Microsoft Azure AI gains new LLMs, governance features
Microsoft today at its annual Build conference introduced several updates to Azure AI, the company’s cloud-based platform for building and running AI applications. Azure AI competes with similar offerings from rival cloud providers such as AWS, Google, and IBM. The updates include the addition of new governance features, new large language models (LLMs), and Azure […]
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GitLab unveils GitLab 17, AI for devsecops
GitLab has unveiled GitLab 17, a major update of its devsecops platform that brings a CI/CD catalog of reusable pipeline components and an AI impact dashboard. The company also announced GitLab Duo Enterprise, an AI-powered assistant that helps detect vulnerabilities in code and resolve CI/CD bottlenecks. GitLab Duo Enterprise, the subject of a virtual launch […]
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10 more bad programming habits we secretly love
We all know the thrill of bending the rules, or even breaking them. Maybe it’s going 56 in a 55-MPH zone, or letting the parking meter expire. Maybe it’s dividing two numbers without testing to see if the denominator is zero. Programmers have a weird relationship with rules. On one hand, code is just a […]
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Understanding the generative AI development process
Back in the ancient days of machine learning, before you could use large language models (LLMs) as foundations for tuned models, you essentially had to train every possible machine learning model on all of your data to find the best (or least bad) fit. By ancient, I mean prior to the seminal paper on the […]
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Grafana: Shining a light into Kubernetes clusters
Back in 2014, when the wave of containers, Kubernetes, and distributed computing was breaking over the technology industry, Torkel Ödegaard was working as a platform engineer at eBay Sweden. Like other devops pioneers, Ödegaard was grappling with the new form factor of microservices and containers and struggling to climb the steep Kubernetes operations and troubleshooting […]
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SQL at 50: What’s next for the structured query language?
In May 1974, Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce published a paper on SEQUEL, a structured query language that could be used to manage and sort data. After a change in title due to another company’s copyright on the word SEQUEL, Structured Query Language (SQL) was taken up by database companies like Oracle alongside their new-fangled […]
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DuckDB: The tiny but powerful analytics database
Most people assume that analytical databases, or OLAPs, are big, powerful beasts—and they are correct. Systems like Snowflake, Redshift, or Postgres involve a lot of setup and maintenance, even in their cloud-hosted incarnations. But what if all you want is “just enough” analytics for a dataset on your desktop? In that case, DuckDB is worth […]
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Visual Studio vs. Visual Studio Code: How to choose
For decades, when I got to work in the morning, I would start Microsoft Visual Studio (or one of its predecessors, such as Visual C++ or Visual InterDev), then brew tea and possibly attend a morning meeting while it went through its laborious startup. I would keep the IDE open all day as I went […]
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10 principles for creating a great developer experience
About a decade ago, I was a CIO evaluating a technology solution and I shared our primary requirements with a prospective vendor’s rep. He demoed at least three products from the company’s portfolio. Each tool had its own user experience, development approach, and learning requirements, but all three were needed to solve our business requirements. […]
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Red Hat’s Podman AI Lab supports developer adoption of genAI
Red Hat has unveiled Podman AI Lab, an extension to the Podman Desktop graphical interface that lets developers build generative AI-powered applications in containers. Announced May 7, Podman AI Lab is intended to make it easier to develop with AI in a local environment. The Podman AI Lab extension supports the adoption of generative AI […]
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