GitHub Copilot Enterprise is a version of GitHub Copilot that integrates into an organization’s knowledge bases so that it can provide more relevant and specific responses, enabling greater developer productivity. 

This new offering has features that streamline code navigation and completion, which helps developers gain a deeper understanding of their codebase. “It empowers junior developers to contribute quicker, assists senior developers in handling live incidents, and aids in modernizing aging codebases by offering clear code summaries, relevant suggestions, and quick answers to queries about code behavior,” Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, wrote in a blog post. 

Chat functionality integrates directly into GitHub.com, which allows developers to ask questions and receive answers that include links to relevant documentation or other existing solutions to meet their needs. 

GitHub is also beta testing an integration with Bing search, which will allow developers to turn to the the internet to find information as well, such as searching for updates to frameworks. 

Another feature of GitHub Copilot Enterprise is autogenerated pull request summaries and the ability to analyze the difference between the existing code and proposed changes, which will help save time in understanding the changes being made in a codebase. 

GitHub has stated that GitHub Copilot Enterprise does not use companies’ data to train its models, except in the case of custom models where explicit permission has been granted. 

“Personalized, natural language recommendations are now at the fingertips of all our developers at Figma,” said Tommy MacWilliam, engineering manager for Infrastructure at Figma. “Copilot Enterprise has improved collaboration across the SDLC by making it easier for our engineers to source and find information via Copilot Chat. We’re also seeing a significant increase in overall developer productivity. Our engineers are coding faster, collaborating more effectively, and building better outcomes.”

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The DPH Framework describes “the systems, processes, metrics, and feedback systems we use to understand our developers and their needs internally at LinkedIn,” Max Kanat-Alexander, principal staff software engineer at LinkedIn, and Grant Jenks, senior staff software engineer at LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post.  

The Framework can be adapted by organizations looking to implement systems to improve productivity and developer satisfaction. 

It describes the metrics LinkedIn follows, how it chose what to measure, and provides insights into why some metrics are better than others. For example, some of the metrics in place at LinkedIn include Developer Build Time, which is the time developers wait for their builds to finish; Net User Satisfaction, which measures how happy developers are with the internal tools they are using; and Code Reviewer Response Time, which measures how long it takes to a review to respond to code updates.  

The DPH Framework also recommends creating Developer Personas to better understand developers by categorizing them into groups based on their workflows. This enables leaders to think about the priorities separately for each group. 

There are also guidelines for teams who are creating feedback systems, and guidelines for quantitative metrics. 

Finally, the Framework ends with a set of example metrics that companies can base theirs on. 

“Now more than ever, developers are navigating so much change and new opportunity in this new era of Generative AI, so ensuring teams have the systems, processes, metrics and feedback systems to be successful is paramount. Our goal with this release was to offer an answer to one of the main questions we hear asked across the software industry, “How can I help my software development teams be more efficient, more effective, and happier?” We found that the best way to answer this question is through data, usually meaning metrics and feedback systems,” Kanat-Alexander and Jenks wrote.

The post SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework appeared first on SD Times.

This developer hub offers a comprehensive website aimed at providing developers and end-users with convenient access to detailed resources. The platform offers various learning materials such as videos, tutorials, and reference documents, enabling users to learn and progress at their preferred pace.

“Continuous deployment is critical to us delivering value to our customers, so our engineering team not only code our products, they consume them,” said Jim Douglas, CEO of Armory. “They live and breathe the developer experience daily, so it’s front and center in all our product decisions.”

Developer Hub offers the ability to visualize deployment configurations to understand existing setups, share URLs from exposed services to webhooks for service identification, access and review Kubernetes manifests on the deployment graph screen, and expose external preview URLs for deployed Kubernetes services, granting developers independent access without relying on other teams for networking setup.

Every user, including Freemium tier users, have full access to the site, allowing them to utilize their account to the fullest extent.

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It utilizes Appian’s enterprise AI architecture and private AI strategy to deliver comprehensive process automation solutions swiftly.

In its first version, AI Copilot employs generative AI to transform PDFs and structured forms into user-friendly digital interfaces, enhancing user experiences. This tool streamlines the conversion of PDF forms into interactive business apps, enabling developers to use low-code design tools for fine-tuning. 

Future AI Copilot features will expand its generative AI functions to build workflows using natural language and to access Appian’s data fabric architecture for self-service analytics and immediate report generation.

“The AI copilot will augment and accelerate the end-to-end application development capabilities of the Appian Platform,” said Chandra Surbhat, the experience practice head and VP for Enterprise Futuring at Wipro. “Leveraging generative AI will simplify the software development on an already low-code platform. Plus, clients will use Appian’s private AI strategy, which addresses their critical privacy and security concerns. We look forward to tapping into Appian AI Copilot and unlocking greater business value for our customers.”

There are also additional new capabilities in the latest release of the Appian Platform. One is a more secure and scalable data fabric. Data fabric scalability has doubled to 4 million synced rows per record so users can unify their enterprise data to power and train AI services with built-in guardrails that protect the security and privacy of data, the company explained.

The tool offers an improved AI Skill Designer experience that is user-friendly. Creating custom and private AI models at scale is simplified, including the ability to test models before deploying them. Users can train and modify models for tasks like document and email classification, and seamlessly integrate them into workflows similar to other design elements.

Lastly, the new release has a more unified Appian RPA to create, manage, and deploy robotic tasks directly from Appian Designer using the familiar and intuitive design object experience. With the addition of groups and role maps, users can efficiently manage access and permissions for robotic tasks, enhancing security and control.

Additional details are available here. 

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This is why the job of the project manager should revolve, almost exclusively, around enabling developers to do just that. However, it can sometimes be difficult to keep developers happy and building while also staying on top of progress and pushing the project forward.

How the project manager role has changed

According to Sílvia Rocha, VP of engineering at OutSystems, the skills that make project managers successful have undergone a transformation in the last two decades.

“I think before, when our projects were very much waterfall, the role of a project manager was a little more on the forefront of the governance,” Rocha said. “And now with the flourishing of agile practices, I think project managers have moved a little bit to the side.” 

She explained that with this shift towards more agile practices, projects often have multiple leaders, such as Scrum masters and product owners. Because of this, project managers have had to reinvent themselves quite a bit.

Rocha also cited a heightened level of autonomy at the team level as a reason why the role of the project manager is changing.

“I think a lot of rethinking and redesigning of what that role is and the interactions that the project manager has is something that I have definitely seen the industry do,” she said.

One of the ways that the role has been altered is the added emphasis placed on empathy and interpersonal communication skills.

Yishai Beeri, CTO at the developer workflow automation company LinearB, said interpersonal communication skills are key when it comes to building trust with developers.

He explained that having effective interpersonal communication skills leads to a more positive and open team culture, enabling team members to feel comfortable enough to come to the project manager if something is not going as expected. 

“If you can trust the developers to tell you when things are not progressing as required or when things are starting to accumulate risk, then you can focus solely on these things and assume that everything else is going as planned,” Beeri said. 

Building this trust also allows project managers to not automatically feel worried when team members are not constantly offering up status updates. When everyone trusts each other to make issues known, then silence becomes a positive thing. 

Rocha went on to explain that in the choice between a project manager with higher level technical skills and one with superior interpersonal skills, the latter would most likely provide better outcomes.

“Putting things in a simple and outcome-focused way and letting the team know that you are there to assist and that you are there to remove dependencies and roadblocks for them lets them know that you feel their pain, that you realize what it is like to be in their shoes, and that you are actively working towards helping them,” she said. 

Additionally, Beeri explained that avoiding the blame game is essential when it comes to communicating and building trust with a team.

He emphasized that project managers should always care more about solving the issue than pointing a finger at any developer who may have had a hand in causing it. 

“And I think a lot of this takes time and it comes from having worked together for some time and learning to understand each other’s cues or way of communicating,” Beeri said. “It can be hard to replicate that without the experience of working as a team and working together to understand how different people communicate about the same things.”

How project managers can be a benefit to developers 

In an SD Times-led discussion on the “Dev Interrupted” Discord server, Conor Bronsdon, co-host of the Dev Interrupted podcast, explained that project managers can either be a benefit to the team, or a massive hindrance.

“Ideally, they’ll enable engineers to focus on deep work, particularly coding,” Bronsdon said. “However, it’s very easy for project management to turn into a blocker if the system is constructed in a way that breaks up focus time and creates switching costs.”

He went on to say that project managers should be intentional when it comes to creating the right system for the developers on their team, and they should be sure that the developers understand why the system is important.

“If you don’t create a system that works for your team, and ensure they have the context they need about why the project manager system is important, you’re going to create problems,” Bronsdon explained. 

In that Discord discussion, Beeri added that a common mistake project managers make is always chasing the current status on every item. 

He expanded on this, explaining that if the project manager is constantly asking for status updates or time estimates while developers are untangling and working through complicated problems, it can end up slowing progress in the long run. 

“A great project manager has enough dev chops to get a feel for progress without constantly asking, know how to use tools to augment their take on reality, and have the patience to manage the project with the uncertainties inherent to dev work,” Beeri said. “They also proactively manage up to shield devs from the execs/stakeholders that are also standing in line to ask ‘when will it be done?’ five times a day.” 

Bronsdon explained that it can be easy for a project manager to become frustrated if it seems like developers are dragging their feet on providing the manager with information or updates that are vital to their role. 

Understanding that the challenges developers face are different from the manager’s own helps to create a path to reach a resolution that leaves everyone feeling heard and validated. 

“This requires excellent communication skills and the ability to tailor that communication to your different audiences,” Bronsdon said. 

Prioritizing the developer

When trying to foster open communication and understanding, it is important to also be mindful of the developers’ time. 

Yishai Beeri, CTO of the developer workflow automation company LinearB, explained that oftentimes project managers fall into the trap of overloading their team with meetings in an attempt to facilitate communication. He warned that this is an almost-instant productivity killer.

“[Constant meetings] also give the project manager a feeling (some would say illusion) of control,” Beeri said. “Like ‘I know what’s happening and I know where we’re going,’ but great project managers are comfortable with uncertainty.”

He went on to say that a good project manager is one that centers their communication around risk areas and blockers as well as pushing context to the developers instead of pulling status updates from them. 

According to Beeri, good project managers utilize asynchronous communication options wherever possible and only utilize synchronous avenues to tackle real problems. 

This works to allow developers to be more in charge of their own time, fostering heightened productivity as well as a better relationship between team members and the manager.

He also stressed the importance of managing dependencies as a project manager. He warned not to fall back on old and anti-Agile habits such as trying to map out the dependencies and timeline in advance.  

Rather, Beeri advised project managers to focus on gaining “local” visibility to current and near-term dependencies.

“[A good project manager should] suggest minor shifts in order of execution to resolve them, as well as focused over-communication to mitigate their impact,” he explained. “They also develop a nose for common dependencies/blockers down the line and proactively suggest steps to avoid them.”  – Katie Dee

Accommodating a remote setting 

Rocha also discussed how the transition to remote work has altered the role of the project manager. She said with less face-to-face opportunities, project managers have had to find new ways to tap into the working processes of their teams. 

She said that in the beginning, project managers struggled with this and often tried to overcompensate for the distance and inject themselves too much into the work developers are doing, leading them to become overbearing with their teams.

Beeri also touched on this, saying that since going remote, offering developers high-level empathy has become a bigger challenge than ever. 

He explained that because so much of a human being’s capacity for communication and empathy relies on non-verbal cues, the mediums of communicating in a remote working world have become a hurdle for project managers to overcome.

“Some of these non-verbal cues get lost in screen-based communication… And in some cases this also makes scheduling hard when you do have to synchronize people together,” Beeri said. “Getting everyone in the room together is obviously easier when we’re all in the same office, so those parts have become more difficult.” 

Rocha went on to say that bringing in games and tools that add fun to arduous, but necessary, meetings and tasks has been useful. “I have seen the most successful project managers find their place in this new reality in techniques where they almost gamify a number of the processes that are core to a good and functioning team,” Rocha explained.

Rocha also emphasized the importance of approaching conversations with team members from the perspective of adding value for the end user.

She explained that this is a method that project managers should use in order to avoid falling into a helicopter style of managing because it contextualizes conversations and updates around something that is important to the developer, rather than it being a box on a checklist. 

With this, Rocha stressed that the project manager should constantly be positioning themself as a helper rather than as merely a process guide.

“Especially building a new product from the ground up… a lot of the work that is happening for these products is very overarching and one of the things that will make you a rockstar project manager is if you are actually helping in the alignment across the many teams in a way that developers see as valuable,” she said. “Then they see that dependencies are better catered to, they can go faster, they are more productive, they are not stuck waiting on other teams.”

According to Rocha, this is the best way to be seen as an asset to the team rather than a blocker. The project manager should exist as an enabler that works to heighten the productivity of their developers. 

The post Soft skills become imperative to be an effective project manager appeared first on SD Times.

SD Times recently had a chance to speak with Michael Drogalis, the principal technologist at Confluent, a company that provides a complete set of tools needed to connect and process data streams. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

SD Times: Can you set the context for how much data streaming is growing today and how important is it that developers pay more attention to it?

Drogalis: I remember back in like 2013 or 2014, I attended the Strange Loop Conference, which was really great. And as I was walking around, I saw there was this talk on the main stage by Jay Kreps, who’s now Confluent’s CEO, and it was about Apache Kafka. I walked away with two things on my mind. Number one, this guy was super tall like 6 foot 8 which was very impressionable. And then the other was that there are at least two people in the world who care about streaming, which is basically the vibe back then it was a very new technology.  

There were a lot of academic papers about it, and there were clearly patches of interest in the technology landscape that could be put together, but none of them had really broken out. 

The other project at that time was Apache Storm, which was a real-time stream processor, but it kind of just lacked the components around it. And so there was like a set of people: a small community. 

And then fast forward to today, and it’s just a completely different world. I have the privilege of working here and seeing companies, every size, every vertical, every industry, every use case, and with every latency requirement. And the transition is kind of just shocking to me that you don’t see a lot of technologies break out that quickly over the course of a decade.

SD Times: Are there any projects around this that you’re seeing are interesting?

Drogalis: I saw a few stats that are interesting this year. The Apache Foundation’s Kafka is one of the most active projects, which is pretty cool, because the Apache Foundation now has a huge number of projects that it incubates. And I also saw on the StackOverflow annual developer survey that Kafka was ranked as one of the most loved or one of the most recognizable technologies. To see it break out from being an undercurrent to something that’s really important and on peoples’ minds is pretty great.

SD Times: What are some of the challenges of handling data streaming today?

Drogalis: It’s kind of like driving on the opposite side of the road than you’re used to. You go to school, and you’re taught to program in maybe Java or Python. And so the basic paradigm everyone is taught is, you have a blob of data in a data structure in a file, and you suck it up, and then you process it, and then you spit it out somewhere. And you do this over and over again until you perform your data processing task, or you do whatever needs to be done. 

And streaming really turns this all on its head. You have this inversion of flow, and instead of bounded data structures, you have unbounded data structures. The data continuously comes in and you have to constantly process the very next thing that shows up. You really can’t arbitrarily scan into the future, because you don’t really know what’s coming. Events may be arriving out of order, and you don’t know if you have the complete picture yet. Everything is effectively asynchronous by default. And it takes some getting used to since it’s becoming an increasingly robust paradigm. 

But, it certainly is a big change to get your head around. I kind of liken it to when people were starting to adopt JavaScript on the server, and it’s async. So it definitely takes a little bit of getting used to but the power makes it worth it.

SD Times: So what are some of the best practices and most common skills that are needed to deal with the growth of data streaming?

Drogalis: A lot of it kind of comes down to experience. I mean, this is sort of a newer technology that’s kind of evolved somewhat recently. So a lot of it is just getting your hands dirty, going out and figuring out how does it work? What will work best? 

As far as best practices, I think a couple of things jumped out to me. Number one is getting your head around the idea of data retention. When you work with batch-oriented systems, the idea is to generally just kind of keep all your data forever, which can work. You may have some expiration policy that sort of works in the background where you mop up data that you don’t need at some point, but the streaming systems seem to have this idea of retention built into them where you age out old data, and you make this trade-off between what do I keep versus what do I throw away and what you keep is kind of the boundary of what you’re you’re able to process. 

The second thing that’s worth studying up on is to be intentional about your designs and the idea of time. With streaming, your data can kind of come out of order. I think a classic example of this is maybe you’re collecting events that are coming off of cell phones, and maybe somebody takes a cell phone and they drive into the Amazon rainforest, and they have no connectivity. And then they come out and they reconnect. And then the upload data from last week, the systems that you design have to be able to be intelligent enough to kind of look at it and say this data didn’t actually just happen. It’s from like a week ago. There’s power and there’s complexity, and the power is obviously that you can really retroactively update your view of the world. And you can take all kinds of special actions depending on whatever you want to do with your domain. But the complexity is that you have to figure out how to deal with that and factor that into your programming model. 

The post Developers have to keep pace with the rise of data streaming appeared first on SD Times.

The same is true for development teams in an organization. Failing to provide developers with insight into their tools and processes could lead to unaddressed bugs and even system failures in the future.

This is why the importance of providing developers with ample observability cannot be overstated. Without it, the job of the developer becomes one big blind spot. 

Why is it important? 

“One of the important things that observability enables is the ability to see how your systems behave,” said Josep Prat, open-source engineering director at data infrastructure company Aiven. “So, developers build features which belong to a production system, and then observability gives them the means to see what is going on within that production system.”

He went on to say that developer observability tools don’t just function to inform the developer when something is wrong; rather, they dig even deeper to help determine the root cause of why that thing has gone wrong. 

David Caruana, UK-based software architect at content services company Hyland, stressed that these deep insights are especially important in the context of DevOps. 

“That feedback is essential for continuous improvement,” Caruana said. “As you go around that loop, feedback from observability feeds into the next development iteration… So, observability really gives teams the tools to increase the quality of service for customers.” 

The in-depth insights it provides are what sets observability apart from monitoring or visibility, which tend to address what is going wrong on a more surface level. 

According to Prat, visibility tools alone are not enough for development teams to address flaws with the speed and efficiency that is required today. 

The deeper insights that observability brings to the table need to work in conjunction with visibility and monitoring tools. 

With this, developers gain the most comprehensive view into their tools and processes. 

“It’s more about connecting data as well,” Prat explained. “So, if you look at monitoring or visibility, it’s a collection of data. We can see these things and we can understand what happened, which is good, but observability gives us the connection between all of these pieces that are collected. Then we can try to make a story and try to find out what was going on in the system when something happened.” 

John Bristowe, community director at deployment automation company Octopus Deploy, expanded on this, explaining that observability empowers development teams to make the best decisions possible going forward.

These decisions affect things such as increasing reliability and fixing bugs, leading to major performance enhancements. 

“And developers know this… There are a lot of moving parts and pieces and it is kind of akin to ‘The Wizard of Oz’ … ‘ignore the man behind the curtain,’” Bristowe said. “When you pull back that curtain, you’re seeing the Wizard of Oz and that is really what observability gives you.” 

According to Vishnu Vasudevan, head of product at the continuous orchestration company Opsera, developer interest in observability is still somewhat new. 

He explained that in the last five years, as DevOps has become the standard for organizations, developer interest in observability has grown exponentially. 

“Developers used to think that they can push products into the market without actually learning about anything around security or quality because they were focusing only on development,” Vasudevan said. “But without observability… the code might go well at first but sometime down the line it can break and it is going to be very difficult for development teams to fix the issue.”

The move to cloud native 

In recent years, the transition to cloud native has shaken up the software development industry. Caruana said that he believes the move into the cloud has been a major driver for observability.

He explained that with the complexity that cloud native introduces, gaining deep insights into the developer processes and tooling is more essential than ever before. 

“If you have development teams that are looking to move towards cloud-native architectures, I think that observability needs to be a core part of that conversation,” Caruana said. “It’s all about getting that data, and if you want to make decisions… having the data to drive those decisions is really valuable.” 

According to Prat, this shift to cloud native has also led to observability tools becoming more dynamic.

“When we had our own data centers, we knew we had machines A,B,C, and D; we knew that we needed to connect to certain boxes; and we knew exactly how many machines were running at each point in time,” he said. “But, when we go to the cloud, suddenly systems are completely dynamic and the number of servers that we are running depends on the load that the system is having.”

Prat explained that because of this, it is no longer enough to just know which boxes to connect; teams now have to have a full understanding of which machines are entering into and leaving the system so that connections can be made and the development team can determine what is going on.

Bristowe also explained that while the shift to cloud native can be a positive thing for the observability space, it has also made it more complicated.

“Cloud native is just a more complex scenario to support,” he said. “You have disparate systems and different technologies and different ways in which you’ll do things like logging, tracing, metrics, and things of that sort.”

Because of this, Bristowe emphasized the importance of integrating proper tooling and processes in order to work around any added complexities. 

Prat believes that the transition to cloud native not only brings new complexities, but a new level of dynamism to the observability space. 

“Before it was all static and now it is all dynamic because the cloud is dynamic. Machines come, machines go, services are up, services are down and it is just a completely different story,” he said. 

Opsera’s Vasudevan also stressed that moving into the cloud has put more of an emphasis on the security benefits that observability can offer. 

He explained that while moving into the cloud has helped the velocity of deployments, it has added a plethora of possible security vulnerabilities. 

“And this is where that shift happened and developers really started to understand that they do need to have this observability in place to understand what the bottlenecks and the inefficiencies are that the development team will face,” he said.

The risks of insufficient observability  

When companies fail to provide their development teams with high level observability, Prat said it can feel like regressing to the dark ages. 

He explained that without observability, the best developers can do is venture a guess as to why things are behaving the way that they are. 

“We would need to play a lot of guessing games and do a lot more trial and error to try and reproduce mistakes… this leads to countless hours and trying to understand what the root cause was,” said Prat.

This, of course, reduces an organization’s ability to remain competitive, something that companies cannot afford to risk. 

He emphasized that while investing in observability is not some kind of magic cure-all for bugs and system failures, it can certainly help in remediation as well as prevention. 

Bristowe went on to explain that observability is really all about the DevOps aspect of investing in people, processes, and tools alike. 

He said that while there are some really helpful tools available in the observability space, making sure the developers are onboard to learn with these tools and integrate them properly into their processes is really the key element to successful observability. 

Observability and productivity 

Prat also emphasized that investing in observability heavily correlates to more productivity in an organization. This is because it enables developers to feel more secure in the products they are building.

He said that this sense of security also helps when applying user feedback and implementing new features per customer requests, leading to heightened productivity as well as strengthening the organization’s relationship with its customer base. 

With proper observability tools, a company will be able to deliver better features more quickly as well as constantly work to improve the resiliency of its systems. Ultimately, this provides end users with a better overall experience as well as boosts speeds. 

“The productivity will improve because we can develop features faster, because we can know better when things break, and we can fix the things that break much faster because we know exactly why things are being broken,” Prat said. 

Vasudevan explained that when code is pushed to production without developers truly understanding it, technical debt and bottlenecks are pretty much a guarantee, resulting in a poorer customer experience. 

“If you don’t have the observability, you will not be able to identify the bottlenecks, you will not be able to identify the inefficiencies, and the code quality is going to be very poor when it goes into production,” he said.

Bristowe also explained that there are times when applications are deployed into production and yield unplanned results. Without observability, the development team may not even notice this until damage has already been caused. 

“The time to fix bugs, time to resolution, and things like that are critical success factors and you want to fix those problems before they are discovered in production,” Bristowe said. “Let’s face it, there is no software that’s perfect, but having observability will help you quickly discover bottlenecks, inefficiencies, bugs, or whatever it may be, and being able to gain insight into that quickly is going to help with productivity for sure.” 

Aiven’s Prat noted that observability also enables developers to see where and when they are spending most of their time so that they can tweak certain processes to make them more efficient.

When working on a project, developers strive for immediate results. Observability helps them when it comes to understanding why certain processes are not operating as quickly as desired. 

“So, if we are spending more time on a certain request, we can try and find why,” Prat explained. “It turns out there was a query on the database or that it was a system that was going rogue or a machine that needed to be decommissioned and wasn’t, and that is what observability can help us with.”

Automation and observability 

Bristowe emphasized the impact that AI and automation can have on the observability space. 

He explained that tools such as ChatGPT have really brought strong AI models into the mainstream and showcased the power that this technology holds. 

He believes this same power can be brought to observability tools. 

“Even if you are gathering as much information as possible, and you are reporting on it, and doing all these things, sometimes even those observations still aren’t evident or apparent,” he said. “But an AI model that is trained on your dataset, can look and see that there is something going on that you may not realize.”

Caruana added that AI can help developers better understand what the natural health of a system is, as well as quickly alert teams when there is an anomaly. 

He predicts that in the future we will start to see automation play a much bigger role in observability tools, such as filtering through alerts to select the key, root cause alerts that the developer should focus on.

“I think going forward, AI will actually be able to assist in the resolution of those issues as well,” Caruana said. “Even today, it is possible to fix things and to resolve issues automatically, but with AI, I think resolution will become much smarter and much more efficient.” 

Both Bristowe and Caruana agreed that AI observability tools will yield wholly positive results for both development teams and the organization in general.  

Bristowe explained that this is because the more tooling brought in and the more insights offered to developers, the better off organizations will be. 

However, Vishnu Vasudevan, head of product at the continuous orchestration company Opsera, had a slightly different take. 

He said that bringing automation into the observability space may end up costing organizations more than they would gain.

Because of this risk, he stressed that organizations would need to be sure to implement the right automation tools so that teams can gain the actionable intelligence and the predictive insights that they actually need.

“I would say that having a secure software supply chain is the first thing and then having observability as that second layer and then the AI and automation can come in,” Vasudevan said. “If you try to build AI into your systems and you do not have those first two things, it may not add any value to the customer.”

How to approach observability 

When it comes to making sure developers are provided with the highest level of observability possible, Prat has one piece of advice: utilize open-source tooling.

He explained that with tools like these, developers are able to connect several different solutions rather than feeling boxed into one single tool. This ensures that they are able to have the most well-rounded and comprehensive approach to observability.

“You can use several tools and they can probably play well together, and if they are not then you can always try and build a connection between them to try and help to close the gap between two tools so that they can talk to each other and share data and you can get more eyes looking at your problem,” Prat said. 

Caruana also explained the importance of implementing observability with room for evolution.

He said that starting small and building observability out based on feedback from developers is the best way to be sure teams are being provided with the deepest insights possible. 

“As you do with all agile processes, iteration is really key, so start small, implement something, get that feedback, and make adjustments as you go along,” Caruana said. “I think a big bang approach is a high risk approach, so I choose to evolve, and iterate, and see where it leads.”

The post How observability prevents developers from flying blind appeared first on SD Times.

According to the company, the competition offers participants access to the App Builder drag & drop tool, allowing designers and developers to collaborate in one platform. 

It also provides a complete design system, which is compatible with Sketch and Adobe XD and generates code in Angular and Blazor.

“App Builder makes it easy to be creative and customize apps to meet unique needs,” said Jason Beres, SVP at Infragistics. “With App Builder, anyone can create an application such as an e-commerce, travel or team collaboration app and we welcome entries from developers and designers all over the world.”

The contest is open for interested participants to enter until the end of November. Final judging will take place on December 1st-3rd, 2022 and will be done by Jason Beres, senior VP of developer tools at Infragistics; George Abraham, senior product manager at Infragistics; and Andrea Silveira, director of user experience in product development at Infragistics.

Prizes will be awarded to the top three winners and include gift cards in the amounts of $1,000, $500, and $250. The winners will be announced on December 15th, 2022 during the webinar “What Makes an Award-Winning Application and App Builder Design Contest”.

To register for the contest for free, click here. 

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The control plane provides a new managed cloud UI and an integrated toolchain built entirely on top of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open-source projects. 

Developers can use the control plane to view and manage their organization’s apps and services across development, deployment, and production environments without needing to stitch together Kubernetes tools or needing to compromise productivity. 

Ambassador Labs also unveiled two new developer programs that are designed to elevate hands-on learning with Kubernetes: Summer of Kubernetes and the Ambassador Community Advocate program.

“Kubernetes has become an industry-standard and organizations are now faced with a dizzying ecosystem of cloud native open source tools. To deal with increasingly complex tool sprawl, companies have resorted to gluing together various homegrown systems to improve the Kubernetes developer experience,” said Richard Li, the CEO and founder of Ambassador Labs. “A modern developer control plane is necessary to accelerate Kubernetes adoption with less complexity and our mission is to put one in the hands of every developer and at the heart of every organization.” 

DCP is now available as a managed solution that integrates the Service Catalog, source control, Kubernetes and key CNCF technologies in a new UI.

Also, Telepresence now runs in more places with support for container-based continuous integration systems, macOS and Linux. 

The new platform can also be used to manage canary releases to quickly and safely ship updates since DCP is powered by the open-source project Argo and can integrate into existing GitOps workflows. 

Contributors to Emissary-ingress, a CNCF Incubation project, now benefit from an overhauled contribution, release, and testing process, according to the company in a post that contains additional details. 

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The new App Store Small Business Program will benefit the vast majority of developers who sell digital goods and services on the store, providing them with a reduced commission on paid apps and in-app purchases, according to Apple. It is expected to launch at the beginning of 2021. 

“Apps have taken on new importance as businesses adapt to a virtual world during the pandemic, and many small businesses have launched or dramatically grown their digital presence in order to continue to reach their customers and communities,” Apple wrote in a post. “The program’s reduced commission means small developers and aspiring entrepreneurs will have more resources to invest in and grow their businesses in the App Store ecosystem.”

Existing developers who made up to $1 million in 2020 for all of their apps, as well as developers new to the App Store, can qualify for the program and the reduced commission. This is half of the standard commission rate that applies for apps selling digital goods and services and making more than $1 million in proceeds. 

At the same time, if a participating developer falls below the $1 million threshold, the standard commission rate will apply for the remainder of the year and if a developer’s business falls below the $1 million threshold in a future calendar year, they can requalify for the 15% commission the year after. 

“The App Store has been an engine of economic growth like none other, creating millions of new jobs and a pathway to entrepreneurship accessible to anyone with a great idea. Our new program carries that progress forward — helping developers fund their small businesses, take risks on new ideas, expand their teams, and continue to make apps that enrich people’s lives,” said Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. 

Additional details are available here.

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