Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Slack, Pinterest and other tech industry giants have joined forces with the World Health Organization (WHO) to organize a hackathon to promote the development of software solutions that address "challenges related to the coronavirus pandemic."
The Build for COVID19 Global Online Hackathon (#BuildforCOVID19) was announced on Tuesday and began taking project submissions today. Interested developers can register on the DevPost hackathon registry, and also a registration page created by the Hack Club. The deadline for submitting projects is Monday. The hackathon organizers will announce the top projects on April 3.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 26, 20200 comments
Oracle announced the general availability of Java 14 (Oracle JDK 14) this week, and though this is not a long-term support release, it comes with some highly anticipated new features -- plus, it arrives just two months before the 25th anniversary of the Java programming language, which was released by Sun Microsystems on May 23, 1995.
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Posted by John K. Waters on March 19, 20200 comments
The Eclipse Foundation this week released the results of its first annual "IoT Commercial Adoption Survey." Based on the responses of 366 individual participants, who responded between Oct. 7 and Dec. 2, 2019, the survey uses direct industry feedback to provide a snapshot of the state of the Internet of Things (IoT) industry landscape.
"The Internet of Things is clearly one of the major technology trends today and a ubiquitous buzzword," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. "This survey, which we hope will be the first of an annual tradition, seeks to provide real insights into what organizations are doing with the IoT right now and their plans for production deployments." More
Posted by John K. Waters on March 12, 20200 comments
The Python programming language has been topping virtually every tech trend list for the past two years, so it was no surprise to see it earn another "most popular" ranking in O'Reilly's annual analysis of the most-used topics and the top search terms from its online learning platform. But the reason for Python's latest blue ribbon is worth noting: according to O'Reilly, it was demand among data scientists and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) engineers.
Python is the go-to language for AI, ML and natural language programming (NLP) development, thanks in no small part to the dozen or so libraries and development tools that support it, from TensorFlow to Pytorch. And simple syntax and readability promote rapid testing of complex algorithms, and make the language accessible to non-programmers.
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 20, 20200 comments
The Eclipse Foundation has made some baller moves in the last few years -- its commitment to an annual simultaneous release of multiple open-source projects and taking on the responsibility for the evolution of enterprise Java, to name two. This week it entered into a partnership to support another foundation's open-source technology.
Working with the IOTA Foundation, Eclipse launched the Tangle EE Working Group to provide a governed environment for contributions to IOTA's open source distributed ledger technology (DLT).
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Posted by John K. Waters on February 12, 20200 comments
I was reminded today that developers are action-oriented -- at least when it comes to problems that can be solved with software. IBM developer advocate Nicholas Bourdakos knew his colleagues were spending hours manually labeling thousands of images for their machine learning models, and he railed against this injustice to the heavens, "This shall not stand!"
Okay, he probably didn't do that. (I like to think all developers do it in their hearts.) In fact, when I talked with him on a video call today, he was the definition of "chill."
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 30, 20200 comments
MORE ON THIS TOPIC: Java in 2020, Part 1: What To Expect According to the Experts
Talking with Gartner VP and distinguished analyst Anne Thomas about Java at the start of a new year is becoming a habit. (Let's call it a tradition.) Thomas is a longtime industry watcher with deep industry knowledge, she understands the tech and she doesn't mind stirring the pot, so to speak, if that's what her observations demand.
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 28, 20200 comments
Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of the open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) server, and Harpreet Singh, former head of the Bitbucket group at Atlassian, have launched a startup that's using machine learning (ML) to speed up the software testing process.
Their new company, Launchable, which emerged from stealth mode on Thursday, is developing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product with the ability to predict the likelihood of a failure for each test case, given a change in the source code. The service will use ML to extract insights from the massive and growing amount of data generated by the increasingly automated software development process to make its predictions. More
Posted by John K. Waters on January 23, 20200 comments
The Eclipse Foundation's Jakarta EE Working Group today announced unanimous approval of a release plan for version 9 of the Eclipse Jakarta EE Platform.
The Working Group is proposing to deliver the specifications in a series of eight "waves," starting with an Independent (stand-alone) Wave, followed by Waves 1-7. Wave 1, for example, comprises the following specs:
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Posted by John K. Waters on January 16, 20200 comments