All About the Developers

This week, SD Times turns its light on developers – their jobs, their roles, and the way they work.

One of the top-trending articles on the site gives developers a list of questions to ask before joining a new project team or taking a new job. These questions will help developers get to the crux of the matter: Is the team they’re joining effective?

While there are no magic metrics that can quantify effectiveness, these questions will help developers gain a deeper understanding into how the new organization works.

Developers in the cloud

A recent survey of developers found that just about half lack an understanding of serverless computing, but growth opportunities and salary rank high in the things they want out of their jobs. According to an article in SD Times, 

the number one reason developers leave their jobs is because of a lack of training and opportunities to work in new technologies. Immediately following were pay concerns, poor leadership and outdated technologies.

The study also found that about half of all developers responding to the survey are using containers. As IT organizations continue to see the time and cost savings of breaking applications down to small, interchangeable bits of logic, functionality and data.

Twenty years of open source

In its July issue, SD Times looks at the history of open source, from the early efforts of pioneers such as Richard Stallman (GNU, free Software ) up to popular projects today such as Angular JS, node, Git and Kubernetes. SD Times editor-in-chief David Rubinstein shares his introduction to the open-source community and looks at some of the seminal moments in the movement in his latest column and declares that open source has won. 

We see it with the embrace of open source by longtime community arch-rival Microsoft, which was scorned for being the antithesis of open source by trying to lock users in to its operating system, its database, its developer tools and more. Today, Microsoft is a major contributor to many open-source projects and though its recently announced acquisition of GitHub sent some shock-waves through a still skeptical open-source community, 

Microsoft appears to be setting itself up as a proper steward. As reported in SDTimes, “As part of the acquisition, GitHub will continue to focus on developers. Microsoft corporate vice president and founder of Xamarin, Nat Friedman, will become the new GitHub CEO. GitHub’s current CEO Chris Wanstrath will become a Microsoft technical fellow, reporting to executive vice president Scott Guthrie.

“So as we look to the next decade of software development and beyond, we know it’s all about the developer. And as we’ve gotten to know the team at Microsoft over the past few years through collaborating on projects from Git LFS to Electron, we’ve learned that they agree. Their work on open source has inspired us, the success of the Minecraft and LinkedIn acquisitions has shown us they are serious about growing new businesses well, and the growth of Azure has proven they are an innovative development platform,” Wanstrath wrote in a blog post.