Roundup of the Latest in Coding News
What do security, time management, and collaboration have in common? They all happen to be the big themes that stand out in this roundup of coding news.
Think about Security during Development
Let’s say you just came up with a groundbreaking idea for a new app, and you can’t wait to start coding in order to launch the project. Before you get too excited about all that fame and fortune in store for you, maybe you should slow down and think about security.
According to Howard Schmidt, former cyber tsar to President Barack Obama, with the rise of hacking, computer espionage, and the increasing need to rush out products in a competitive marketplace, cyber security has fallen by the wayside, as The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
One way to counteract this lack of security is to make sure that when you begin developing, you take into account potential security issues by following a “relatively new security standard for software development, ISO 27034.” Tech bigwigs Microsoft, Adobe, and Cisco are all supporting this new standard, which emphasizes integrating security into a product’s early development stages rather than introducing security when issues eventually begin to sprout.
From The Sydney Morning Herald: "The theory goes that the need for fast release of software applications is outstripping developers' capacity to identify and fix bugs, or vulnerabilities, in time for deployment."
Waiting Is the Hardest Part
Do you find yourself sitting in front of your computer, daydreaming or dilly-dallying while you wait for code to finish compiling? You are not alone. ReadWrite describes a recent survey by Sunnyvale-based Electric Cloud that says developers spend 20 percent of their time in purgatory...er, I mean waiting.
From ReadWrite: "It turns out, at least according to a survey conducted by software delivery service Electric Cloud, that developers spend almost 20% of their time... waiting. Waiting for their code to compile (that is, for it to be translated from a programming language like Python or C into a binary machine language computers can execute). Waiting for test routines to finish running."
Electric Cloud has reportedly received 1,200 responses to its survey, which the company sent out to LinkedIn groups and forums relevant to coders and engineers.
How GitHub Uses Itself for Collaboration
Online source code repository GitHub is once again on a roll, only this time, the organization itself is benefiting from community collaboration. Michelle Juergen of Entrepreneur reports on how GitHub’s co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner recently pinged users for their expertise in developing “a new type of data format.” Two days later, “hundreds of contributions to the project had been made.”
This anecdote is a nice segue into how GitHub operates. For those that might not be aware, GitHub is essentially “an open-source revision-control system that manages and stores multiple versions of a project, and improves upon the system with an online interface, access control and the ability to see users' profiles and project history.”
