Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride – InApps Technology 2022

A friend of mine is fond of the phrase “buy the ticket, take the ride.” They often use it in the way one might say “you made your bed, now you have to lie in it.” In other words, you did something and now you have to deal with the consequences. The former phrase is part of a quote from Hunter S. Thompson that continues by saying “…and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well… maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion.” Well, this week in programming, some people went and bought the ticket on Twitter, and now they’re taking the ride.

Lest it was unclear, @cmaxw was banned from KubeCon for making others feel unsafe on Twitter with tone policing and potentially other offenses — no public statement as to the reasoning has been issued by the Linux foundation. The Linux Foundation offered a quick summation of its code of conduct to those listening, before any other potential attendees might experience the ban hammer.

Speaking of codes of conduct, this week we also saw the release of the Contributor Covenant 2.0, which creator Coraline Ehmke says “shifts the focus from a project-based context to a community context” and “provides baseline enforcement guidelines from a community impact and consequence perspective.” Among the many adopters of the Contributor Covenant, GitHub notes that Git this last week also became an adopter in order to clearly layout which conduct is acceptable and which is not.

“By adopting a code of conduct, the Git project is making it clear which behaviors it encourages and which it won’t tolerate. New contributors are able to see explicitly what the project’s values are, and they can put their trust in Git’s choice of using the well-trusted and widely adopted Contributor Covenant. This code of conduct is enforced by the project’s leadership, who will handle any case in which an individual does not adhere to the guidelines.”

Here’s to inclusivity, safe spaces, and hopefully some “forced consciousness expansion” to those in need, but if nothing else… here’s to inclusivity and safe spaces. And now, on to some news from this last week in programming.

This Week in Programming

• GitHub Delivers Its “State of the Octoverse”: That’s right, it’s that time of year again — a time to dispute numbers, express disbelief in data, and otherwise pore over GitHub’s 2019 State of the Octoverse. According to the blog post highlights, there are more than 40 million people building together on GitHub worldwide, collaborating across time zones, using open source software, and being supremely connected, with more than 44 million repositories created in the last year. A few other numbers offered in the realm of tooting its own horn include 7.6 million vulnerability alerts remediated and more than 209,000 pull requests merged with automated updates by Dependabot. For the curious, GitHub qualifies this 40 million developer stat as “the total number of non-spammy user accounts on GitHub as of Sept. 30, 2019, regardless of their activity status.” Of course, outside of these numbers, there’s also all the goods on what programming languages are more popular than others, with the eye-catching headline being that Python has outpaced Java for the first time, although JavaScript still reigns supreme. Go ahead, click through and get lost in the data and the pretty visualizations.

• GitHub Actions Get Self-Hosted Runners: In what GitHub says is “one of the most eagerly anticipated updates,” the site now offers self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions, which, as the name implies, allows you to host your own runners and customize the environment used to run jobs in your GitHub Actions workflows. Some benefits of this new feature, which is available in beta, include the ability to use your own hardware, environment, tools, configuration, security, and networking — basically, any variable that you want to control by hosting yourself, you can enjoy.

• Quarkus Reaches 1.0: Red Hat’s Quarkus, the Kubernetes-native Java stack tailored for OpenJDK HotSpot and GraalVM, this week reached version 1.0, with a release candidate now available and a final version on its way shortly. Since Quarkus first appeared last March, Quarkus has seen 30 releases over 36 weeks from 177 contributors. According to the blog post, some recent updates to Quarkus leading up to 1.0 include a core networking model that supports both reactive and imperative programming models, a new security layer that embraces a reactive approach, Spring API compatibility, and a Quarkus ecosystem of extensions.
• Visual Studio Goes Online: Meanwhile, Microsoft held its Ignite conference this past week, and one of the more potentially interesting announcements for developers was that of the Visual Studio Online Public Preview, which basically bundles the IDE with an Azure-hosted developer environment, making onboarding much quicker and allowing developers top run big, memory-intensive applications immediately in the cloud. As stated, Visual Studio Online is currently in public preview, and gives developers the choice of three different IDEs: Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio IDE (in private preview), or the included browser-based editor. As a Chromebook user myself, this is one part that particularly appeals to my sensibilities: “Gone are the days of lugging around heavy dev machines on the road or to a coffee shop. Instead, travel light knowing you’ve got the full computing power of Azure, just a new browser tab away.”
• Ready to Run Serverless: Microsoft also unveiled its serverless for the enterprise offering, which it says provides “serverless functions with no cold start and network isolation, PowerShell support for event-driven automation, simplified secrets management across serverless apps, unified monitoring capabilities, and increased language support — including .NET Core 3 and Python 3.7!” This all comes with the general availability of the Azure Functions Premium plan, which Microsoft says provides “the best of both serverless and dedicated hosting.”

• And Machine Learning: Not to leave any prominent buzzword behind, Microsoft also unveiled a number of new features for Azure Machine Learning, including a new studio web experience — with authoring options from no-code drag-and-drop and automated machine learning to code-first development — support for R, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Open Datasets, ONNX, and others, and new security and governance features including role-based access control (RBAC), Azure Virtual Network (VNet), capacity management, and AI interpretability and fairness capabilities.
• Python Picks Up the Pace: Python developers get ready, the changes to your favorite language are about to come a bit more often, as Python is switching to an annual release cycle. According to an article over at JaxEnter, “Python BDFL and steering council member Brett Cannon has announced the acceptance of PEP 602, and thereby the move to a faster annual release cycle for major language versions.” The faster cycle will mean we could see Python 3.9 as soon as Oct. 5, 2020, despite being originally scheduled to arrive in April 2021 — the date set by the current 18-month release cycle. Python scheduling aside, JetBrains is also running its super-brief annual Python developer survey, so head on over if you want to be heard.

The Linux Foundation is a sponsor of InApps Technology.

List of Keywords users find our article on Google: