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1Password focuses on code security

According to 1Password, the new features, including the CI/CD integrations and 1Password Shell Plugins, offer developers the opportunity to secure their code by managing keys, credentials, and secrets as projects move from one environment to another.

With 1Password Shell Plugins, developers are enabled to sign into any CLI with a fingerprint, by keeping their API access keys in 1Password. This works to allow users to sync credentials in encrypted vaults across devices and eliminates the need to store plaintext keys on disks.

Additionally, 1Password’s CI/CD integrations help developers secure secrets and allow them access to them directly within CI/CD environments with pre-built integrations for CircleCI, GitHub Actions, and Jenkins.

Lastly, Git Commit Signing enables developers to sign their Git commits as well as receive a “verified” badge on GitHub and GitLab through SSH keys that are integrated, configured, and stored in 1Password.

Meta unveils PyTorch 2.0

According to Meta, PyTorch 2.0 is the initial step towards the next-gen 2-series release of PyTorch.

This release is intended to improve performance speed as well as add support for Dynamic Shapes and Distributed while still maintaining the same eager-mode development and user experience.

PyTorch 2.0 also introduces `torch.compile ` , a new capability that improves PyTorch performance and starts the move for parts of PyTorch from C++ back into Python.

Google: AlloyDB for PostgreSQL now is GA

The solution is a fully managed, PostgreSQL-compatible database service that enables organizations to modernize database workloads. The preview was announced earlier this year at Google Cloud I/O.

According to the company, when compared with standard PostgreSQL, AlloyDB was faster for both transactional workloads and analytical queries. In addition, it was also faster than Amazon’s comparable service for transactional workloads.

“Developers have many choices for building, innovating and migrating their applications. AlloyDB provides us with a compelling relational database option with full PostgreSQL compatibility, great performance, availability and cloud integration. We are really excited to co-innovate with Google and can now benefit from enterprise grade features while cost-effectively modernizing from legacy, proprietary databases, ” said Bala Natarajan, senior director of data Infrastructure and cloud engineering at PayPal.

Drupal 10 improves authoring experience

Drupal 10 debuts the new Claro administration theme, which replaces the Seven theme, and the Olivero default front-end theme, which replaces the Bartik theme.

Claro was part of Drupal’s Admin UI & JavaScript Modernisation project, which aimed to re-imagine the content authoring and site administration experience of Drupal.

Olivero includes modern design elements and support for commonly used Drupal features like second-level navigation, embedded media, and layout builder.

Drupal 10 also introduces CKEditor 5, which includes an improved authoring experience and more modern editing capabilities.

Other updates include replacement of some jQuery components with modern JavaScript components, Theme Starterkit tools for bespoke theme creation, and replacement of Symfony 4 with Symfony 6.

There are also two indevelopment features that will be added to Drupal 10 as contributed modules when they are ready. These include Automatic Updates and Project Browser.

Automatic Updates applies patches to Drupal core in a sandboxed version of your website, which enables developers to keep their site running until deployment time. This allows them to detect and report problems at every stage of the deployment process, rather than having to wait until an update is live to discover problems.

Project Browser is a repository for modules and themes that enables developers to easily add them to their sites.

Linux Foundation launches RISC-V certification exam

The certification is being offered in collaboration with RISC-V International, the global open hardware standards organization.

According to the companies, this release is designed to test functional knowledge of the RISC-V instruction set architecture.

The RVFA exam is intended for anyone pursuing a career as an embedded systems engineer, RTL design engineer, design verification engineer, software developer, or documentation engineer.

Additionally, interested candidates should already have a knowledge of git, advanced programming languages, debuggers like GDB, and system architecture (ISA).

Snyk gets $196.5M Series G investment

The round was led by Qatar Investment Authority with participation from new investors Evolution Equity Partners, G Squared, and Irving Investors as well as existing investors boldstart ventures, Sands Capital, and Tiger Global.

According to the company, this comes after a year of rapid customer adoption for Snyk, with over 2,300 users who have fixed more than 5.2 million vulnerabilities over the last year.

Snyk has also released successful cross-portfolio deployments, with over 70% of users

currently leveraging Snyk’s Developer Security platform. Snyk believes that this reveals an increase in the desire to shift from legacy approaches and the hardships of managing several security vendors.

JetBrains previews Qodana Cloud

Qodana Cloud is a cloudbased extension of the code quality platform Qodana.

According to the company, Qodana Cloud collects data from Qodana linters and gathers them in a single place, which allows developers to dive deeper into particular issues.

JetBrains explained that having to switch between linters can slow down the code review process, so Qodana Cloud will eliminate some of that friction.

Teams can use the new solution to discover trends and patterns in code across all projects, which will give them a more complete understanding of how their projects and teams are performing.

The platform offers the ability to create separate organizations, teams, and projects, and assign a single team to several projects.

Each project also displays the history of previous checks, which allows you to compare quality checks across commits.

Similar to Qodana, users can open issues right from the IDE, enabling them to fix server-side errors from the editor, the company explained.

Future releases will add role-based access control to enable teams to create permissions based on what a user needs to complete their job. They are also working to add additional security controls and enable quick fixes for certain issue types.

Ease of use key in Apache Cassandra 4.1

The 4.1 release is the first version that follows the new yearly release cycle that was implemented last year. The release will be supported for three years. Apache Cassandra is a distributed NoSQL database, and is an opensource project under the Apache Software Foundation.

Ecosystem improvements in Apache Cassandra 4.1 include a new Memtable API that provides pluggable persistent memory, improved Lightweight Transaction performance via Paxos v2, pluggable external schema manager services, and pluggable SSLContext creation.

According to a blog post, the Paxos optimizations improve latency and halve the number of round trips needed to achieve consensus. It also guarantees linearizability across range movements that are similar to what would be expected from a database with strong consistency.

“Apache Cassandra is open source technology at its best. It exceeds our database performance goals and is a critical database we are using for providing a seamless streaming experience to our customers worldwide, ” said Vinay Chella, Senior Engineering Leader at Netflix.

Updates pertinent to Cassandra Query Language (CQL) developer include the ability to group by time range, the ability to use CONTAINS and CONTAINS KEY conditions in conditional updates, and the ability to use IF EXISTS and IF NOT EXISTS in ALTER statements.

Cassandra operators can look forward to updates like configurable system level guardrails, a partition denylisting tool, improved syntax to cassandra.yaml, new systems tables, the ability to monitor top partitions by size, and improvements to nodetool, backup and restore.

CompTIA introduces Job Posting Optimizer

The Optimizer will help employers expand their pipelines and seek out overlooked or untapped talent.

The free, web-based platform offers a range of tech job templates and data tools intended to optimize postings for skills, qualifications, and inclusivity oriented to the U.S. labor market.

According to the company, of the over 500,000 job postings for entry-level tech positions in 2022, 57% of employers limited their search to candidates with a four-year degree or higher.

Additionally, for employers looking to fill entry-level cybersecurity roles the number one listed industry-recognized certification is a managerial-level credential that requires advanced experience.

GitLab launches beta of new Web IDE

According to GitLab, this new Web IDE is more user-friendly and efficient. It combines VS Code’s core features along with heightened performance and the ability to securely connect to a remote development environment straight from the Web IDE.

For self-managed users, the Beta version will be available as a part of the GitLab 15.7 release, which is coming on December 22, 2022. It will be behind a feature flag that can be enabled by administrators on an instance-level. z

People on the move

n GitHub has announced that Inbal Shani has been appointed as its Chief Product Officer. Before joining GitHub she was a general manager at AWS in their ECS service. She has also held leadership roles at Microsoft and TomTom.

n The mobile testing company Kobiton announced the appointment of Sean Barry to the role of CEO. He was previously the COO of Rent, which was a company owned by real estate company Redfin. Before that he worked at Updater, Bridgevine, and Allconnect.

n Dan Isaacs has been announced as Chief Strategy Officer at the Object Management Group (OMG). He is also general manager and CTO for the Digital Twin Consortium, which is oart of OMG. He will continue his work there. As Chief Strategy Officer, Isaacs will develop a strategy for unifying OMG’s consortia and expanding the global ecosystem.

n Dr. Jisheng Wang is joining API security and observability company Traceable as Head of Artificial Intelligene and Machine Learning and VP of Engineering. He was previously the senior director of engineering at Juniper Networks, where he led R&D for the networking AIOps solution Marvis.

2022 saw business and technology come together under the banner of value stream management, more uptake in microservices and other cloud-native technologies, and a greater emphasis on software quality and security.

What will 2023 bring? These industry experts share their thoughts.

Nick Durkin, Field CTO, Harness Measuring developer effectiveness in 2023

In 2023, we will see a major shift in how businesses measure the effectiveness of developers’ work. I believe that companies will start analyzing developer activities and outputs, similar to how sales teams are evaluated, and that an element of gamification may come into play as well. With businesses now able to access critical tools that measure employee performance across departments, developer teams will be able to showcase the invaluable work they are doing, and how they are achieving those outcomes. I think this will be a positive shift in the way businesses run their tasks and teams because it will advocate for the most critical facets of the company, like engineering and development.

Rob Zuber, CTO, CircleCI Software teams that embrace failure in 2023 will

come out on top. My biggest piece of advice for other leaders is to create a culture that embraces failures. The richest information about how an organization can be improved comes when things go wrong. For software engineering teams especially, having a blameless culture builds the trust teams need to solve problems quickly and avoids time wasted worrying about the perceptions of others.

Alexander Lovell, Head of Product, Fivetran Data teams: Put up or shut up

2023 will be put up or shut up time for data teams. Companies have maintained investment in IT despite wide variance in the quality of returns. With widespread confusion in the economy, it is time for data teams to shine by providing actionable insight because executive intuition is less reliable when markets are in flux. The best data teams will grow and become more central in importance. Data teams that do not generate actionable insight will see increased budget pressure.

Steve Wood, SVP of Product, Platform, Slack Low code as we know it is dead.

As the nature of low-code apps continues to evolve, the lines between the consumer (what we think of as the user) and the producer (typically the builder) will become increasingly blurred, and the actual “building” of an app will increasingly merge with the “using” of an app. With that, as we enter 2023, we’re seeing a more focused phase of low-code apps — one that’s template, solution, and outcome driven. In the year ahead, we’ll see the next phase of low code become hyper-focused on identifying actual business use cases and giving users the tools to act on them by simply using these apps and without having to build at all. Low-code platforms will have to know, or be able to predict, what the most common use cases are and provide customers with a ready-made solution.

Tal Lev-Ami, CTO and co-founder, Cloudinary The adoption of new video and

image codecs. Developers must choose wisely when it comes to image formats–the wrong format could allow immersive experiences to sink a site’s load time and reliability. JPG is no longer king– major improvements have been made to compress assets more effectively while offering more features that will optimize the web experience. WebP adoption has grown since 2019 and is on track to overtake PNG as the second most frequently used format. JPEG XL is roughly 60% more efficient than JPEG. In March 2022, the JPEG XL specification was published as an ISO standard.

Haoyuan Li, Founder and CEO, Alluxio More large-scale analytics and AI workloads will be containerized

In the cloud-native era, Kubernetes has become the de facto standard, with a variety of commercial platforms available on the market. Organizations are increasingly deploying large-scale analytics and AI workloads in containerized environments. While containers provide many benefits, the transition to containers is very complex. As a result, in 2023 the main bottleneck to container adoption will be the shortage of talent with the necessary skill set for tools like Kubernetes.

Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience, SIOS Technology Site Reliability Engineering Increases Need for High Availability for Critical Applications

With large organizations now managing many hundreds of servers and cloud VMs, all requiring increased availability, means that incorporating HA into Site Reliability Engineering principles will become a standard part of DevOps projects. Using SRE, DevOps teams will standardize on HA tools that are capable of decreasing complexity, increase availability and reliability, and automate application aware failovers. The vendors who have products that support multiple OS versions, clouds, applications, and databases will be baked into vendor best practices.

Chris Gladwin, CEO, and Co-founder of Ocient Hyperscale Will Become Mainstream

Data-intensive businesses are moving beyond big data into the realm of hyperscale data, which is exponentially greater. And that requires a reevaluation of data infrastructure. In 2023, data warehouse vendors will develop new ways to build and expand systems and services.

It’s not just the overall volume of data that technologists must plan for, but also the burgeoning data sets and workloads to be processed. Some leading-edge IT organizations are now working with data sets that comprise billions and trillions of records. In 2023, we could even see data sets of a quadrillion rows in data-intensive industries such as adtech, telecommunications, and geospatial.

Gabriel Aguiar Noury, Robotics Product Manager, Canonical The rise of social robots

In 2023, social robots will be back. Late in 2022, we saw companies like Sony unveiling robots like Poiq. This set the stage for a new wave of social robots. Powered by natural language generation models like GPT3, robots can create new dialogue systems. This will improve the robot’s interactivity with humans, allowing robots to answer any question. Social robots will also build narratives and rich personalities, making interaction with users more meaningful. GPT-3 also powers Dall-E, an image generator. But, this is not only about the novelty effect. Dall-E will keep pushing research to help robots define their behaviour based on their surroundings. As image detection and context generation merge, robotics scene awareness and social intelligence will take a new leap. By generating a detailed textual description of an image, robots will soon be able to understand the room they are in or what people are doing. This is another step towards real autonomy.

Prateek Kapadia, Chief Technology Officer at Flytxt An emergence of low-code CX

The past few years have highlighted the need for enterprises to pivot to meet the ever-shifting landscape of customer needs efficiently. Next year, we’ll see an increase in user-friendly, low-code processes and systems to create a seamless customer experience across a myriad of touchpoints and systems. Vendors will embrace Industry-standard APIs to allow enterprises to integrate their CX ecosystem connecting internal and external systems painlessly. continued on page 8 >

Rukmini Reddy, SVP of Engineering, Platform, Slack DevOps teams will need to get creative

As we head into 2023, which is increasingly likely to be defined by the effects of an economic downturn, DevOps teams will need to get creative and do more with less. There will be a focus on maximizing the ROI of professional developers, who are some of the most expensive assets for businesses. It will be imperative to ensure the developer experience is as seamless as possible, minimizing the amount of time spent switching between multiple, disparate — and sometimes inefficient — tools. With focus shifting to developer productivity, I expect tightening purse strings to act as a catalyst for teams to adopt more efficient practices when it comes to developing and shipping code. We’ll see more reliance on tools like software development kits and pre-baked code that can be reused and repurposed to slash cycle times and deliver secure, impactful code as quickly as possible.

Brian Anderson, CEO, Nacelle Headless commerce becomes the go-to

After years of gaining traction among early adopters, in the coming years, headless will truly become the norm. According to a Salesforce Commerce Cloud survey, 80% of all online merchants are either already — or plan to be — headless over the next two years. Headless commerce offers a competitive advantage to those who embrace it. Specifically, merchants who are headless see increases in conversion rates, average order values, engineering productivity, and website change velocity. When one competitor in a vertical goes headless, a technology adoption race occurs as others scramble to upgrade and keep pace.

Headless implementation in isolation will be deemed foolish so in 2023, top merchants will look at headless within the context of their broader company vision and technology strategy.

Sune Engsig, VP of Product Development at Leapwork

Test automation has struggled to capture a user interface element — a button, an input field, or a cell in a complicated table — and find it again later even when things change. It’s why UI test automation is often referred to as 'fragile. ' 2023 will get closer to training ML to predict what to use as reference points and how to build recipes to find any type of UI elements, based on content and structure.

Dean Hager, CEO, Jamf Education technology can help students beyond remote learning.

Historically, some teachers viewed technology as disruptive in the classroom. During the pandemic, technology was needed to keep classes in session. As it turns out, the need to deploy technology that supports distance learning has had an impact that will change the classroom forever. Many technology-resisting teachers now realize that technology doesn’t disrupt the classroom. If deployed effectively, it enhances both teaching and learning.

Danny Sandwell, Senior Solutions Strategist, Quest New data sovereignty laws will spur businesses to make data more visible and inter-

operable. We expect to see businesses take a more proactive role in creating their own data governance policies amid the current wave of regulatory action. The current global patchwork of data sovereignty and privacy laws has made it more complicated than ever for businesses to create consistent policies on data sharing, integration and compliance. This will continue to have a significant impact on organizations’ ability to maximize the use of data across their IT infrastructure, unless they put together clear plans for data integration and governance. In 2023, the passing of more data sovereignty and sharing laws will spur businesses to invest in getting visibility into their data and creating clear plans for sharing and integration across their IT landscape.

Zohar Bronfman, co-founder and CEO of Pecan AI Customer retention will be the primary focus for business leaders in 2023

They will double down on their efforts to engage their customer base more deeply. Whether they’re seeking to increase retention, grow their share of wallet, or win back customers, leaders know that these customers are their greatest asset, especially during challenging economic times. And, importantly, they already have all the customer data they need to help understand and predict what they’re likely to do, fueling their ability to personalize offers and outreach. That knowledge of future customer behavior will drive successful retention strategies next year.

Esko Hannula, Sr. VP of Product Management at Copado DevOps backlash

After years of DevOps fever, criticism towards DevOps is going to grow, for two different reasons. First, many businesses fail to reap the benefits because they have just implemented tools without changing their working practices. Second, many corporations have, and will continue to, reduce IT operations personnel assuming that Ops would somehow happen by itself in DevOps. Nevertheless, DevOps will continue to deliver success and gain popularity among those that implement it right and, despite temporary hiccups, the crowd of successful DevOps adopters keeps growing.