Google has released a first Developer Preview of its Android 14 mobile OS, emphasizing tablets and foldables as well as improvements for data transfers and battery life.

The preview was unveiled on February 8. Version 14 builds on work done in Android 12L and 13 to support tablets and foldable form factors. The goal with every release is to make it easier to optimize an app across all Android surfaces, proponents said. To assist with building apps to adapt to different screen sizes, Android’s builders have created sliding pane layout, window size classes, activity embedding, and box with constraints, supported in the Jetpack Compose UI development kit. With Version 14, guidance for large screens has been updated. Also, a preview of a cross-device SDK is featured for building applications to work across different devices and form factors.

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Repatriation seems to be a hot topic these days as some applications and data sets return to where they came from. I’ve even been tagged in some circles as an advocate for repatriation, mostly because of this recent post.

Once again I will restate my position: The overall goal is to find the most optimized architecture to support your business. Sometimes it’s on a public cloud, and sometimes it’s not. Or not yet. 

Keep in mind that technology evolves, and the value of using one technology over another changes a great deal over time. I learned a long time ago not to fall in love with any technology or platform, including cloud computing, even though I’ve chosen a career path as a cloud expert.

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Version 1.30 of the Deno JavaScript/TypeScript runtime, published late January 2023, emphasizes support for built-in Node.js modules and offers a major update to the configuration file.

With Deno, npm packages have already had access to built-in Node.js modules such as fs (file system), path, process, and others through the runtime’s Node.js compatibility layer. In release 1.30, published January 25, these modules are exposed to Deno code via node: specifiers. For developers using code with both Deno and Node.js, the node: scheme will work in both runtimes. Deno has been positioned as a more secure alternative to Node.js, which has leveraged npm.

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While not as well known as some of the larger JavaScript frameworks, Remix has earned a reputation as one that stands out. Some of the good ideas first introduced by Remix, which went open source in 2021, have been absorbed into other frameworks, as well.

At the highest level, Remix is a full-stack JavaScript framework in the style of Next.js: it supports server-side rendering (SSR) of a full-stack, reactive JavaScript application. Beyond that similarity, Remix takes a different approach from Next in several ways that we will explore in this article.

Not just React

Perhaps the most significant departure from Next.js is that Remix is designed to abstract its front-end implementation. In other words, it is decoupled from React. Although Remix with React is the standard approach currently, it is possible to use different front-end frameworks like Svelte and Vue.

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A major part of Microsoft’s “cloud-first” .NET 7 release in November, ASP.NET Core 7 brings powerful new tools to the web development framework to help developers create modern web applications. Built on top of the .NET Core runtime, ASP.NET Core 7 has everything you need to build cutting-edge web user interfaces and robust back-end services on Windows, Linux, and macOS alike.

This article discusses the biggest highlights in ASP.NET Core 7, and includes some code examples to get you started with the new features. To work with the code examples provided in this article, you should have Visual Studio 2022 installed in your computer. If you don’t have a copy, you can download Visual Studio 2022 here.

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DataStax on Wednesday said that it was launching a new cloud-based service, dubbed Astra Block, to support building Web3 applications.

Web3 is a decentralized version of the internet where content is registered on blockchains, tokenized, or managed and accessed on peer-to-peer distributed networks.

Astra Block, which is based on the Ethereum blockchain that can be used to program smart contracts, will be made available as part of the company’s Astra DB NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS), which is built on Apache Cassandra.  

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Analytics software provider Starburst introduced several new updates to its Enterprise and Galaxy offerings at its annual Datanova conference to support analytics and AI workloads for enterprises.

Starburst Enterprise is the company’s data management and analytics platform that offers an enterprise version of Trino, an open source, distributed SQL query engine for big data that allows users to query data from multiple data sources within a single query.

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Microsoft’s latest strategy for its .NET languages—C#, F#, and Visual Basic—emphasizes attributes including performance and interoperability, with the company remaining in charge of governance.

The company posted the latest overviews of plans for the three languages on February 6. Big changes will not be found in the updated strategy, but Microsoft said it was committed to full support for all three languages and to open source, backward compatibility, and aggressive language evolution for C# and F#.

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In hard times many people seek training or accreditation. The idea is that what they may lack in experience, they will make up for with the right set of credentials or certifications.

Definitely do not quit your job for this. Experience nearly always trumps credentials. However, if you are considering a career change to tech and you lack experience or you were laid off early in your career, you may be tempted to put a BSCS after your name. And in fact you can do a bachelor’s in computer science online.

Here are some options you might consider, and some pros and cons to be aware of.

Do you really need a degree?

Are you sure? When I started my career as a software developer in the 1990s, I was the only self-taught programmer I had met. However, these days they are more common. While a degree can help, consider whether you can wait two or five years, spend $20k to $40k (in the US) plus living expenses, or pursue the degree while holding another job. There are other paths, such as studying what you need and racking up some volunteer experience.

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I began this journey convinced that Steampipe could help the fediverse evolve, but not sure exactly how. My first thought was to use Steampipe’s API-wrangling superpower to study patterns of communication (and conflict) across the fediverse. But as one of many Twitter escapees last November, I soon realized that the network I was joining reflected a culture that had been humming along nicely for six years and didn’t particularly want to be the object of sociological study.

As I argued in Autonomy, packet size, friction, fanout, and velocity, Mastodon bakes in certain kinds of friction for reasons. You’ve likely heard about a default unfriendliness to search, which is both a technical setting and a cultural choice that privileges the experience of current flow over the mining of past flow. Even more fundamentally, the ID of a toot not only differs from server to server but also obfuscates the toot’s date, another technical/cultural choice that means you can’t randomly access history by date. None of these frictions is insurmountable. They will be overcome for purposes good and bad. I hope and expect that communities will be able to choose their desired amounts and kinds of friction while still interoperating with others. But for my project it seemed that trying to survey the wider fediverse wasn’t the right place to start.

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R has a number of quick, elegant ways to join data frames by a common column. I’d like to show you three of them:

• base R’s merge() function
• dplyr’s join family of functions
• data.table’s bracket syntax

Get and import the data

For this example I’ll use one of my favorite demo data sets—flight delay times from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. If you want to follow along, head to http://bit.ly/USFlightDelays and download data for the time frame of your choice with the columns Flight Date, Reporting_Airline, Origin, Destination, and DepartureDelayMinutes. Also get the lookup table for Reporting_Airline.

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Cloud-based data warehouse company Snowflake on Tuesday announced its intent to acquire secure data-sharing software provider LeapYear Technologies in an effort to boost its data clean room capabilities.

What is a data clean room?

Data clean rooms are software frameworks that allow different organizations to collaborate on data analysis by allowing multiple parties to analyze data sets without disclosing the raw data to one another.

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Data issues are not new: data integration, data security, data management, and defining single sources of truth. However, what is new is combining these issues with multicloud deployments. Many of these problems can be avoided with a bit of upfront planning and using common data architecture best practices that have been understood for years.

The core problem, as I see it, is enterprises attempting to lift and shift data to multicloud deployments without good forethought around the common problems that are likely to arise:

Forming data silos. The use of multiple cloud services can result in isolated data silos, making it difficult to integrate and manage data across multiple platforms. This should come as no surprise to anyone, but in many respects, multicloud has made data silos more numerous.

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C++, already established as a rising star in the Tiobe programming language popularity index, continues to make great strides so far in 2023.

The language scored an increase of 5.93% this month over the same time last year, far ahead of all other languages, software quality services vendor Tiobe said. In January, C++ won the Tiobe Programming Language of the Year designation for 2022, awarded to the language experiencing the most growth in Tiobe’s index. C++ is favored for developing applications requiring capabilities of the C language but for large software systems, Tiobe said. The founder of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, recently cited uses ranging from aerospace to artificial intelligence/machine learning to biomedicine.

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The concept of edge computing is simple. It’s about bringing compute and storage capabilities to the edge, to be in close proximity to devices, applications, and users that generate and consume the data. Mirroring the rapid growth of 5G infrastructure, the demand for edge computing will continue to accelerate in the present era of hyperconnectivity.

Everywhere you look, the demand for low-latency experiences continues to rise, propelled by technologies including IoT, AI/ML, and AR/VR/MR. While reducing latency, bandwidth costs, and network resiliency are key drivers, another understated but equally important reason is adherence to data privacy and governance policies, which prohibit the transfer of sensitive data to central cloud servers for processing.

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Mobile devices play a large and growing role in nearly every aspect of our daily lives, so it’s not surprising there would be a growing need for mobile app developers.

Mobile app developers create applications for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. This might include creating mobile versions of web or computer-based applications. It might also involve developing applications specifically as mobile-exclusive software.

The responsibilities of a mobile app developer vary based on the role, according to the career site Indeed.com. Common duties include meeting with senior employees or client representatives to discuss the desired features of an application under development; creating a project plan and budget for the coding, testing, and release of an application; writing and debugging code; developing and releasing patches; and updating existing mobile apps with new features and upgrades.

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Recently, tech has felt like career Chernobyl, with well over 200,000 people laid off over the past year. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, etc. Every big tech company, and many smaller ones, seems determined to shed 5% to 10% of their employees because “growth rates [are] slow[ing] as enterprises of all sizes evaluate … ways to optimize their cloud spending in response to the tough macroeconomic conditions.” Thus spake Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky on the company’s recent earnings call, and it’s a familiar refrain among tech executives these days.

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Oracle’s controversial new Java pricing plan, based on the customer’s total number of employees, rather than the number of employees using the software, presents opportunities for Java rivals Eclipse Foundation and Azul, the companies said.

Eclipse immediately seized on the opportunity to pitch its alternative. “Stumbled across Oracle's latest Java price list,” tweeted Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich on January 27. “Wow, I had no idea that Java was so expensive! Fortunately, you can download the fully compatible, community supported, quality-certified, Temurin OpenJDK distribution for free!” 

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It’s 8 a.m., and a business leader is looking at a financial performance dashboard, questioning if the results are accurate. A few hours later, a customer logs in to your company’s portal and wonders why their orders aren’t showing the latest pricing information. In the afternoon, the head of digital marketing is frustrated because data feeds from their SaaS tools never made it into their customer data platform. The data scientists are also upset because they can’t retrain their machine learning models without the latest data sets loaded.

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