Skip to main content

Posts

Data is the new petroleum; companies need better pipelines — and better oil-spill clean-up methods

Data powers the 21st-century economy in the same way that petroleum did last century — but there’s one key difference, today the producers and users of this vital resource are one and the same. These days, every organization is pumping out data by the barrel and investing mightily in ways to refine and use it to fuel business momentum. But often, companies fail to fully protect data as the key resource it is, despite its critical role in day-to-day operations. Data disruptions, much like an oil spill, can halt business in its tracks. While enterprises are spending billions of dollars to try to keep bad actors from compromising their networks, what happens when the hackers inevitably infiltrate the IT environment?   Without the right systems in place to back up and restore proprietary information, the big investments that companies are making in advanced analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence are at risk. If data is the 21st-century oil, businesses need better sto...

Mirantis Launches Open Source Project for Platform Engineering that Accelerates Innovation for Modern Distributed Workloads

Mirantis , providing organizations with total control over their strategic infrastructure using open-source software, today launched  k0rdent , the first open-source Distributed Container Management Environment (DCME) that provides a single control point for cloud native applications – on-premises, on public clouds, at the edge – on any infrastructure, anywhere. By managing Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure, k0rdent makes it easy for platform engineers to create customized internal developer platforms (IDPs). The k0rdent architecture is composable so that platform engineers can easily customize it to their specific requirements, and standardized deployment templates are provided to speed implementations. “Organizations everywhere are experiencing the need to increase developer velocity and reduce time-to-market, while simplifying operations and managing compliance risks – but at the same time have to deal with managing ever-increasing Kubernetes sprawl,” said Randy Bias v...

4 key skills that make software engineering leaders more effective

In the digital age, software engineering leaders are pivotal in driving business priorities forward. Yet, the role is fraught with challenges, as leaders juggle numerous responsibilities, often finding themselves mired in tactical tasks at the expense of strategic initiatives. A recent Gartner survey sheds light on this issue, revealing that only 7% excel across all three of their core responsibilities: leading high-performing teams , delivering impactful solutions, and driving business value. To navigate these challenges and enhance their effectiveness, software engineering leaders should focus on four strategic actions: understanding stakeholder needs, communicating in business language, maintaining a forward-looking roadmap, and holding teams accountable for business outcomes. Understanding Stakeholder Needs Building trust and fostering collaboration with stakeholders are crucial for software engineering leaders. By regularly engaging with stakeholders, leaders can align s...

Podcast: From “shift left” to “shift everywhere”

For years developers have been told to shift left, meaning that testing happens at the start of the software development process. The idea behind this is that it’s easier and more cost effective to find and fix an issue earlier on in an application’s life cycle. However, Dylan Thomas, senior director of product engineering at OpenText Cybersecurity, believes that companies should be moving to a “shift everywhere” approach where testing doesn’t just happen at the beginning or the end, but is rather a continuous process.  “In 2025, DevSecOps will continue evolving beyond the ‘shift-left’ paradigm, embracing a more mature ‘shift everywhere’ approach. This shift calls on organizations to apply the right tools at the right stages of the DevSecOps cycle, improving efficiency and effectiveness in security practices,” he predicted at the end of last year.  Thomas was interviewed on the most recent episode of our podcast, What the Dev?, to talk more about this concept of shift eve...

Code.org and Amazon launch new curriculum to teach AI skills to kids in grades 8-12

Code.org and Amazon have announced the launch of a new curriculum for grades 8-12 to teach AI coding skills to kids. Code.org is a learning platform for computer science that is used in many schools, and it has been partnering with Amazon on various educational initiatives for a decade. According to Code.org, this new program, Exploring Generative AI , will teach how AI works, how to create with it, and the ethical implications of an AI-driven world.  Specifically, students will learn the internal structure of generative AI models by studying their input, storage, process, and output. They’ll learn how models represent language, the impact of training data on model performance, and the potential for bias. Students will then use this knowledge to design chatbots for personally relevant issues or creative tasks, construct guidance on appropriate AI usage, and develop a chatbot to address an issue in their community.  “Our mission at Code.org is to ensure every student has ...

WaveMaker releases AutoCode plugin for Figma for generating front-end components

The web and mobile development company WaveMaker today announced the launch of WaveMaker AutoCode , which is an AI-powered plugin for Figma that creates “pixel-perfect front-end components with lightning fast accuracy,” according to the company.  Figma is a collaborative design platform that brings together design and development teams into a single space. WaveMaker AutoCode works out-of-the-box for Figma designs using Material 3, and it can also be altered to work with client-proprietary design systems.  It automatically identifies design elements in Figma such as forms, lists, and cards, and maps them to corresponding WaveMaker Studio widgets. WaveMaker AutoCode supports Figma variables, modes, and design tokens, which the company explained helps maintain the integrity of the original design throughout the development process. The generated code can also be customized with JavaScript code that adds business logic, helping make the handoff to the frontend engineering t...

OpenAI announces “deep research” agent that can complete online research

OpenAI has just announced a new AI agent that can synthesize large amounts of information online to complete multi-step research projects.  “Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently—you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post .  According to the company, deep research is powered by a version of the o3 model optimized for browsing the web and analyzing data. It utilizes reasoning capabilities to search, interpret, and analyze text, images, and PDFs found on the internet. The agent can also change course as it reacts to the information it finds.  Each of its outputs is fully documented with citations and a summary of how the AI came to its conclusion, which allows the user to easily verify the results.  It can take between 5 to 30 minutes to complete research, depending on the compl...

10 development tools that have recently added new AI capabilities

Software companies are constantly trying to add more and more AI features to their platforms, and it can be hard to keep up with it all. We’ve written this roundup to share updates from 10 notable companies that have recently enhanced their products with AI.  Amazon Q Developer agent gets an update The agent now can build and test code in real time, and will validate its changes before sending it to the developer for review.  For example, a developer could request it to add a checkout feature to an e-commerce platform and the agent will analyze the existing codebase and then make code changes and perform tests within minutes.   Read more about the updates here .  DeepSeek R1 is now available on Azure AI Foundry Microsoft has announced that DeepSeek R1 is now available through Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, enabling developers to experiment with it while using Microsoft’s built-in model evaluation tools to compare outputs and benchmark performance. Microsof...

Forrester: Finding AI talent is challenging

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 ...

DeepSeek R1 is now available on Azure AI Foundry

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,...

YugabyteDB 2.25 offers compatibility with PostgreSQL 15

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...

The best ways to deal with flaky tests

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...

Report: 88% of companies are contemplating leaving Oracle Java

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...

Survey: Organizations looking to AI to enhance value stream efforts

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...