Developer

Recruiting developers with the right skills remains the top challenge for 2023, according to a new survey of over 2,200 software developers and IT professionals carried out by Infragistics' Reveal.

While nearly all developers (88.8 percent) work with a designer or design team, nearly half of a developer's time (43.4 percent) is spent on coding an app, the survey finds. The lack of skilled developers is being solved by turning to low-code/no-code tools in three-quarters (76.8 percent) of organizations.

Free access to the Twitter API was meant to end yesterday, but the company has announced that there will be a brief stay of execution. Having already extended the cut-off by four days, Twitter now says that "we will be delaying the launch of our new API platform by a few more days".

The delay is blamed on "an immense amount of enthusiasm for the upcoming changes with Twitter API", but the lack of detail and clarity about what is happening is causing confusion and anger. Over the weekend, the company also contacted academic researchers to inform them that they will be losing free access to the API as well; it had previously been expected that such education and research-related usage would remain free.

Following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Mastodon has been the platform of choice for many of the people seeking to flee the blue bird platform, or just looking for a lifeboat in case Twitter finally sinks.

One of the strengths of Mastodon, but also one of its drawbacks, is its distributed, open source nature whereby people can stand up their own Mastodon servers. This means there's no central control, however, you need some technical expertise to create and run a server.

When Microsoft announced that it would release a single feature update per year for its new Windows 11 operating system, one could hear a sigh of relief from many system administrators and also Home users.

The previous strategy of releasing two feature updates per year backfired, as it put a lot of strain on Microsoft but also administrators and users. The gain was not worth talking about usually, as the first feature update of the year did not really include many new features or improvements.

Developers are under more pressure than ever to deliver projects quickly, but at the same time applications and the supply chain need to be kept secure.

So, what things can we expect to see for development in 2023? Here are some expert views on the key trends.

The demands of modern business IT environments can often lead to friction between developers and security teams which can hamper the successful rollout of cloud security.

Developers want to deliver features as fast as possible and security teams want things to be as secure as possible, so there is constant conflict of interest. We spoke to David Hendri, CTO and co-founder of cloud security startup Solvo, to discover how to rebuild the trust between developers and security by creating a common language.

One of the side effects of the pandemic has been a boost to digital transformation efforts. But in the rush to innovate businesses are struggling to find developer talent.

New research shows 72 percent of tech teams have a skills shortage with two million vacancies for tech jobs advertised between May 2021 and 2022 in the UK alone, and tech salaries almost 80 percent higher than those for non-IT roles.

A new study of 400 software engineering and operations professionals by continuous deployment specialist Armory shows that 80 percent rate ensuring reliable deployments as their top priority.

However, 59 percent say that overly complex deployment to multi-cloud environments is the top app development and deployment issue their engineering team needs to address.

Remote work is the new normal for developers, with 83 percent working remotely more than half of the time and 76 percent saying they've maintained or increased their frequency of working remotely in the last year.

This is one of the findings of the latest Jamstack Community Survey, from development platform Netlify, which aims to identify trends happening across the global web developer ecosystem built around Jamstack.

Developer-first security is the future in the cloud -- the responsibility for cloud security rests with developers and DevOps teams, not IT security.

In the days of the on-premise data center and early cloud adoption, the roles of application developers, infrastructure operations, and security were largely siloed. In the cloud, this division of labor increases the time-to-market for innovation, reduces productivity, and invites unnecessary risk.

Microsoft and Canonical have announced that the .NET development platform is available as a native experience on Ubuntu hosts and container images, starting in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

This means .NET developers will be able to start their Linux journey with Ubuntu and will benefit from timely security patches and new releases as the two companies work together to deliver them.

Kubernetes is one of the most widely used platforms for running containerized applications. Many businesses though still run their databases in a more traditional environment.

Of course there's no reason why you can't run a database in Kubernetes and there are many advantages to doing so. We spoke to Karthik Ranganathan, founder and CTO of cloud-native database specialist Yugabyte, to discuss the pros and cons.

Technical teams sometimes have difficulties getting along, as the scope of work across a project can be so diverse. In any profession, if a team member doesn’t understand the value of what their colleague brings to the group, this can cause conflict, so close and frequent communication is key.

Research from Harvard Business Review supports this philosophy, with high-performing teams reaching out to each other ten times per day, compared to an average of six. This shows how regular check-ins strengthen bonds within the group, which subsequently reduces errors and disagreements as everyone has a clear idea about each person’s role in the team.

Researchers at Sonatype have identified multiple malicious Python packages that contain ransomware scripts.

The packages are named after a legitimate, widely known library called 'Requests', with names like 'requesys', 'requesrs' and 'requesr', in order to trick developers into installing the wrong version.

As Kubernetes becomes increasingly widely adopted, monitoring these systems effectively becomes even more critical for businesses. But because Kubernetes is by nature ephemeral -- things can be created and destroyed quickly -- this represents a challenge.

As a Gartner report last year pointed out poor or manual monitoring procedures can introduce friction for developers and loss of visibility. To combat this problem, analytics platform Sumo Logic has unveiled a new process to deliver Kubernetes observability in just a few clicks.