Tech News - Application Development

Yesterday, Fastly, a US-based cloud computing service provider, open-sourced its native WebAssembly compiler and runtime, Lucet. Lucet is built on top of Cranelift, Mozilla’s low-level retargetable code generator. It already powers Fastly’s Terrarium project, their experimental platform for edge computation using WebAssembly, and now it is coming to their edge cloud platform as well. How does Lucet work? Lucet delegates the responsibility of executing WebAssembly programs into two components: compiler and runtime. The compiler compiles WebAssembly modules to native code and the runtime manages resources and traps runtime faults. As it uses ahead-of-time compilation strategy, it simplifies the design and overhead of the runtime compared to just-in-time (JIT) compilation that browser engines use. What are its advantages? Faster and safer execution of WebAssembly programs WebAssembly allows web browsers to safely execute programs with near-native performance. It is supported by some of the most commonly used browsers including Google, Mozilla, and Safari. With Lucet, Fastly aims to take WebAssembly “beyond the browser” by providing users a platform for faster and safer execution of programs on Fastly’s edge cloud. More languages to choose from Since WebAssembly is supported by an impressive list of programming languages including Rust, TypeScript, C, and C++, Lucet users will be able to work with the language they prefer. They do not have to be restricted to Fastly’s Varnish Configuration Language (VCL). Simultaneous execution of programs The Lucet compiler and runtime ensure that each WebAssembly program is allocated its own resources. This enables Fastly’s edge cloud to simultaneously execute a large number of WebAssembly programs without compromising on security. Supports WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) Lucet supports WASI, an API that provides access to various operating-system-like features. These include files and filesystems, Berkeley sockets, clocks, and random numbers. At the moment, Lucet supports running WebAssembly programs written in C, Rust, and AssemblyScript and its runtime only support x86-64 based Linux systems. To read the official announcement, visit Fastly’s official website. Introducing CT-Wasm, a type-driven extension to WebAssembly for secure, in-browser cryptography Creating and loading a WebAssembly module with Emscripten’s glue code [Tutorial] The elements of WebAssembly – Wat and Wasm, explained [Tutorial]

Earlier this month, Uber open-sourced Pelton, a unified resource scheduler that manages resources across distinct workloads. Pelton, first introduced in November last year, is built on top of Mesos. “By allowing others in the cluster management community to leverage unified schedulers and workload co-location, Peloton will open the door for more efficient resource utilization and management across the community”, states the Uber team. Peloton is designed for web-scale companies such as Uber that consist of millions of containers and tens of thousands of nodes. Peloton comes with advanced resource management capabilities such as elastic resource sharing, hierarchical max-min fairness, resource overcommits, and workload preemption. Peloton uses Mesos to aggregate resources from different hosts and then further launch tasks as Docker containers. Peloton also makes use of hierarchical resource pools to manage elastic and cluster-wide resources more efficiently. Before Peloton was released, each workload at Uber comprised its own cluster which resulted in various inefficiencies. However, with Peloton, mixed workloads can be colocated in shared clusters for better resource utilization. Peloton feature highlights Elastic Resource Sharing: Peloton supports hierarchical resource pools that help elastically share resources among different teams. Resource Overcommit and Task Preemption: Peloton helps with improving cluster utilization by scheduling workloads that use slack resources. Optimized for Big Data Workloads:  Support has been provided for advanced Apache Spark features such as dynamic resource allocation. Optimized for Machine Learning: There is support provided for GPU and Gang scheduling for TensorFlow and Horovod. High Scalability: Users can scale to millions of containers and tens of thousands of nodes. “Open sourcing Peloton will enable greater industry collaboration and open up the software to feedback and contributions from industry engineers, independent developers, and academics across the world”, states the Uber team. Uber and Lyft drivers strike in Los Angeles Uber and GM Cruise are open sourcing their Automation Visualization Systems Uber releases Ludwig, an open source AI toolkit that simplifies training deep learning models for non-experts

Yesterday, the team at Kubernetes released Kubernetes 1.14, a new update to the popular open-source container orchestration system. Kubernetes 1.14 comes with support for Windows nodes, kubectl plugin mechanism, Kustomize integration, and much more. https://twitter.com/spiffxp/status/1110319044249309184 What’s new in Kubernetes 1.14? Support for Windows Nodes This release comes with added support for Windows nodes as worker nodes. Kubernetes now schedules Windows containers and enables a vast ecosystem of Windows applications. With this release, enterprises with investments can easily manage their workloads and operational efficiencies across their deployments, regardless of the operating systems. Kustomize integration With this release, the declarative resource config authoring capabilities of kustomize are now available in kubectl through the -k flag. Kustomize helps the users in authoring and reusing resource config using Kubernetes native concepts. kubectl plugin mechanism This release comes with kubectl plugin mechanism that allows developers to publish their own custom kubectl subcommands in the form of standalone binaries. PID Administrators can now provide pod-to-pod PID (Process IDs) isolation by defaulting the number of PIDs per pod. Pod priority and preemption in this release enables Kubernetes scheduler to schedule important pods first and remove the less important pods to create room for more important ones. Users are generally happy and excited about this release. https://twitter.com/fabriziopandini/status/1110284805411872768 A user commented on HackerNews, “The inclusion of Kustomize[1] into kubectl is a big step forward for the K8s ecosystem as it provides a native solution for application configuration. Once you really grok the pattern of using overlays and patches, it starts to feel like a pattern that you'll want to use everywhere” To know more about this release in detail, check out Kubernetes’ official announcement. RedHat’s OperatorHub.io makes it easier for Kuberenetes developers and admins to find pre-tested ‘Operators’ for applications Microsoft open sources ‘Accessibility Insights for Web’, a chrome extension to help web developers fix their accessibility issues Microsoft open sources the Windows Calculator code on GitHub  

Yesterday, the team at Redox released Redox OS 0.5.0, a Unix like operating system written in Rust. The team has added important programs and libraries to this release. What’s new in Redox OS 0.50? Cairo This release comes with Cairo, a 2D graphics library that supports multiple output devices. It produces consistent output on all output media and takes advantage of display hardware acceleration when available. It is implemented as a library which is written in the C programming language, while the bindings are available for various programming languages. relibc Redox OS 0.50 features relibc, a portable POSIX C standard library which is written in Rust and supports Redox and Linux. It reduces the issues with newlib and further creates a safer alternative to a C standard library. It has been designed to be used under redox, as an alternative to newlib. Event system The event system has been redesigned for providing support for select and poll. This release comes with new packages added to the Cookbook as well as for memory mapping support implemented in it. Standard images This release comes with new images based on new bootloaders for coreboot and EFI. The team has worked towards providing libraries for EFI Rust development and for developing coreboot payloads in Rust. LLVM This release also features the LLVM Project which is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies. The LLVM Core libraries come with a target-independent optimizer and a code generation support for popular CPUs.          GLib This version of Redox OS comes with GLib which is the low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK+ and GNOME.                   Pixman Redox OS 0.50 comes with Pixman that is a low-level software library for pixel manipulation that features image compositing and trapezoid rasterization. Orbital widget toolkit This release comes with Orbital Widget Toolkit which is a multi-platform GUI toolkit for building user interfaces with Rust. This toolkit is based on the entity component system pattern which provides a functional-reactive API. It provides fast performance and ease over cross-platform development. Few users are happy and excited about this release and are appreciating the Redox team. A user commented on HackerNews, “Congrats on getting another release out the door! I was beginning to fear that momentum was stalling in lieu of PopOS. Keep up the great work!” The developer of Redox OS shared that there are still security concerns in the kernel with regards to memory management. He commented, “There are a couple known security issues in the kernel regarding memory management. One is that memory is granted in pages, so buffers passed to a scheme are over-mapped for the process handling it. You have to be root to handle a scheme, so it was not a high severity issue.” He further added that there are concerns with the grants which can be dropped by owning process and highlighted that more kernel work is needed. He commented, “Another is that grants can be dropped by the owning process while in use by another process. This can lead to the re-allocation of said grants in the owning process, making memory accessible to the other users of the grant. More kernel work is needed to prevent schemes from leaking data in this manner.” To know more about this news in detail, check out Redox’s official announcement. Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support LLVM 8.0.0 releases! JUnit 5.4 released with an aggregate artifact for reducing your Maven and Gradle files  

Last week, Wednesday marked the first major milestone for Fyne, which is a cross-platform GUI written in Go. Fyne 1.0 uses OpenGL to provide cross-platform graphics and the entire toolkit is developed using scalable graphics. The Fyne toolkit communicates with operating system graphics using OpenGL, which is supported on almost all desktop and laptop systems. To do this, it relies on the built-in functionality of Cgo, the C language bridge for Go. For packaging, it uses fyne package command to generate and package all the required metadata for an application to distribute on macOS, Linux, or Windows. By default, it will build an application bundle for the current platform, which can be used in part of a cross-compilation workflow. What’s new in Fyne 1.0? Canvas API (rect, line, circle, text, image) Widget API (box, button, check, entry, form, group, hyperlink, icon, label, progress bar, radio, scroller, tabs, and toolbar) Light and dark themes Pointer, key and shortcut APIs (generic and desktop extension) OpenGL driver for Linux, macOS, and Windows Tools for embedding data and packaging releases Currently, the release only supports desktop applications. For more info, read Fyne’s blog. You may also check out Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go to learn more about Go programming. Introducing Web High-Level Shading Language (WHLSL): A graphics shading language for WebGPU State of Go February 2019 – Golang developments report for this month released Golang just celebrated its ninth anniversary

PyPy team released version 7.1 of PyPy, a fast and compliant Python Interpreter, yesterday. PyPy 7.1 explores new features, improvements, and other changes. PyPy 7.1 supports x86 machines on common operating systems (Linux 32/64 bits, Mac OS X 64 bits, Windows 32 bits, OpenBSD, FreeBSD), ARM32,  s390x running Linux, etc. What’s new in PyPy 7.1? PyPy 7.1 comes with two different interpreters, namely, PyPy2.7 (an interpreter that supports the syntax and features of Python 2.7) and PyPy3.6-beta (second official release of PyPy that supports 3.6 features). The latest release finally merges the internal refactoring of unicode representation as UTF-8. Users can remove the conversions from strings to unicode internally, thus leading to a nice speed bump. The UTF-8 changes have been merged to the py3.5 branch (Python3.5.3). The ability to use the buffer protocol with ctype structures and arrays has been improved in PyPy 7.1. The CFFI (C Foreign Function Interface) backend has been updated to version 1.12.2 in PyPy 7.1. Users can use CFFI as opposed to the c-extensions to interact with C and cppyy to interact with C++ code. PyPy team states that they need help from the contributors in case of PyPy and RPython documentation improvements, for tweaking popular modules to run on pypy, and general help with making RPython’s JIT even better. For more information, check out the official PyPy 7.1 release notes. PyPy 7.0 released for Python 2.7, 3.5, and 3.6 alpha Python 3.8 alpha 2 is now available for testing Python steering council election results are out for January 2019

GNU team released version 4.0 of their GNU Nano, a text editor for Unix-like computing systems that use command line interface, yesterday. GNU Nano 4.0 explores new changes and improvements. GNU Nano 4.0 release has been named as “Thy Rope of Sands”. What’s new in GNU Nano 4.0? The overlong line that used to get automatically hard-wrapped has been fixed in GNU Nano 4.0. Smooth scrolling has become the default in GNU Nano 4.0. No newline character will be added automatically at end of buffer. Option --breaklonglines (-b) can easily turn the automatic hard-wrapping back on. Other pption --jumpyscrolling (-j) provides the chunky, half-screen scrolling, and option --emptyline (-e) leaves the line below the title bar unused. <Alt+Up> and <Alt+Down> can now do a linewise scroll instead of a findnext. Option --guidestripe=<number> is now able to draw a vertical bar at the given column in GNU Nano 4.0. In case a line continues offscreen, it will now end with a highlighted ">" in GNU Nano 4.0. The bindable functions such as 'cutwordleft' and 'cutwordright' have been renamed in GNU Nano 4.0. The paragraph-jumping functions have been moved from Search to Go-to-Line. An option --rebinddelete can compensate for more misbindings. The --disable-wrapping-as-root configure option has been removed. For more details on GNU Nano 4.0, check out the official release notes. GNU Octave 5.1.0 releases with new changes and improvements GNU Health Federation message and authentication server drops MongoDB and adopts PostgreSQL GNU Bison 3.3 released with major bug fixes, yyrhs and yyphrs tables, token constructors and more

LLVM team released LLVM 8.0, earlier this week. LLVM is a collection of tools that help develop compiler front ends and back ends. LLVM is written in C++ and has been designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and "idle-time" optimization of programs that are written in arbitrary programming languages. LLVM 8.0 explores known issues, major improvements and other changes in the subprojects of LLVM. There were certain issues in LLVM 8.0.0 that could not be fixed earlier (before this release). For instance, clang is getting miscompiled by trunk GCC, and “asan-dynamic” is not able to work on FreeBSD. Other than the issues, there is a long list of changes that have been made to LLVM 8.0.0. Non-comprehensive changes to LLVM 8.0.0 llvm-cov tool can export lcov trace files with the help of the -format=lcov option of the export command. The add_llvm_loadable_module CMake macro has been deprecated. The add_llvm_library macro with the MODULE argument can now help provide the same functionality. For MinGW, references to data variables that are to be imported from a dll can be now accessed via a stub. This will further allow the linker to convert it to a dllimport if needed. Support has been added for labels as offsets in .reloc directive. Windows support for libFuzzer (x86_64) has also been added. Other Changes LLVM IR:  The Function attribute named speculative_load_hardening has been introduced. This will indicate that Speculative Load Hardening should be enabled for the function body. JIT APIs: ORC (On Request Compilation) JIT APIs will now support concurrent compilation. The existing (non-concurrent) ORC layer classes, as well as the related APIs, have been deprecated. These have been renamed with a “Legacy” prefix (e.g. LegacyIRCompileLayer). All the deprecated classes will be removed in LLVM 9. AArch64 Target: Support has been added for Speculative Load Hardening. Also, initial support added for the Tiny code model, where code and the statically defined symbols should remain within 1MB. MIPS Target: Support forGlobalISel instruction selection framework has been improved. ORC JIT will now offer support for MIPS and MIPS64 architectures. There’s also newly added support for MIPS N32 AB. PowerPC Target: This has now been switched to non-PIC default in LLVM 8.0.0. Darwin support has also been deprecated. Also, Out-of-Order scheduling has been enabled for P9. SystemZ Target: These include various code-gen improvements related to improved auto-vectorization, inlining, as well as the instruction scheduling. Other than these, changes have also been made to X86 target, WebAssembly Target, Nios2 target, and LLDB. For a complete list of changes, check out the official LLVM 8.0.0 release notes. LLVM 7.0.0 released with improved optimization and new tools for monitoring LLVM will be relicensing under Apache 2.0 start of next year LLVM officially migrating to GitHub from Apache SVN

The team at Linux has put in a lot of efforts on Linux RC 5.1. Last week, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, announced that the two-week long merge window for Linux 5.1 is finally coming to an end. The first Release Candidate of Linux kernel 5.1 is finally ready for testing. Let’s have a look at the changes and new features which will be coming in Linux RC 5.1. What’s expected in Linux RC 5.1? Intel graphics With this release, the Intel Fastboot is enabled by default. The Intel graphics driver eliminates unnecessary mode-set operations at boot-time by default. The ones on older Intel graphics can still toggle the feature with the i915.fastboot=1 kernel parameter. Fastboot comes with a clean, flicker-free Linux boot experience. This release comes with Intel HDCP 2.2 support. There is an added support for Coffeelake GVT  for Intel's graphics virtualization tech. Virtual memory support This release comes with Nouveau DRM driver that has heterogeneous memory management hook-ups, which provides shared virtual memory support. This release comes with support for AMDGPU Vega 10/20 BACO and other Vega enhancements. There is a new DRM driver in this release known as the Arm Komeda display driver. Added Support This release comes with Support for the Bitmain SoC as a dual-core A53 combined with a single RISC-V core. This release comes with new Arm support including the Socionext Milbeaut, NXP i.MX8QuadXPlus, and a few Rensas SoCs. New accelerator This release comes with Habana Labs Goya accelerator along with its new driver. A new accelerator subsystem is expected in the Linux kernel. The accelerator is based on AI having open-source, mainline kernel support. Power management This release comes with Icelake PMC core support for dealing with the power management controller registers on the CPUs. To know more about this news in detail, check out Linux Kernel’s mailing list. The Linux Foundation announces the CHIPS Alliance project for deeper open source hardware integration Announcing Linux 5.0! Linux use-after-free vulnerability found in Linux 2.6 through 4.20.11

Yesterday, the team at Google open-sourced Sandboxed API, a tool that Google has been using internally for its data centers for years. It is a project for sandboxing C and C++ libraries running on Linux systems. Google has made the Sandboxed API available on GitHub. Sandboxed API helps coders to automate the process of porting their existing C and C++ code in order to run on top of Sandbox2, which is Google's custom-made sandbox environment for Linux operating systems. Sandbox2 has also been open-sourced and is included with Sandboxed API GitHub repository. Christian Blichmann & Robert Swiecki, from Google's ISE Sandboxing team, said, "Many popular software containment tools might not sufficiently isolate the rest of the OS, and those which do, might require time-consuming redefinition of security boundaries for each and every project that should be sandboxed." The idea behind introducing sandboxing The idea behind sandboxing is to prevent bugs from spreading from one process to another, or the underlying operating system and the kernel. Many software projects process data that are externally generated and potentially could be untrusted. For instance, the conversion of user-provided picture files into different formats or executing user-generated software code. In case, a software library that parses such data is complex, then there is a high possibility that it might fall victim to certain types of security vulnerabilities such as memory corruption bugs or other problems related to the parsing logic. These vulnerabilities can have a serious impact on security. In order to overcome these challenges, developers prefer software isolation method known as sandboxing. With the help of sandboxing methods, developers make sure that only resources such as files, networking connections, and other operating system resources are accessible to the code involved in parsing user-generated content. The team plans to have an added support more operating systems and plans to bring Sandboxed API to the Unix-like systems like the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD) and macOS. Google also aims to bring CMake support to the API. To know more about this news in detail, check out Google’s blog post. Google to be the founding member of CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation) Google announces the stable release of Android Jetpack Navigation #GooglePayoutsForAll: A digital protest against Google’s $135 million execs payout for misconduct

Yesterday, the team at GNOME released the latest version of GNOME 3, GNOME 3.32, a free open-source desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems. This release comes with improvements to desktop, web and much more. What’s new in GNOME 3.32? Fractional Scaling Fractional scaling is available as an experimental option that includes several fractional values with good visual quality on any given monitor. This feature is a major enhancement for the GNOME desktop. It requires manually adding scale-monitor-framebuffer to the settings keyorg.gnome.mutter.experimental-features. Improved data structures in GNOME desktop This release comes with improvements to foundation data structures in the GNOME Desktop for faster and snappier feel to the animations, icons and top shell panel. The search database has been improved which helps in searching faster. Even the on-screen keyboard has been improved, it now supports an emoji chooser. New automation mode in the GNOME Web GNOME Web now comes with a new automation mode which allows the application to be controlled by WebDriver. The reader mode has been enhanced now that features a set of customizable preferences and an improved style. With this release, the touchpad users can now take advantage of more gestures while browsing. For example, swipe left or right to go back or forward through browsing history. New settings for permissions Settings come with a new “Application Permissions” panel that shows resources and permissions for various applications, including installed Flatpak applications. Users can now grant permissions to certain resources when requested by the application. The Sound settings have been enhanced for supporting a vertical layout and an intuitive placement of options. With this release, the night light color temperature can now be adjusted for a warmer or cooler setting. GNOME Boxes GNOME Boxes tries to enable 3D acceleration for virtual machines if both the guest and host support it. This leads to better performance of graphics-intensive guest applications such as games and video editors. Application Management from multiple sources This release can handle apps available from multiple sources, such as Flatpak and distribution repositories. With this release, Flatpak app entries now can list the permissions required on the details page. This will give users a comprehensive understanding of what data the software will need access to. Even browsing application details will get faster now with the new XML parsing library used in this release. To know more about this release, check out the official announcement. GNOME team adds Fractional Scaling support in the upcoming GNOME 3.32 GNOME 3.32 says goodbye to application menus Fedora 29 beta brings Modularity, GNOME 3.30 support and other changes  

Yesterday, the team behind Sublime Text released Sublime Text 3.2, a text editor that comes with Git integration, improved diff markers, new theme functionality and much more. What’s new in Sublime Text 3.2? GIT integration With this release, the files and folders in the sidebar will now display badges for indicating Git status. In this release, the ignored files and folders are de-emphasized. In Sublime Text 3.2, the Git branch and number of modifications are displayed in the status bar. The commands have now been added to open a repository. Now there are few themes that customize the display of sidebar badges and status bar information. A new setting show_git_status has been added that disables Git integration. Improved editor control This release comes with block_caret setting. The positioning and sizing of gutter icons have now been improved. This release comes with improved IME support for Windows and improved input method (IM) support - fcitx, ibus, etc for Linux. Improved diff markers With this release, diff markers now display added, modified and deleted lines. A new setting called mini_diff now controls incremental diff behavior. With the new Git functionality, diffs can now be calculated against HEAD or the index. Few diff-related commands such as Next Modification, Previous Modification, and Revert Modification have been added. Improved files and folders For Windows, the paths are treated as case-sensitive and the unlock directories are closed. Enhanced themes/UI This release comes with added support for variables and revised JSON format with variables key. Performance has been improved with large numbers of rules in a .sublime-theme. Also, support for macOS native tabs has been added. Window placement and resize performance has been improved. API This release comes with View.set_reference_document() and View.reset_reference_document() for controlling diff generation. Phantoms can now be  drawn correctly in conjunction with draw_centered. Major bug fixes In this release, the Goto Symbol in Project has been fixed. The draw_minimap_border setting is now working. Few users are comparing the performance of Sublime Text with VScode as they think VScode is better. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “I hope Sublime steps up their game, as I think VScode is standing on their shoulders, and competition is good.” Few others think that Sublime is the best editor. Another comment reads, “If all I needed was a great text editor, I would use Sublime. It's everything I want in an editor.” To know more about this news, check out Sublime Text’s blog post. Meet Sublime Merge, a new Git client from the makers of Sublime Text Introducing R-Factor, a refactoring tool for React and Redux Typescript 3.3 is finally released!

On Tuesday, Microsoft open sourced its Accessibility tools, allowing developers to easily find and fix common accessibility issues early in the development cycle. This includes Accessibility Insights for Windows and Accessibility Insights for Web, both built on Deque’s open source axe technology. You can run quick tests, easily create audits that you can export and share with others, and even file issues to GitHub. Accessibility Insights for Web Accessibility Insights for Web is basically a Chrome extension that helps developers find and fix accessibility issues in web apps and sites. The tool comes with a lightweight, two-step process called FastPass that helps developers identify common, high-impact accessibility issues. Fast Pass uses automated checks to check compliance with approximately 50 accessibility requirements. It also makes use of Tab stops to provide clear instructions and a visual helper for identifying accessibility issues related to keyboard access, such as missing tab stops, keyboard traps, and incorrect tab order. The second part of Accessibility Insights is Assessment which helps HTML developers in verifying if a web app or web site is 100% compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA. It also comes with Automated checks and also Manual Testing to provide step-by-step instructions, examples, and how-to-fix guidance for approximately 20 tests. Deque Systems provides GitHub issue filing for Accessibility Insights for Web, and color contrast detection heuristics for Accessibility Insights for Windows. On why Accessibility Insights is open sourced, Microsoft writes in a blog post, “We are driven by the promise of more accessible products for more people.  That’s why we’re releasing Accessibility Insights to the open source and accessibility communities – it’s all of ours now, and together we’ll continue to make it a better tool and build a more accessible future.” You can read more about Accessibility Insights on its website. It’s a win for Web accessibility as courts can now order companies to make their sites WCAG 2.0 compliant W3C and FIDO Alliance declare WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins Microsoft open sources the Windows Calculator code on GitHub

Just two days ago, the team at Google announced Season of Docs, a new program which will connect technical writers with open source projects. Season of Docs will help in bringing technical writers and open source projects together in order to work on open source documentation. https://twitter.com/GoogleOSS/status/1105138318826627072 According to Open Source Survey, documentation is valued in open source communities but it is still difficult to work on it. A person dealing with the documentation needs to know how to structure a documentation site so that people can easily understand the content and only technical writers can do that. Another plus point is that they are aware of the procedures of writing docs that can fit the needs of their audience. Technical writers can help in optimizing a community’s processes for open source contribution and onboarding new contributors. With Season of Docs, technical writers can spend a few months working closely with open source communities. Writes can work with their chosen open source project and also explore the latest technologies. Mentors from open source organizations can share their knowledge based on their communities’ processes and tools. The technical writers and mentors together can build a new doc set and improve the structure of the existing docs. They can also work on tutorials and further improve contribution processes and guides. According to the team, this project will raise awareness about open source, docs, and technical writing. The open source organizations can apply for participating in Season of Docs starting from 2nd to 23rd of April. Google will then publish the list of accepted mentoring organizations, along with their ideas for documentation projects from 30th April. In July, Google will announce the accepted technical writer projects. The technical writers will get a chance to work with mentors on the accepted projects and submit their work between 2nd September and 29th November. Google will then publish the list of successfully completed projects by 10th December. To know more about this news, check out Google’s blog post. Google Cloud Console Incident Resolved! Google confirms it paid $135 million as exit packages to senior execs accused of sexual harassment Researchers input rabbit-duck illusion to Google Cloud Vision API and conclude it shows orientation-bias  

Fedora has always been shipping Mono 4.8, the open source development platform for building cross-platform applications, with each Fedora release. Even after shipping Mono 5.0 in May 2017, the company still continued with Mono 4.8. But it seems the idea will be changing now with the release of Fedora 31. With Fedora 31, the team at Fedora is finally planning to switch to Mono 5.20 which is expected to release later this year. An effort was made in the past few months by the Fedora team to build Mono from source. The build was also done for Debian using msc instead of csc and the reference assemblies were rebuilt from source. In case of Mono, it requires itself to build. The Mono version 4.8 which is included in Fedora currently, is too old to build version 5.20. Currently, the team has been using monolite and a little version of mono compiler, .NET 4.7.1 reference assemblies for first build time. The sources for the required patch files are maintained on Github. The transition from Mono 4 to Mono 5 was on halt because of the changes required in their compiler stack and its dependency upon some binary references. These binaries are available as a source but treated as pre-compiled binaries for simplification and speed. The Fedora developers are now working towards getting Mono 5 into Fedora 31. This will also let the cross-platform applications that are relying upon Microsoft's .NET framework 4.7 and later to now work. Mono 4.8 is also not compatible for PowerPC 64-bit but it is expected that Mono 5 will be. To know more about this news, check out the change proposal. Fedora 29 released with Modularity, Silverblue, and more Swift is now available on Fedora 28 Fedora 29 beta brings Modularity, GNOME 3.30 support and other changes