Programming in the pandemic – Skymind: Thoughts from the AI ecosystem – ComputerWeekly.com

With only a proportion of developers classified as key workers (where their responsibilities perhaps included the operations-side of keeping mission-critical and life-critical systems up and online), the majority of programmers will have been forced to work remotely, often in solitude.

So how have the fallout effects of this played out?

This post is written by Paul Dubs, drawing on his 15+ years of experience as a software engineer. Based in Germany, he is responsible for heading up the software division of Skymind, an open source enterprise deep learning software company that cals itself a dedicated AI ecosystem builder.

Dubs writes as follows

We are building AI solutions for business use. This includes our open source products Deeplearning4J and Konduit Serving, as well as commercial products and professional services.

In many ways, things havent changed that much due to the pandemic. The company has always been a remote-first company. The team has consisted of people distributed over many different time zones. The biggest change has been that we cant come together as easily as we used to. Previously it was possible for key people to meet in-person at least once per quarter. Often, we met at conferences or for workshops.

In terms of what types of application development we think have actually flourished under the constraints of lockdown vs. what types of development have suffered things that are clearly defined. Where you know exactly what needs to be built and no communication or planning is needed, things can be done very well under lockdown conditions. When you can just set yourself as offline and work heads down until you are done.

But anything that benefits from a free communication flow is somewhat hindered: brainstorming and whiteboarding; planning and figuring out what to build in the first place.

Unfortunately, most of the online meeting solutions weve tried so far end up being a very distant second compared to an in-person meeting. The latency results in people starting to talk over each other; the noise reduction algorithms remove too much and make it hard to understand some people; sudden technical problems always result in lost time.

Dubs: tough times, but teamwork has still shined through.

Thinking about our staff numbers, headcount has grown quite a bit during the last year, despite the pandemic.

Training these people has been a challenge we have had to overcome. Whereas we could organise a workshop and come together previously, we now have to find different ways to share our knowledge. One of the ways we are doing it is through regular knowledge sharing sessions over Zoom. We record them, to allow people who were not able to attend to watch them at a later time, and make that learning more asynchronous in general.

Thinking about methods waterfall development as we know it has always been a strawman. Even the paper that introduced it, used it as an example of what not to do. So, I dont think that we as an industry are likely to fall back to it.Agile development methodologies have always been about being adaptable, about being able to deal with the uncertainties of business life. With uncertainties at an all-time high, it seems unlikely that anyone would consider moving away from agile methods. It makes sense, however, that the actual details change.

How that change looks obviously depends on the situation. For example, there is no point of a standup in the morning, if there is no morning that is consistent for all of the team members as we are working at different hours and time zone.s

A more asynchronous approach, where you have a kind of continuous standup in a Slack channel, for example, can work better in that case.

I have been working in a remote position for a few years now. When the pandemic hit, this meant that I was well prepared and essentially nothing about my day-to-day work had to change.

In contrast to many people who were used to going to an office building to do their work and now have to work from their bedroom, living room or kitchen, I had a properly set up home office already. More importantly, I was already used to working in an environment that is abundant with distractions.

For many people, it was the first time where they had to do the majority or all of their work from home and while they knew how to deal with distractions in their office environment, they werent equipped yet to deal with them at home. When you have to work from your kitchen, your mind might wander to what you will be cooking today or you start to suddenly notice all the little spots that may need a little bit of cleaning. When working from the living room, the TV may be a constant reminder that you might be also watching your favorite show right now.

It really is no moral failing of their own, as those activities are strongly associated with those rooms. For the brain, the work might as well be the distraction.Finding your own rhythm that will work in your home environment takes some time and practice.

For myself, Im following the same schedule as Ive used before the pandemic. I get up sometime between 6 and 7 in the morning, get a light workout in, revisit my plan for the day that Ive set up the evening before, and read a bit. Then I get some breakfast and get to work. Sometime around noon or early afternoon I have lunch and a short break and then get back to work. When Im done for the day, I sketch out a new plan for the next day. The plan helps to stay on track, or get back on track when something unexpected needs to be handled.

One particular thing that really helps me to stay focused, is to ignore all and any news until the evening. During interesting times, as we are currently experiencing, the trickling stream of news can heavily sap attention from the things that really matter.

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Programming in the pandemic - Skymind: Thoughts from the AI ecosystem - ComputerWeekly.com

14 free or affordable online courses to learn Python, offered by MIT, Harvard, UPenn, Google, and more – Business Insider

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It's no secret that coding-related jobs are on the riseand that careers in data science and software development are among the ones with the highest average job satisfaction, according to Glassdoor.

For that reason, you may have heard of Python, one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Its uses range from data analysis to AI and machine learning, and its code is used by companies like Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, Amazon, Instagram, Spotify, and many more.

Luckily, there are many online resources to get started in learning about Python, from relatively short, free introductions to months-long intensive (yet comparatively affordable) certificate programs. Many are offered by prestigious universities like MIT, Harvard, UPenn, and the University of Michigan, or by top companies like Google or IBM, giving online students access to lessons and projects that can help them work towards a future career in Python development.

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14 free or affordable online courses to learn Python, offered by MIT, Harvard, UPenn, Google, and more - Business Insider

Developer jobs: Googles Go, Redux.js, Google Cloud, and AWS skills will get you the most interviews – ZDNet

While many people will face tough prospects in 2021, software engineers remain in high demand even in areas that tech companies and employees are supposedly fleeing from, like San Francisco.

But while employees might want to leave expensive cities, employers are offering slightly more to attract talent in traditional tech hubs.

"Average salaries for top software engineering roles increased in all major tech hubs last year by 5% in the San Francisco Bay Area, 3% in New York, 7% in Toronto, and 6% in London respectively," Hired notes in a new report.

SEE: Hiring Kit: Python developer (TechRepublic Premium)

Hired notes that programmers who know Google's Go programming language, the Redux JavaScript library, Google Cloud, and AWS get more interview requests from employers.

Remote working under the pandemic, however, has had some impact on traditional tech hubs as more remote roles appear elsewhere.

For example, Denver, in Colorado accounted for 34% remote role offers, while roles in London and Toronto accounted for 6% and 9% of remote roles, respectively.

Hired's survey, covering 10,000 participating companies and 245,000 job seekers, was conducted with hiring platform Vettery.

"Demand for software engineers and their skill set continued to grow despite the massive economic downturn amid the pandemic and one of the most difficult job markets in US history," said Josh Brenner, Vettery's chief.

"As many companies will pick up their hiring efforts again this year, they will have to compete even more for top engineering talent."

The companies found that 83% of software engineers were after "new challenges and continuous learning", meaning that companies will need to cater to an appetite among developers for remote work and career development opportunities.

Developers across the board are in demand. People with backend and full stack knowledge accounted for 58% and 57% of interview requests, while frontend software engineers accounted for 30% of all interview requests.

SEE: Programming languages: Microsoft TypeScript leaps ahead of C#, PHP and C++ on GitHub

Software engineers who know about Redux.js, Google Cloud, AWS and React.js are in luck. Engineers proficient in Redux.js received almost three times more interview requests than the marketplace average, while candidates with Google Cloud, AWS and React.js skills received 2.7 times more interviews.

The companies found that developers with knowledge of Go and Scala got twice as many interview requests.

AWS is where the jobs are though. "AWS was requested 8 [times] more in job listings compared to Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure skills," Hired notes.

Developers who want a job also need to know Kubernetes and Docker, the predominant container technologies.

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Developer jobs: Googles Go, Redux.js, Google Cloud, and AWS skills will get you the most interviews - ZDNet

Google recommits to the Python ecosystem – SDTimes.com

Google has announced it is increasing its support for the Python Software Foundation (PSF). The company is now a Visionary Sponsor and will work to improve the language, ecosystem and community.

Python is critically important to both Google Cloud and our customers. It serves as a popular runtime for many of our hosted services, from the launch of App Engine more than a decade ago, to modern serverless products like Cloud Functions. We use the Python Package Index (PyPI) to distribute hundreds of client libraries and developer tools, including the popular open-source machine-learning library TensorFlow. And we use it internally as well, where it helps power many of our core products and services, Dustin Ingram, a senior developer advocate at Google, wrote in a blog post.

RELATED CONTENT:Python named TIOBEs programming language of 2020Moving from Python 2 to Python 3

As part of its new support, the company will donate more than $350,000 to support PSF projects and improve the supply-chain security. The investment will go towards: productionized malware detection for PyPl; improvements for Python tools and services; and a full-time CPython Developer-in-Residence to help prioritize maintenance and address the backlog of the CPython project, according to the company.

Additionally, the Google Cloud infrastructure in-kind donation has been recommitted to the PSF to support its critical infrastructure such as the Python Package Index. This will help support the critical infrastructure that the PSF operates, including the Python Package Index.

The company will also make the Google Cloud Public Datasets program home to the PyPI download statistics and PyPI project metadata, which will be updated in near-real-time.

Like so many Google Cloud customers, were big believers in Python. Supporting the PSF in this way will help ensure that the Python ecosystem has a strong and viable future for many years to come, Ingram wrote.

More information is available here.

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Google recommits to the Python ecosystem - SDTimes.com

Ruffle keeps classic flash games alive (and safer) with an open source emulator – Liliputing

The death of Adobe Flash was a long time coming. While the 25-year-old technology was instrumental in bringing animation, games, and interactive content to the web when it was still young, it was always sort of a security nightmare, with Adobe struggling to issue bug fixes faster than vulnerabilities were discovered and exploited.

But now that Adobe has finally pulled the plug on Flash, what happens to all the classic games and other content developed in Flash?

Some has been ported to newer web technologies like HTML5. Some live on in the Internet Archives Flash library. And theres BlueMaximas Flashpoint, a project to save more than 70,000 Flash games and 8,000 animation and bundle them with a Flashpoint Secure Player.

Now theres another option called ruffle. Its an open source Flash Play emulator thats designed to be more secure than Adobes product, while allowing you to run Flash games and animations on a wide range of devices.

Ruffle is written using the Rust programming language, which features built-in memory protection to help protect users from many of the vulnerabilities that affected Adobes Flash Player.

The Flash Player emulator is also cross-platform:

Ruffle is still under active development and a note on the projects github page describes it as in the proof of concept stage. But you can take it for a spin by visiting ruffle.rs/demo/ to play a couple of sample games and animations in your browser.

via Bleeping Computer

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

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Programming in the pandemic – Perforce: In open source, crowd is a positive – ComputerWeekly.com

The Computer Weekly Developer Network examines the impact of Covid-19 (Coronavirus) on the software application development community.

With only a proportion of developers classified as key workers (where their responsibilities perhaps included the operations-side of keeping mission-critical and life-critical systems up and online), the majority of programmers will have been forced to work remotely, often in solitude.

So how have the fallout effects of this played out?

This post comes from Justin Reock in his role as chief evangelist for open source software (OSS) & Application Programming Interface (API) management at Perforce Software.

Reock reflects upon the use of open source platforms, languages and related technologie in general in light of the Covid-19 global crisis and writes as follows

On the whole, I would argue that open source software has been invaluable during the pandemic.

Crowd-sourced software initiatives and hackathons, protein-folding peer-to-peer networks and foundation sponsorship have all been in play throughout the contagion and many of these initiatives continue forwards.

GitHub has shown us that commits held steady or even increased suggesting (if it is fair to measure that in terms of raw commits without considering quality) that developer productivity has held steady or even gone up.

For many developers, having a shared project and sense of community during a very isolating time for humanity has been uplifting and good for their spirits. Its a reminder that coding together is in fact a social activity, no different than any other collaborative and creative endeavour.

Perhaps the biggest impact and fallout from this whole period of experiences (for programmers, operations staff and the wider software engineering community) will be the acceleration of transformation and DevOps initiatives within businesses.

So many have witnessed the resilience of businesses that have already undergone the DevOps transition (and even watched their profits soar) as we moved to online ordering, contactless delivery and more.

The CI/CD part of the DevOps makeover has always been about dealing with constant change.The mantra of releases are hard, so release often embraces the notion that change is difficult, so organisations should make themselves really good at dealing with it. That meant when the pandemic hit, the seams of our global digital twin were tested. Companies that were capable of quickly refactoring to online experiences, digital goods and other conveniences have now become essential to carrying on a reasonable quality of life in the physical world.

It is one thing to expect the unexpected, and it is quite another to design systems that thrive in unexpected conditions.Whatever requisite effort may need to be invested to achieve DevOps maturity in an organisation, the positive impact it can have to business longevity is now indisputable.

However, especially in segments of the industry that are highly collaborative such as gaming, quality and deadlines have suffered drastically and development teams have blamed it squarely on moving to a remote work model.

NOTE: As a software change management specialist, Perforce has a particularly acute proximity with and close understanding of how games programmers work.

Even enabling employees to work from home was a challenge, as the hardware supply chain which we rely on to deliver our webcams, tablets, and laptops and other tech gear suffered major disruptions: so, all in all, there is no question that organisations, including open source communities, which had already taken steps towards transformation and remote work were able to continue operations smoothly, though not completely without impact.

That said, the overall industry picture is not all rosy, with many segments that rely heavily on peer collaboration taking a hit in quality and productivity.

We hope, of course, for brighter future times for all.

Reock: Commit to commit dear developers, you know you want to.

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Programming in the pandemic - Perforce: In open source, crowd is a positive - ComputerWeekly.com

Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation – Mozilla & Firefox

Today Mozilla is thrilled to join the Rust community in announcing the formation of the Rust Foundation. The Rust Foundation will be the home of the popular Rust programming language that began within Mozilla. Rust has long been bigger than just a Mozilla project and todays announcement is the culmination of many years of community building and collaboration. Mozilla is pleased to be a founding Platinum Sponsor of the Rust Foundation and looks forward to working with it to help Rust continue to grow and prosper.

Rust is an open-source programming language focused on safety, speed and concurrency. It started life as a side project in Mozilla Research. Back in 2010, Graydon Hoare presented work on something he hoped would become a slightly less annoying programming language that could deliver better memory safety and more concurrency. Within a few years, Rust had grown into a project with an independent governance structure and contributions from inside and outside Mozilla. In 2015, the Rust project announced the first stable release, Rust 1.0.

Success quickly followed. Rust is so popular that it has been voted the most most-loved programming language in Stack Overflows developer survey for five years in a row. Adoption is increasing as companies big and small, scientists, and many others discover its power and usability. Mozilla used Rust to build Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox (replacing approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust).

It takes a lot for a new programming language to be successful. Rusts growth is thanks to literally thousands of contributors and a strong culture of inclusion. The wide range of contributors and adopters has made Rust a better language for everyone.

Mozilla is proud of its role in Rusts creation and we are happy to see it outgrow its origins and secure a dedicated organization to support its continued evolution. Given its reach and impact, Rust will benefit from an organization that is 100% focused on the project.

The new Rust Foundation will have board representation from a wide set of stakeholders to help set a path to its own future. Other entities will be able to provide direct financial resources to Rust beyond in-kind contributions. The Rust Foundation will not replace the existing community and technical governance for Rust. Rather, it will be the organization that hosts Rust infrastructure, supports the community, and stewards the language for the benefit of all users.

Mozilla joins all Rustaceans in welcoming the new Rust Foundation.

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Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation - Mozilla & Firefox

Programming languages: This old favourite tops the charts again – ZDNet

C accounted for 16.34% of all searches that Tiobe tracks.

What's the top programing language? Is it JavaScript for the web? Or do data scientists rule the roost these days with Python? No. According to Swiss software house, Tiobe, the nearly 50-year old language C is the top language today.

C hails from Bell Labs and was created nearly 50 years ago, back in 1972, by American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie. He also co-created the Unix operating system.

As ZDNet noted when Ritchie died inin 2011, C is the "heart of programming as the quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity and portability." It's also a language that's close to the hardware, requires minimal memory, and doesn't necessitate a compiler for running on a processor.

SEE: Hiring Kit: Python developer (TechRepublic Premium)

C, a general purpose language, accounted for 16.34% of all searches that Tiobe tracks across search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu. C in February 2021 was ahead of Java, Python, C's descendant C++, and Microsoft's C#.

These days, engineers at Amazon, Microsoft and Google are interested in Rust, a language created at Firefox-maker Mozilla, which promises to help correct some of the memory-related security issues that come with C and C++ code.

Nonetheless, C is a mainstay of the top 10 languages and is relatively stable compared to other languages, according to Tiobe chief Paul Jansen.

"Some say that the IT industry is changing continuously. Every day a new IT buzzword pops up somewhere. But if we take a closer look at the top 8 of the TIOBE index, it appears to be unchanged for the last 7 years," he said.

That doesn't this mean that the programming language world hasn't changed, he points out.

"Of course it has changed. Except for language C, all programming languages in the top 8 are releasing new versions frequently. For instance C#, which releases a language update almost every year. Or JavaScript, which changes so fast that hardly anybody can follow. C++ is changing less frequently (once in 3 years), but its latest release contains the introduction of modules, which will cause a major shift in C++ programming," he said.

Jansen notes that the top 8 programming languages are stable, but positions 9 and 10 frequently change.

SEE: 5G and edge computing: How it will affect the enterprise in the next five years

Languages that have occupied these positions include database language SQL, low-level Assembly, statistical language R, Java-friendly Groovy, Google's systems programming language Go, and Apple's app development language Swift.

The only notable change in Tiobe's February 2021 index is that Java dropped out of first place compared to last year. Java accounted for 11.29% of searches and declined 6.07% compared to this month last year.

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Programming languages: This old favourite tops the charts again - ZDNet

The Rust programming language finds a new home in a nonprofit foundation – TechCrunch

Rust the programming language, not the survival game now has a new home: the Rust Foundation. AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla banded together to launch this new foundation today and put a two-year commitment to a million-dollar budget behind it. This budget will allow the project to develop services, programs, and events that will support the Rust project maintainers in building the best possible Rust.

Rust started as a side project inside of Mozilla to develop an alternative to C/C++. Designed by Mozilla Researchs Graydon Hore, with contributions from the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, Rust became the core language for some of the fundamental features of the Firefox browser and its Gecko engine, as well as Mozillas Servo engine. Today, Rust is the most-loved language among developers. But with Mozillas layoffs in recent months, many on the Rust team lost jobs and the future of the language became unclear without a main sponsor, though the project itself has thousands of contributors and a lot of corporate users, so the language itself wasnt going anywhere.

A large open-source project often needs some kind of guidance, which the new foundation will provide and it takes a legal entity to manage various aspects of the community, including the trademark, for example. The new Rust board will feature five board directors from the five founding members, as well as five directors from project leadership.

Mozilla incubatedRust to build a better Firefox and contribute to a better Internet, writes Bobby Holley, Mozilla andRust Foundation Board member, in a statement. In its new home with the Rust Foundation, Rustwill have the room to grow into its own success, while continuing to amplify some of the core values that Mozilla shares with theRustcommunity.

All of the corporate sponsors have a vested interest in Rust and are using it to build (and rebuild) core aspects of some of their stacks. Google recently said that it will fund a Rust-based project that aims to make the Apache webserver safer, for example, while Microsoft recently formed a Rust team, too, and is using the language to rewrite some core Windows APIs. AWS recently launched Bottlerocket, a new Linux distribution for containers that, for example, features a build system that was largely written in Rust.

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The Rust programming language finds a new home in a nonprofit foundation - TechCrunch

Tech giants come together to launch the Rust Foundation – TechRadar

Mozilla, the makers of the popular Firefox web browser, has banded together with some of the world's biggest tech giants to launch the Rust Foundation.

Spun around the increasingly popular open source programming language, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have created joined the non-profit foundation as its founding members.

Rust began just over a decade ago in 2010 as a Mozilla side project to enhance Firefox, and soon became a favorite with developers. In fact, the language has been voted as the most loved language in Stack Overflows Developer Survey for the past five years.

Mozilla incubated Rust to build a better Firefox and contribute to a better Internet. In its new home with the Rust Foundation, Rust will have the room to grow into its own success, while continuing to amplify some of the core values that Mozilla shares with the Rust community, remarked Mozillas Bobby Holley, who is one of the board members in the Rust Foundation.

While Rust originated at Mozilla, it is used by several companies, including Microsoft and AWS who financially support the languages development.

Rust has a vibrant community and has had its own governance model since 2015. Mozilla claims moving it to its own foundation is the next logical step in the evolution of the language.

Rust exists because of the efforts of countless people working together to make software better. At its core, the role of the Foundation is to empower and support those people to do their best work, says Holley.

According to the release, Mozilla has already transferred all trademark and infrastructure assets to the Rust Foundation.

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Tech giants come together to launch the Rust Foundation - TechRadar