9 hacks for a better nightly build
In the beginning, there was no need to build anything. We manipulated the toggle switches on the front panel of a mainframe, and the code either ran or it didn’t. Creating software was very straightforward. Maybe not easy, but certainly uncomplicate...
When your cloud strategy is ‘it depends’
This past week I spent time with some IT executives at a Fortune 500 company. Despite years of big spending on AWS, the company made a commitment years ago to switch to Microsoft Azure. Today they’re still on AWS… and Azure… and private data cen...
3 common misconceptions around biometrics and authentication
Scared of flying but don’t think twice about a lengthy road trip? Consider this: NOVA reports that your odds of a fatal car crash are 1 in 5000, but the chance of perishing in a plane is just 1 in 11 million. Despite air travel being 2,200 times saf...
Oracle CloudWorld 2024: Conference news and insights
Oracle CloudWorld is one of the tech industry’s signature events. The event, known as Oracle OpenWorld until 2020, is a significant gathering for IT professionals, developers, and business leaders looking to explore the latest advancements in cloud ...
AWS hands OpenSearch to the Linux Foundation
Amazon Web Services is transferring its OpenSearch open-source project to the Linux Foundation, which has launched the OpenSearch Software Foundation to support the project and its search and analytics software. The announcement was made September 16....
Decoding OpenAI’s o1 family of large language models
OpenAI said its project Strawberry has graduated to a new family of large language models (LLMs) that the company has christened OpenAI o1. The new family of models, which also includes an o1-mini version for cost efficiency, according to the company,...
Life without Python’s ‘dead batteries’
This (half-)month in Python and elsewhere: Python’s “dead batteries” are about to be removed—and soon. Here’s how to live without them. Also, get started with Pillow for image processing, and find out how Python’s built-in enum module make...
New AI reporting regulations
The U.S. Commerce Department announced on Monday that it is proposing detailed reporting requirements for advanced developers of artificial intelligence and cloud computing providers. In an era when artificial intelligence and cloud computing are driv...
Life without Python’s ‘dead batteries’
This (half-)month in Python and elsewhere: Python’s “dead batteries” are about to be removed—and soon. Here’s how to live without them. Also, get started with Pillow for image processing, and find out how Python’s built-in enum module make...
What’s in the cards for MariaDB?
K1 Investment Management, the new owner of MariaDB, sent a strong hint about what its future plans for the company may entail with the appointment of Rohit de Souza as the organization’s new CEO. While he now has the challenge of overseeing product ...
JFrog Platform adds runtime security for containers
With the introduction of JFrog Runtime, JFrog has added a component to its software supply chain security and devsecops platform to help users secure container-based applications in production. Introduced September 10, JFrog Runtime integrates with JF...
Microsoft moves .NET 9 to release candidate stage
Microsoft’s .NET 9 software development framework has reached the release candidate stage with featured enhancements to the WebSocket APIs. Additionally, the .NET MAUI Visual Studio Code extension has an added capability to horizontally align text. ...
Kong API platform adds service catalog
API infrastructure platform provider Kong has updated its Kong Konnect API platform with the Konnect Service Catalog, a de facto system of record that enables greater visibility and stronger management of all APIs in a company’s IT infrastructure, t...
Using the Pinecone vector database in .NET
If you’re building generative AI applications, you need to control the data used to generate answers to user queries. Simply dropping ChatGPT into your platform isn’t going to work, especially if you’re using proprietary data that wasn’t part ...
Using PostgreSQL as a vector database in RAG
PostgreSQL with the pgvector extension allows tables to be used as storage for vectors, each of which is saved as a row. It also allows any number of metadata columns to be added. In an enterprise application, this hybrid capability of storing both ve...
Oracle CloudWorld 2024: Latest news and insights
Oracle CloudWorld, one of the tech industry’s signature events, began September 9th. The event, known as OpenWorld until 2020, is a significant gathering for IT professionals, developers, and business leaders looking to explore the latest advancem...
Exception handling in Java: The basics
If you’ve ever wanted to understand how failure is represented in source code, you’ve come to the right place. In addition to an overview of Java exceptions, this article gets you started with Java’s language features for throwing objects, tryin...
Node.js adds built-in API for on-disk caching
Node.js 22.8.0, the latest release of the event-driven JavaScript runtime, adds a JavaScript API to enable on-disk caching of all modules loaded after the API is called, presenting a caching option for code. The API is called module.enable.CompileCach...
File handling in server-side JavaScript
Working with files on the server is a perennial need for developers. Server-side JavaScript platforms like Node, Deno, and Bun offer a flexible and fairly simple approach to doing things with files. This article shows you how to use the fs library t...
TypeScript 5.6 now generally available
TypeScript 5.6, the latest version of Microsoft’s strongly typed JavaScript variant, is now available as a production release. The update features capabilities that include disallowing nullish and truthy checks on syntax that never varies on nullish...