Weekly Links: December 7, 2020

Software Development

Developers Are Less Happy Than Regular People

We developers aren’t really sure yet if we even count as “people”. Let’s assume we do. Then we score 61 on the global happiness index, compared to 65 for the average OECD citizen. Says who? Honeypot, “Europe’s developer-focused job platform”. Great name, guys: In computer security, a honeypot is a way to fight criminals. 🤦🏻‍

Unsurprisingly, developers are slightly happier at the beginning of their careers. If you only knew… Surprising to me: Female developers are slightly happier than their male colleagues. Maybe that happier outlook on life is one reason why women tend to live longer than men (it’s 4.5 years in my home country)? Guys, if it’s any consolation: They spend a good chunk of that time waiting for a restroom! 😏 I’m sorry, but I couldn’t resist.

The 2020 State of the Octoverse

Github has 56 million developers and expects 100 million by 2025. More nuggets from the annual report: Java is still the number three language on Github, after JavaScript and Python (which overtook us 2019). North America still has the highest number of active users, but it was the only region with a decline in that number (now at 34%, 2.6% less than last year). And Saturday has the least amount of Git pushes across the world.

Releases

GraalVM 20.3

GraalVM turns Java programs into fast & small native applications. This new version is more container-aware. Aren’t we all?! It also uses less memory, so it’s more light-weight. Don’t we all want to be?! As usual, there’s a free Community Edition. And if you want more speed, you have to pay Oracle for the Enterprise edition.

Quarkus 1.10

The most humble Spring Boot competitor (“Supersonic Subatomic Java”) makes just small waves this time around: Some changes to defaults, multiple reactive data sources, improvements for Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, some odds and ends. Well, you can’t be supersonic every time, right?!