This Week in Programming: Who’s Headed to KubeCon?
A little over a month ago now, with the Delta variant spreading rapidly across the U.S. and filling up ICUs, we wondered if the canceled AWS re:Inforce conference would be just the first of many dominoes to fall. While the future seemed uncertain, (isn’t that a blanket statement of the past two years?) the mass cancellation that we saw in early 2020 never came to repeat itself.
Being The New Stack, we were, of course, particularly interested in the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America taking place in mid-October in Los Angeles. Well, here we are just a few weeks out, and it would appear all systems are go… but are you going to be there?
I am ready to see other humans besides my children. #KubeCon
— Andrew Rynhard (@andrewrynhard) September 22, 2021
While the show will still go on, it does look like this year’s KubeCon+CloudNativeCon will be a little, shall we say, light in terms of in-person attendance. The conference is requiring that all attendees show proof of vaccination, but that doesn’t seem to be an inhibitor to attendance so much as a remaining weariness around gathering indoors in large crowds, paired with a continued travel ban.
Today it is a sad day, I am cancelling my flight and hotel reservation for @KubeCon_ as the travel ban will not be lifted in time. I will miss meeting you all @n3wscott @e_k_anderson @AikasVille and the rest of the amazing @KnativeProject community that is attending!
— Mauricio Salatino (@salaboy) September 21, 2021
A recent Twitter thread showed that a number of names you would otherwise expect at Kubernetes’ yearly event, including Joe Beda, one of the Kubernetes creators, would not be attending for precisely this set of reasons. Corroborating that fact, Priyanka Sharma, the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently told The New Stack that indeed in-person attendance would be less than usual at this year’s conference, likely topping out at around 4,000 instead of the nearly 12,000 that attended in 2019.
For those of you who are attending the show, there will be your usual variety of parties, co-located events, and talks, although some of those will even be virtual while in-person, and even a post-conference trip to Disneyland.
AFAIK containers provide sufficient isolation from COVID-19, you should be safe
— MissTime 41 |🏳️🌈🎗🎀🟣|she/her (@MTime41) September 23, 2021
This Week in Programming
- Google Adds Running Code to Google Cloud Docs: Once upon a time, the Web was a rather static experience, but those days are long gone, as IDEs and such move into the browser with increasing frequency. One further example of this is Google’s new ability to run code directly from Google Cloud’s documentation, with the addition of a Cloud Shell integration “within each and every documentation page” that “lets you test code in a preprovisioned virtual machine instance while learning about Google Cloud services.” To use the feature, you will have to activate billing verification with your Google Cloud account, but you will be able to test “services that have a free tier at no charge, like Pub/Sub and Cloud Vision.”
- GitHub’s Security Features Just a First Step for Rust & npm: GitHub made two announcements this week — added support for Rust in the GitHub Advisory Database and a new npm access token format — both of which GitHub project manager Grey Baker said on Twitter were “a sign of things to come.” Where they stand now, the addition of Rust means that Rust developers can more easily check for security issues on GitHub, and the new npm access token format makes it so that they are easier to spot and means GitHub secret scanning can find and automatically revoke any leaked npm token using the new format. Moving forward, however, Baker said that the addition of Rust “is a first step to full Rust support in our supply chain features — Dependency Graph and Dependabot support are coming next.” The new npm access token format, meanwhile, will “let us do more than remediate leaks, though — early next year we’ll start allowing Advanced Security users to prevent them by rejecting pushes that include identifiable credentials (with an easy override experience)” and moreover “tees us up to make npm credential leaks a thing of the past in the near future.”
My love language is removing tracking parts from URLs before sharing them.
— Sameera (@SamKap) September 21, 2021
- Microsoft Looks at “The Future of Visual Studio Extensibility”: The march continues toward the release of Visual Studio 2022, with Preview 4 being released last week, and Microsoft writes this week that the future of Visual Studio Extensibility is here. The blog post looks at “several exciting extensibility updates that are either available now or on the horizon,” including a public VSExtensibility repo that will host extension-related announcements, code samples, and documentation on preview features. As you might already know, Visual Studio 2022 will be 64-bit and extensions will need to be migrated using the VS 2022 extension migration guidance. Other new features highlighted in the post include an expanded language server protocol (LSP) and the addition of the Visual Studio Community Toolkit, a set of project templates, API wrappers, and productivity tools that “provide a simpler, streamlined experience for writing extensions in Visual Studio.” Finally, Visual Studio 2022 also introduces the new, Out-of-Proc Extensibility Model, which means that Visual Studio will be able to load extensions out-of-process, allowing for “more reliable extensions that won’t cause Visual Studio to hang or crash.”
- IBM Introduces an API Developer Playground: Earlier this year, IBM introduced the IBM API Hub, giving developers access to the company’s numbers APIs, and now the company has launched a new API developer playground where developers “play with the APIs within a free playground environment.” The Developer Playground is in beta and gives developers “a web IDE environment, where you can get the source code and configure, build, and run the app within minutes.” For the interested, IBM says offered a hands-on workshop at the Hybrid Cloud 2021 Digital Developer Conference.
- Google Intros a “Wikipedia-Based Image-Text Dataset”: Last up, for you machine learning aficionados out there, Google has introduced the Wikipedia-Based Image Text (WIT) Dataset, a large multimodal dataset, “created by extracting multiple different text selections associated with an image from Wikipedia articles and Wikimedia image links.” According to the blog post, datasets such as this are normally created either by manually captioning images or via web crawling and extracting alt-texts, but each presents its own difficulties. By comparison, Wikipedia proved to offer accurate information on a broad variety of topics and in 108 languages. WIT, they write, “is the largest multimodal dataset of image-text examples that is publicly available” and has “10x or more languages than any other dataset.”
