InfoQ Homepage News
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Exploring Factors that Drive Software Engineering Productivity
Understanding what drives software development productivity is the key to making high-impact investments in engineering productivity, Emerson Murphy-Hill said at QCon San Francisco. He presented the results of their investigation into factors that predict developer productivity and shared what they learned from exploring inequities in software engineering.
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JetBrains' Webstorm IDE for JavaScript Development Now Free for Non-Commercial Purposes
JetBrains' IDE for JavaScript is now free for non-commercial use. Webstorm thus joins RustRover (Rust IDE) and Aqua (test automation IDE) to the list of JetBrain IDEs available under a non-commercial licensing model. Non-commercial free license users must agree to usage data collection to enjoy the same features as those with paid subscriptions, including AI-powered code completion.
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Spring News Roundup: Delivering Point Releases of Boot, Security, Authorization Server, Session
There was a flurry of activity in the Spring ecosystem during the week of December 16th, 2024, highlighting point releases of: Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Authorization Server, Spring Session, Spring Integration, Spring Modulith, Spring Batch, Spring AMQP, Spring for Apache Kafka, Spring for Apache Pulsar and Spring Shell.
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Google Willow Sets New Quantum Supremacy Milestone
Google has announced its new 105-qubit superconducting chip, code-named Willow, which solved a quantum supremacy experiment that would take at least 300 million years to simulate on a classical computer. More importantly, the chip shows how quantum hardware may achieve fault tolerance in such a way to seemingly unleash its scalability.
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Recap of OpenAI Highlights Key Updates in 12-Day "Shipmas"
OpenAI's "12 Days of Shipmas" event featured daily announcements of new AI features and tools. Below is a summary of the key developments.
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Redis Creator 'antirez' Returns: Can He Shift Momentum away from Valkey?
After over four years away, Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo recently announced his return to Redis. In what has been a challenging year for the company behind the source-available in-memory NoSQL database, the announcement has sparked enthusiasm and stirred much discussion within the Redis community.
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GitHub Launches Free Copilot Plan for Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Users
GitHub has introduced a new free plan for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code, offering 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month without requiring a subscription or payment. The update integrates Copilot as a core feature in the editor, with new tools like Copilot Edits, Custom Instructions, and terminal chat. A similar free plan is also available for Visual Studio users.
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NVIDIA Unveils Jetson Orin Nano Generative AI Supercomputer
NVIDIA has released the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit, a compact generative AI supercomputer. The device, which measures small enough to fit in one's hand, provides increased performance for generative AI capabilities.
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Hugging Face and Entalpic Unveil LeMaterial: Transforming Materials Science through AI
Entalpic, in collaboration with Hugging Face, has launched LeMaterial, an open-source initiative to tackle key challenges in materials science. By unifying data from major resources into LeMat-Bulk, a harmonized dataset with 6.7 million entries, LeMaterial aims to streamline materials discovery and accelerate innovation in areas such as LEDs, batteries, and photovoltaic cells.
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How to Use Property-Based Testing as Fuzzy Unit Testing
According to Eivind Jahren, property-based testing is an invaluable tool for its ease of use and effectiveness. It is flexible in what requirements one can formulate and is simple and lightweight enough to put in the hands of software developers to perform iterative testing on a daily basis, less test code is required, and it’s easier to reuse test data generators for complex structured data.
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Azure AI Agent Service in Public Preview: Automation of Routine Tasks
Unveiling at Ignite, Microsoft's Azure AI Agent Service empowers developers to build and scale AI agents seamlessly. With secure integration, flexible use cases, and support for multiple frameworks, it automates workflows across platforms like Teams and Excel. Experience the future of business automation—innovate efficiently with Azure AI today!
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New MSSQL Extension for VS Code Promises Enhanced Developer Productivity
Microsoft enhances Visual Studio Code's MSSQL extension with comprehensive updates, introducing improved database connection, object exploration, and query analysis tools. The new version offers advanced UI features, streamlined table design, enhanced performance visualization, and expanded export capabilities for developers working with Azure SQL and SQL Server databases.
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PydanticAI: a New Python Framework for Streamlined Generative AI Development
The team behind Pydantic, widely used for data validation in Python, has announced the release of PydanticAI, a Python-based agent framework designed to ease the development of production-ready Generative AI applications. Positioned as a potential competitor to LangChain, PydanticAI introduces a type-safe, model-agnostic approach inspired by the design principles of FastAPI.
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Key Takeaways from QCon & InfoQ Dev Summits with a Look ahead to 2025 Conferences
As we reflect on 2024, one thing is clear: senior developers, architects, and team leaders face challenges that benefit from real-world insights shared by other senior practitioners. This year, the InfoQ Dev Summits in Boston and Munich, and the QCon conferences in London and San Francisco provided curated topics and talks from software practitioners working through demanding challenges.
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Challenges of Creating iOS App Extensions at Lyft
In a recent article, Lyft engineers Artur Stepaniuk and Max Husar described how Lyft handles the complexity of creating an app extension for their iOS app without breaking the tight RAM and binary size constraints set by Apple nor impair user experience.