Developer

Recent high-profile supply chain attacks such as SolarWinds have highlighted how vulnerable the software development pipeline can be.

To find out more about why the CI/CD pipeline is particularly vulnerable to attacks and what can be done to prevent them, we spoke to Vickie Li, developer evangelist at ShiftLeft, which has just launched a new product, ShiftLeft CORE, aimed at reducing risk to the software code base.

Developers waiting for news about the next installment of Visual Studio need wait no longer. Microsoft has announced that Visual Studio 2022 will be released later this summer as a public preview.

The company has also revealed that the software is going 64-bit, overcoming the limitations of the 32-bit edition. Microsoft says that the user experience will feel cleaner, more intelligent and action oriented, and that there is an increased cloud focus thanks to improved GitHub integration.

Digital transformation is sometimes seen as a panacea, providing visibility into the planning process, aligning software development with the business and delivering better outcomes.

But in a new study from Digital.ai more than half of businesses report issues providing that visibility and alignment, which calls into question long term success of today’s digital transformation initiatives.

Microsoft has launched a preview version of its own distribution of Java, making it available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The company has named the release Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, and describes it as its "new way to collaborate and contribute to the Java ecosystem".

The company has made available Microsoft Build of OpenJDK binaries for Java 11, which are based on OpenJDK source code. Microsoft says it is looking to broaden and deepen its support for Java, "one of the most important programming languages used today".

Organizations in virtually every industry rely on apps to provide a critical part of the customer experience. When those apps prove to be unstable, end users can be impacted in ways that cause considerable consternation. Last year, a variety of major organizations suffered significant app crashes that resulted in serious disruptions, lost revenue and hurt reputation. 

For example, London’s Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s busiest airports, experienced two simultaneous app failures that prevented departure boards from displaying accurate information and kept travelers from being able to check-in electronically, causing thousands of passengers to have their flight delayed or cancelled. Later on in 2020, bugs in Facebook’s Software Developer Kit (SDK) led iOS versions of Spotify, Pinterest, TikTok, Venmo, Tinder, Doordash and other notable apps to crash as soon as they were opened. Finally, popular eSports game Apex Legends encountered so many ongoing app crashes last Fall that a major tournament was ruined, with all matches but one having at least a single player disconnect.

Development teams are being prevented from deploying code more often, according to 84 percent of respondents to a new survey.

The research from code development platform Rollbar finds 25 percent say that they only deploy code into production every month or two. Nearly as many (22 percent) say they deploy every two weeks, while six percent deploy only twice yearly.

Enterprise operations leaders today are facing a challenge: Support the rapidly growing and evolving needs of the business without losing control of the complex infrastructure that is needed to do so.

In recent years, and especially in the accelerated digital transformation spurred on by the pandemic, it’s become common practice to increase productivity by siloing development, with multiple teams working autonomously to rapidly deploy code. In simpler times, in organizations running on a handful or applications, it was possible to operate according to a linear, predictable blueprint of development. The dev team was able to identify and de-bug code to keep their applications, and therefore the business, running smoothly. 

Developers are key to recovery from the pandemic according to 91 percent of UK businesses in a new survey, and 95 percent see them as crucial to digital transformation projects too.

But the study from cloud communications platform Twilio finds that the majority are not yet unlocking the full power of developers.

Developers are under increasing pressure to create real-time products that make the most of a wide range of digital resources.

This means that DevOps teams have to cope with information drawn from all sorts of different sources. But how can they ensure they are getting an accurate picture?

New research from code improvement platform Rollbar finds that fixing software bugs and errors is the top pain point for 44 percent of developers.

This is not helped by inadequate tools, with a large majority (88 percent) feeling that traditional error monitoring falls short of their expectations.

A survey of over 120 developers and IT leaders from Reveal shows a 41 percent increase in demand for business intelligence solutions last year and 38 percent seeing increased revenue as the tech market shifted.

But while many took advantage of opportunities, 50 percent reported having to make do with less in 2020. Of those, 23 percent saw projects canceled or postponed, with some respondents indicating lost funding (14 percent) and staff reductions (14 percent).

We've seen a tidal wave of developer-enabling technologies over the last ten years. From DevOps, to CI/CD, to containers and microservices -- all of these best practices and technology patterns aim to speed up the process of shipping code fast from the developer into production.

But while software has become increasingly easy to package and deploy, the process of diagnosing and fixing bugs in production has become much more difficult. When services crash in the middle of the night, developers still find themselves in the world of logs, hotfixes and desperation -- but now with much greater surface area to investigate as applications span distributed systems.

A new survey by O'Reilly Media and IBM reveals that developers are better off building open source cloud skills rather than focusing on skills related to a specific vendor's cloud.

The survey of almost 3,500 developers and technology managers finds that open source software is rated equal to or better than proprietary software by 94 percent of respondents. In addition when choosing cloud providers 70 percent of respondents prefer one based on open source.

The single most important driver of DevSecOps programs is improving the security, quality, and resilience of software, according to a new report. But insufficient automation in software development is the number one cause of delays in product releases.

The study from Security Compass shows bringing technology to market faster is the second most important driver, while cost reduction is the least important.

A new survey of over 9,500 developers, of whom 4,400 actively participate in open source, finds that 54 percent of respondents feel that individuals should be paid for their open source work.

In fact the study from developer cloud company DigitalOcean finds that only 14 percent of respondents are currently paid for their open source contributions.