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How will you be celebrating Pie Day? Plus news from GitHub, WordPress, Google and more.

This Sunday is March 14th, which means people around the world will be celebrating Pie Day (3.14, get it?) You can join the bandwagon and go for an actual pie 🍒🍅 or have a fun challenge, like this one by ProtoPie: a Pie Day Playoff with chances to win tech and subscriptions.

Let's not forget, Monday March 8th saw the celebration of International Women's Day. Our survey data shows that there was a jump from 14% to 20% in the past six months in terms of how many women are involved in software development. Can't wait to see it go to 50/50!

Here's our latest news and articles that feature in this weeks newsletter.

Dev Resources & Articles

Do I really need Kubernetes? This article tries to look beyond the hype and help you answer the question: do I actually need Kubernetes? [CONTENTLAB]

How to review code for vulnerabilities. Performing a code review helps find vulnerabilities in applications. Static analysis is the most efficient way of uncovering most vulnerabilities in your applications. [DZONE]

How DevOps will change now that remote working is here to stay. The primary focus of DevOps is to establish smooth, secure, and effective performance and collaboration — something all businesses need right now. [DZONE]

[VIDEO] The error of our ways. What happens when things break? What happens when software fails? We regard it as a normal and personal inconvenience when apps crash or servers become unavailable, but what are the implications beyond the individual user? [YOUTUBE]

What's an NFT? And why are people suddenly spending millions on them? Sports leagues, artists and speculative investors pouring money into non-fungible tokens. [CBC]

SQ. A free/libre open-source swiss-army knife to inspect, query, join, import, and export data. [SQ]

Obscure mobile design techniques that boost UX. To inspire mobile designers, here's some clever design solutions to tackle mobile navigation, confirmation dialogs, animations, and gamifying the waiting experience. [SMASHING.MAGAZINE]

How Microsoft is making Windows a better developer platform. Microsoft has been revamping Windows to make it more attractive to developers. What has it done, and why? [TECHREPUBLIC]

How to measure developer productivity (and how not to). If you’re using software development productivity metrics to evaluate developer performance, then you’re doing it wrong. For best results, tie them to business outcomes. [ARN]

Why developers procrastinate (and how to stop). Procrastination is an age-old struggle — and not just for developers. But people who do knowledge work are especially prone to it, because of how mental blocks can severely impact their work. [7PACE]

Can you beat 1024 bytes of JavaScript at Chess? A chess program that will baffle and destroy all but the most competent players. And all while a digitized Beth Harmon stares you down. [VICE]

Developers: stop writing these comments! There is technically no right or wrong when it comes to comments, but comments can have a big impact on efficiency. They can make developers’ lives much easier. Let’s take a look at some day-to-day comments and see how we can improve them. [ITNEXT]

Multiple views on how to choose a visualization. Most quick reference guides advise you which visualization to use based on what you want people to see in the data. That’s tougher at the analysis stage, when you don’t yet know what’s there to see. [MEDIUM]

The future of web software Is HTML-over-WebSockets. The future of web-based software architectures is already taking form, and this time it’s server-rendered (again). Papa’s got a brand new bag: HTML-over-WebSockets and broadcast everything all the time. [ALISTAPART]

Here are some app ideas you can build to level up your coding skills. Have you ever wanted to build something but you had no idea what to do? Here is a collection of application ideas which is intended to solve this issue once and for all! [MEDIUM]

Industry News

GitHub fixes bug causing users to log into other accounts. Earlier this month GitHub had received a report of anomalous behaviour from an external party. The anomalous behavior stemmed from a rare race condition vulnerability in which a GitHub user's login session was misrouted to the web browser of another logged-in user, giving the latter an authenticated session cookie of and access to the former user's account. [BLEEPINGCOMPUTER]

Leaked development secrets a major issue for repositories. Every day, more than 5,000 private keys, database connection strings, certificates, and passwords are leaked to GitHub repositories, putting applications at risk. [DARKREADING]

WordPress 5.7 launches with One-Click HTTP to HTTPS conversion. WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza” is now available, which allows site owners to convert from HTTP to HTTPS with a single click. Named after musician Esperanza Spalding, the first WordPress release of 2021 offers features such as an easier to use editor and the ability to accomplish more without writing custom code. A full list of the new features can be read in the article. [SEARCHENGINEJOURNAL]

.NET Core 2.1 to reach end support August 21, 2021. Microsoft announced that NET Core 2.1 will be reaching end of support on August 21, 2021. After this date there will be no more updates and security fixes. In case your application uses NET Core 2.1, Microsoft strongly recommended that you migrate your application to a supported version – .NET 3.1 or later. [C-SHARPCORNER]

Roblox goes public at $41.9 billion valuation in direct listing. Here's one developers view on Roblox: Yonathan Raz-Fridman, the CEO of Supersocial, believes enough in Roblox that he has created a development studio to make games for Roblox. While Roblox has eight million creators and 1.25 million who have made money from making games, Raz-Fridman is betting that bigger studios can raise the quality bar and provide better experiences inside the world of Roblox than outside of it. [VENTUREBEAT]

Here's a deep business analysis of the Roblox platform.

Dropbox to acquire secure document sharing startup DocSend for $165M. When combined with the electronic signature capability of HelloSign, which Dropbox acquired in 2019, the acquisition gives the company an end-to-end document-sharing workflow it had been missing. “Dropbox, DocSend and HelloSign will be able to offer a full suite of self-serve products to help our millions of customers manage the entire critical document workflows and give more control over all aspects of that,” says Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. [TECHCRUNCH]

Google announces Flutter 2. With Flutter 2, you can use the same codebase to ship native apps to five operating systems: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux; as well as web experiences targeting browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge. Flutter can even be embedded in cars, TVs, and smart home appliances, providing the most pervasive and portable experience for an ambient computing world. [DEVELOPERS.GOOGLE]

OVH datacenter disaster shows why recovery plans and backups are vital. Despite all the benefits that cloud computing brings to the table, companies are still putting all their trust in a third-party’s infrastructure, which is why having a robust disaster recovery plan — including data backups — is so important. [VENTUREBEAT]

Introducing Relay Hooks: Improved React APIs for Relay. The rewritten Facebook.com is entirely powered by Relay Hooks, and these APIs have been the recommended way to use Relay at Facebook since mid-2019. The Hooks APIs were written in close collaboration with the React Core team, with the future of React in mind, and have proved themselves popular, stable and successful. [DEVELOPERS.FACEBOOK]

Java 16 goes GA on March 16 includes 17 enhancements. The general availability (GA) release of the Java 16 Platform (Java SE 16) and the Oracle Java Development Kit (Oracle JDK) is set for March 16. Oracle JDK 16 will be a short-term support release, which will be obsolete after the Long Term Support (LTS) release of Java 17 in September, but it comes with a long list of enhancements and upgrades. [ATDMAG]

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