondents agreeing that “‘using high-quality data’ was the most common reason provided for why AI projects were successful both in the U.S. and globally.” Hitachi Vantara also predicts that the amount of storage needed for data will increase by 122% by 2026, indicating that storing, managing, and tagging data is becoming more difficult.  Challenges are already presenting themselves, and 38% of respondents say data is available to them the majority of the time. Only 33% said that the majority of their AI outputs are accurate 80% said that the majority of their...

Platform engineering involves creating and managing a set of tools, services, and processes that enable developers to focus on building applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. The specific definition of a platform can vary depending on the needs and goals of an organization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has played a significant role in shaping the platform engineering landscape. The CNCF ecosystem offers a wide range of tools and projects, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and many more. However, the complexity of the CNCF landscape can make it challenging for teams to select the right tools and build a cohesive platform. An opinionated platform approach involves making deliberate choices about the tools and technologies to be used, providing a more streamlined and predictable experience for developers. By adopting an opinionated platform, organizations can reduce complexity, improve consistency, and accelerate development cycles. Th...

The concept of “shift left” is fundamentally sound. Integrating security earlier into the software development life cycle (SDLC) seems like the obvious move. Instead of leaving security as an afterthought, why not address it before it becomes a problem? It sounds ideal: Faster remediation, fewer vulnerabilities slipping through the cracks, and developers becoming security heroes. Hooray! However, despite the appeal, shift left hasn’t quite lived up to its promise. The intention is clear, but the execution leaves much to be desired. While our industry has tried to move security earlier in the process, the way it has been done isn’t working for developers. I’ve experienced this firsthand, and I believe there’s a better way to fulfill the original promise of shift left. Where Shift Left Falls Short The whole premise of shift left is to put security into the hands of developers, empowering us to manage the risks associated with the code we write. In theory, this decentralizes security,...

While it’s often said that “time is money” when it comes to business, that phrase is now applicable to software development. Staying competitive in today’s world means staying current. Whether large or small, organizations need the ability to respond quickly to changing marketing conditions, business needs, security requirements, and more. And they can’t do that with a software development and deployment infrastructure that is slow to respond. At the same time, many organizations are adopting multiple cloud environments as well as edge use cases which create a more complex management requirement. This is making it harder than ever to streamline application development and deployment. Choices for software development, deployment, management, optimization and security tools have never been broader, and technology workers are dispersed across the globe. In short, modern operating patterns require teams to support an increasingly complex technology landscape across clouds – all of which ...

As we do every year, we’ve heard from folks around the software development industry who share their thoughts on which areas will thrive and which might not survive in 2025 and beyond. Here are some of their predictions for next year. Derek Holt, CEO of Digital.ai 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. SEI will have a breakout year in 2025 as more and more businesses realize they need to measure the end-to-end business process of software development and delivery in order to drive continuous improvement, truly deliver improved developer experiences and ultimately realize the potential gains for an AI-powered Software Development and Delivery capabilities. SEI is the key to each.      Emily Nakashima, VP of engineering at Honeycomb While the current AI hype shows no signs of slowing, so much of the focus in 2024 was on AI code authorship rather than co...

Attackers are increasingly targeting open source projects, seeking to exploit holes in software that millions of organizations rely on as the foundation of their technology stacks. The staggering 280% year-over-year increase in software supply chain attacks in 2023 serves as a stark warning: open source projects and their leadership must elevate security to their highest priority. Reported incidents targeting JavaScript, Java, .NET, Python, and other ecosystems reached 245,000 attacks in 2023 alone—more than double the total incidents from 2019 to 2022 combined. These attacks have grown not only in frequency but in sophistication. The Log4j vulnerability that emerged in March 2022 illustrates this evolution, demonstrating the complex and mature threats that open source projects must now defend against. Complacency creates risk While open source leaders largely recognize the importance of security, development pressures often push security concerns aside. Organizations need...

InstallAware Software, the technology leader in software installation, repackaging, and virtualization solutions for app developers and enterprises, today launched InstallAware X17. InstallAware X17 confers instant trust on packages it signs via its implementation of Azure Trusted Signing, which grants complete trust with purely electronic signing. This separates it from ordinary verification certificates, which are easy to obtain but require weeks to months of use before being trusted by Windows, and also unlike Extended Verification certificates, which do confer the benefit of instant trust but at the great inconvenience of physical dongle requirements (destroying build automation/cloud capabilities). InstallAware X17 also future-proofs its code signing process by implementing new Code Signing Hooks, so that any time the IDE would sign a binary, the hooks trigger and execute any number of custom command lines. This makes it a triviality to integrate with any present or future ven...

The software development landscape is undergoing a profound transformation as generative AI (GenAI) reshapes traditional coding practices. This technological revolution isn’t just changing how code is written—it’s fundamentally altering the skill set developers need to succeed in their careers. As development teams across the industry integrate GenAI into their workflows, a new paradigm is emerging that demands both enhanced technical expertise and stronger interpersonal skills. It’s an opportunity for senior management to rethink how teams are trained and structured to maximize productivity and code quality with AI and human coders working together.  The Shifting Nature of Development Work As GenAI takes on more routine coding tasks, developers are finding that, instead of simply writing code, their focus has shifted to three core responsibilities: translating business requirements into technical solutions, reviewing and validating AI-generated code, and collaborating on complex...

As 2024 comes to a close, SD Times is looking back at the top software development news stories of the year across the industry. Here are 10 of what we believe to be the biggest stories we covered throughout the year: Microsoft releases .NET 9 .NET 9 was released in November , adding a number of performance improvements and new functionality to support developers building with AI.  According to Microsoft, this release featured more than 1,000 performance updates, one of which was that the Server GC was altered to adapt to application memory requirements instead of the resources available in the environment. This change resulted in a 15% increase in requests per second compared to .NET 8 and a 93% reduction in memory usage, Microsoft claimed. .NET capabilities were also expanded for building AI into applications. For this release, Microsoft collaborated with Semantic Kernel to provide a set of C# abstractions for the .NET ecosystem for interacting with AI services. This will ma...

GitHub has announced a free tier of GitHub Copilot to expand the platform’s reach to more developers. “We couldn’t be more excited to make Copilot available to the 150M developers on GitHub,” Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, wrote in a post .  The free tier provides access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. It is integrated into VS Code and allows the developer to choose between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o model.  It provides access to many of the same features paid tiers have, such as debugging help, code explanations, the ability to turn comments into code, inline chat, commit message generation, and more. However, it doesn’t include some advanced features like the ability to attach a knowledge base to chat or set guidelines for code reviews, or many management, security, and governance features. The company also clarified that students, educators, and open source maintainers will still retain their free access to unlimited Co...

OpenAI announced several new capabilities for developers, including the availability of OpenAI o1 in the API and updates to the Realtime API. OpenAI o1 is the company’s reasoning model for complex multi-step tasks, and it has begun rolling out to developers on the API’s usage tier 5.  Some key capabilities enabled by o1 include function calling, structured outputs, the ability to specify instructions or context for the model to follow, vision capabilities, and a new ‘reasoning_effort’ API parameter that lets developers set how long the model thinks before answering.  The company claimed that OpenAI o1 also uses 60% fewer reasoning tokens on average, compared to o1-preview. According to OpenAI, the o1 snapshot being shipped today is a post-trained version of the version of o1 released in ChatGPT two weeks ago. This new snapshot improves on areas of model behavior based on feedback. This latest version is also now being added to ChatGPT.  Additionally, OpenAI made upd...

The AI coding assistant provider Tabnine today announced a new feature, Code Provenance and Attribution , to protect companies from unintentionally adding restrictively licensed code into their codebase when using generative AI to write code.  The new feature checks AI-generated code against public GitHub repositories to find matches, and flags the license type of the original code from GitHub.  According to Tabnine, this new feature will help software development teams understand if the code generated by AI models meets their standards and requirements.  “State-of-the-art LLMs like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o have greatly improved the performance of generative AI applications, including AI code assistants. However, these LLMs are trained on vast amounts of data collected from all corners of the internet, including code that may have restrictions on how it can be used, introducing the risk of IP infringement. Since the copyright law for the use of AI-generated conten...

Emotional intelligence (EI) has become one of the most sought-after soft skills in the IT industry, especially at the management level. The ability to understand and manage emotions — both one’s own and those of others — is critical in many areas of IT, from support services and user experience (UX) to cross-functional leadership and managing large teams. A manager lacking emotional intelligence can struggle to build effective relationships, which negatively impacts team dynamics, productivity, and overall project success. Especially nowadays, when AI can handle basic tasks, something still out of its reach is understanding, evaluating, and acting based on the human factor. EI is, therefore, one of the gold-standard skills every company needs to thrive. In this article, we will explore the significance of emotional intelligence in IT management, its direct impact on team performance, and the ways in which cultural differences shape emotional expression and communication within global...