ISSUE 290: Time for a Survey

“The whole trend here is a lot of the stuff is just shifting closer to where a developer does their normal programming.”

Google’s open source program certainly has come a long way since 2003. That was when the search engine giant could still arguably be called a startup, Android had not yet been acquired, and open source projects Kubernetes, Go and Chromium were years away in the making.

It was also then that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin asked their favorite recruiter to go and find an “open source person,” recounted Chris DiBona, the company’s director for open source.

Already an open source pioneer before joining Google, DiBona continues to oversee the tech giant’s open source program, which continues to have major implications for the IT industry and the open source community.

In this New Stack Makers podcast, DiBona discusses Google’s open source policy, as well as the search engine giant’s plans for its open source future.

Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this podcast.

Time for a Survey

It’s that time of year again when we ask our readers to tell us how we can better serve you and to share what topics and trends are on your minds. Please take five minutes to complete our reader survey. We will carefully review your responses, which will help us decide where to expand and improve our coverage of cutting-edge, at-scale technologies.

This year was an exciting year of growth for The New Stack, with the addition of Editors Heather Joslyn and Darryl Taft and Digital Media Producer Jason Sotomayor to the team. We’ve expanded our coverage of frontend development, workplace culture, and engineering careers and brought you live reporting from KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, and many other events.

More companies than ever have also signed on to support our journalism and add their voices and knowledge to the discussion, and we’ve grown our support team for them as well. Steve Albright has joined us as director of business systems & engineering and Kara Saunders is our new account manager.

In 2022 The New Stack is preparing for another big year of growth with support from our partner and parent company, Insight Partners. We are excited about the potential benefit this brings to our readers and listeners. As we scale, we’ll be looking to you for guidance and feedback on what matters most to your careers and interests.

We cannot do any of this without you — our readers, listeners, sources, guests, and sponsors. Please take the survey and let us know how we’re doing and what you’d like to see from us next year.

So, please take our survey when you can.

Microsoft Goes Deep on Java with JCP Membership

Microsoft continues to extend its commitment to the Java language and platform to better enable Java developers to build on Microsoft platforms, particularly its Azure cloud. The software giant recently signed the Java Specification Participation Agreement, known as JSPA, to officially join the Java Community Process (JCP).

Expand Your ML Models with Transfer Learning

You might be in the middle of training a model and then the business problem shifts. Now you have this model that has been going through the training process with a specific dataset and you need to adapt the model to handle this new problem. This is where transfer learning comes in, and contributor Milecia McGregor shares all the details on how to make it work.

Grafana Wants to ‘Democratize’ Cloud Native Metrics

The open source observability dashboard Grafana has supplemented with some new, long-awaited capabilities that are worth a second look, including enterprise features such as improved control for access and permissions. B. Cameron Gain gives us the lowdown.