How to transform your architecture review board
I recall my angst about my first visit to an architecture review board (ARB), where a team of enterprise architects reviewed plans for new systems and application architectures. My presentation was required to follow a template and be reviewed by the ...
Succeeding with observability in the cloud
In its 2024 report, Splunk breaks down observability practices into four stages: foundational visibility, guided insights, proactive response, and unified workflows. Based on that, it classifies companies into four stages of observability maturity: b...
F# 9 adds nullable reference types
F# 9, the latest version of Microsoft’s open source functional language, has been released with support for nullable reference types and empty-bodied computation expressions. Standard library improvements also are featured, including random sampling...
Akka distributed computing platform adds Java SDK
Akka, formerly known as Lightbend, has released Akka 3, an update to the JVM-based distributed computing platform that adds a Java SDK as well as serverless and “bring your own cloud” deployment options. Akka 3 and the company’s name change were...
14 great preprocessors for developers who love to code
As much as we love them, programming languages can often feel like straitjackets. They’re a complex bundle of syntactic rules, and if we break them–even once–the compiler starts screaming out error messages. There are conventions to define every...
Designing the APIs that accidentally power businesses
In the last decade, every web application developer has become an API designer. But most organizations do not think of developers as API designers, nor do they think about APIs as a product of design — to the detriment of their developers’ product...
Spin 3.0 supports polyglot development using Wasm components
Fermyon has released Spin 3.0, a major update to its open source developer tool for building serverless WebAssembly applications. The new release introduces polyglot programming to ease development. The update to Fermyon’s Spin framework was introdu...
The dirty little secret of open source contributions
“Nobody cares if you contribute.” That’s what a Postgres friend said to me during lunch at KubeCon when I suggested that hiring Postgres contributors could be a selling point for customers. His comment surprised me because for years I’ve belie...
Go language evolving for future hardware, AI workloads
The Go programming language having just turned 15 years old on November 10, proponents now are planning to adapt the Go language to large multicore systems, the latest vector and matrix hardware instructions, and the needs of AI workloads. In a blog p...
And the #1 Python IDE is . . .
This half-month in Python and elsewhere: Take a peek at seven libraries for parallel processing in Python, tour Python’s most popular ORM libraries, and check out our Flask 3.0 tutorial. Also, place your bets for which contender remains standing whe...
Strategies to navigate the pitfalls of cloud costs
In my line of work, I often hear CIOs and CFOs say, “Cloud providers are bleeding us dry.” As ever-increasing cloud bills roll in, they’re demanding answers about what they’re paying for and why they’re paying so much. Public cloud providers...
Rust Foundation moves forward on C++ and Rust interoperability
The Rust Foundation, which stewards development of the Rust language, has released a statement addressing challenges and opportunities for interoperability between Rust and C++, with the intent of making cross-language development more accessible and ...
JetBrains IDEs ease debugging for Kubernetes apps
JetBrains IDEs, with new 2024.3 edition releases, now provide a logical code structure view alongside the familiar physical code structure view in the Structure tool window. The updated IDEs also streamline debugging for Kubernetes applications and pr...
How to use DispatchProxy for AOP in .NET Core
Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) decomposes an application’s source code into distinct aspects that isolate the core business logic from cross-cutting concerns. With AOP, cross-cutting concerns like logging and authentication become “aspects” t...
Understanding Hyperlight, Microsoft’s minimal VM manager
Virtualization seemed to be one of those technologies that was done. With Hyper-V, VMware, and KVM all offering similar features and performance, all that was left to do was to support new chipset instructions and fix bugs. But slowly things began to ...
Docker tutorial: Get started with Docker volumes
Docker containers are meant to be immutable, meaning the code and data they hold never change. Immutability is useful when you want to be sure the code running in production is the same as the code that passed QA testing; it’s not so useful when you...
Kotlin for Java developers
After Java, Kotlin is the most popular JVM language. Kotlin is an expressive, concise language with strong functional programming support. It’s especially appealing to Java developers because it is fully interoperable with Java, and the syntax is a...
The Agile Manifesto was ahead of its time
Last week I went on a short rant about scrum, and how it isn’t agile and is, well, dumb. It occurred to me that one of the obstacles to truly being agile has been the limits of software technology. The way we had to build and deliver software didn...
Visual Studio 17.12 brings C++, Copilot enhancements
Visual Studio 2022 17.12, the latest version of Microsoft’s signature integrated development environment (IDE), is now generally available, with improvements ranging from productivity enhancements for C++ developers to integrated AI variable inspect...
