If you were ever frustrated with your Raspberry Pi and wanted to send it to space… your dream is once again becoming a reality. Astro Pi, a special version of the regular computer for hobbyists, is going to find itself onboard the European Space Agency. The new computers are made up of, in essence, a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 8 GB RAM, a high-quality camera, Google Coral machine learning accelerator, color and luminosity sensors, and a passive infrared sensor.
Along with the devices, the foundation behind the computers announced two competitions - Mission Zero, and Mission Space Lab. Both of them will give teams of young people an opportunity to have their algorithms run in space.
You might not ever get a chance to run things at GitHub, though thanks to an interview with the company’s COO, Erica Brescia, now you might know what it’s like.
Erica Brescia joined GitHub two years ago, which was some time after Microsoft had acquired the company in 2018. In the interview itself, Brescia mentions a few interesting topics, such as the expansion of the platform, the nature of collaboration between them and Microsoft, how GitHub will continue to be a home for all developers, security, and more.
You can find the full article here.
Django, the Python web framework for “for perfectionists with deadlines” is getting a much useful feature. We now know that the next release of the framework will get support for a caching backend in Redis.
Redis is an in-memory data structure used mostly for caching purposes. Even though it does support persistence, it is most often used disabled. It is written in ANSI C, which means it is fast, and has a low memory footprint.
As previously Django developers had to rely on third-party packages to cache data using the in-memory store, they will be now overjoyed they are getting first-party support from the core team.
For details, see this pull request.
GitLab, perhaps the biggest competitor of GitHub, filed for an IPO. If you are not familiar with GitLab’s offerings, you can safely trust them with delivering everything you need in daily DevOps tasks.
The company is in an excellent spot right now, as the embrace of the future of work by the world made all tech companies switch to either remote-first, or hybrid work. As metrics show, the company is growing even without the need to acquire new clients, as its “net revenue retention rate” ([Monthly recurring revenue of the last month + Revenue generated through upgrades and cross-sells - Revenue lost through downgrades - Revenue lost through churn] / Monthly recurring revenue of the last month) is above 100%.
“Garbage Collection” is a form of automatic memory management. It frees you up from thinking of manual memory management. As a caveat, however, the execution of a program has to typically cease its execution until Garbage Collection stopped working. This is exactly the reason why the newest announcement from Red Hat should interest all Java developers.
“Shenandoah”, the Garbage Collector in OpenJDK (one of Java’s implementations), has been improved even further, resulting in sub-millisecond pauses. For the full announcement, read Red Hat’s post, and for a detailed explanation of how “Shenandoah” works, read its wiki page.
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