Programming Leftovers
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The New Stack ☛ Import and Use a Third-Party Package in Golang
Like most compiled programming languages, the Go programming language makes it possible to use external libraries and other pre-packaged tools.
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Apache Groovy: Assertions for clearer, more reliable code
Groovy's assert statement verifies code behavior inline. It throws errors with details for debugging and helps write robust, maintainable Groovy code. Learn how assert works and the benefits it offers.
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Maintainer Confidential: Challenges and Opportunities One Year On
The big news in the last year for us was finding that we could get some help from the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), a German government funded initiative that is trying to help projects and the overall open software ecosystem. They read the article and wanted to see if there was a way to work together and help. The project had already been working on a five year plan, basically an open-ended discussion of where we’d like to see the project in five years’ time and what kinds of things might we like to see happen in that time frame. We found that we could take some of the themes from that plan and have financial help to bring them to reality.
Funding comes with constraints and it has been a challenge to do things in the time frame needed, but by contracting the work through many of the consultancies working within our ecosystem, we’ve been able to quickly pull together some amazing changes.
The projects we targeted were a mix across a spectrum of topics. Some are future looking with things like IDE integration into newer IDEs like VSCode. Some add automated testing to older code like Toaster, meaning we can stop it bit-rotting and degrading and start planning ways to better use it in the future. There was work to improve the developer experience both within our tools such as better understanding why cache objects (“sstate”) weren’t being reused, through to re-enabling patch submission/review processes automated CI-style helpers. There was also work done on properly documenting our security processes and preparing the project for the next generation of SPDX which is key to our Software Bill of Materials (SBoM) support.
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Red Hat ☛ Packet capture using Network Observability eBPF Agent
Network observability is the ability to easily identify and answer questions about your network in real-time, and use the information to make informed decisions to manage and optimize network resources. To facilitate and dig deeper with more insights into an ongoing network flow in real-time, we present Packet Capture Agent (PCA), an extension to the Network Observability eBPF Agent (netobserv-agent).
Historically, network observability data constituted of flow logs. A flow log record captures network flow, essentially layer 4 and 5 data. While this is useful and is extensively used for making network decisions, the question we ask is: can we do better? Is there still information hiding that we have not been able to collect/use for observability?