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Researchers have showcased the first functional graphene semiconductor. The discovery could change computing and electronics forever. By Fred Schwaller.

“The good thing about graphene is, not only can you make things smaller and faster and with less heat dissipation, you’re actually using properties of electrons that are not accessible in silicon. So this is really a paradigm shift — it’s a different way of doing electronics,” said de Heer.

Scientists have made a breakthrough in electronics, creating the world’s first functional semiconductor made from graphene — a material known for being tough, flexible, light and with a high resistance.

Classical computerslike the chip in your phone or laptop use electricity flowing through silicon switches to represent ones and zeros — also known as bits.

One option was graphene. Graphene is a single sheet of carbon atoms — a 2D material held together by the strongest chemical bonds known. These carbons are arranged in tessellated hexagons, much like honeycomb. It is an incredibly strong material — about 200 times stronger than steel. It’s so strong you can hold up a football with just one atomic layer of graphene.

The band gap is a crucial electronic property that allows semiconductors to switch on and off. Graphene didn’t have a band gap — until now. Experts say the innovation holds huge potential for the electronics industry. For one thing, it could allow us to create new graphene semiconductors which are much more powerful, but use less energy than their silicon counterparts. Nice one!

As the software development world becomes faster, enterprises must adapt to customer demands by increasing their application’s deployment frequency. They often rely on DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) methodologies to achieve this. These approaches ensure high system availability amidst frequent deployments and prioritize delivering a seamless user experience. By Keren Feldsher.

This article explores the indispensable role of APM in driving the success of DevOps and SRE teams, highlighting its key capabilities, benefits, and use cases for businesses including:

• What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?
• Why do you need APM?
• How DevOps and SRE facilitate reliable systems
• APM: Unlocking superpowers for DevOps and SRE
• Selecting the right APM solution

By providing comprehensive insights into application and infrastructure performance, APM empowers teams to identify and address issues proactively, fine-tune system performance, and deliver exceptional user experiences. Whether the goal is facilitating continuous delivery within DevOps frameworks or upholding service reliability in SRE practices, APM is essential for an efficient, resilient, and reliable system. Nice one!

Event-driven architecture (EDA) is a software design pattern used in microservices or other decoupled services or apps. Each service in the ecosystem can asynchronously publish and subscribe to events via an event broker. By Darryn Campbell.

The article then makes a good case for:

• What are the advantages of event-driven architecture?
• What is event-driven architecture?
• What are some of the challenges of developing an event-driven architecture?

An event-driven architecture can also enhance the security of real-time chat and messaging applications. The system can ensure only authorized users can access sensitive data and actions by implementing role-based access control and audit logging. Role-based access control allows for granular control over user permissions, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and potential security breaches. Nice one!

Technical SEO is about improving your website to make it easier for search engines to find, understand, and store your content. It also involves user experience factors. Such as making your website faster and easier to use on mobile devices. By Tushar Pol, Christine Skopec and Zach Paruch.

This blog post then explains:

• Why is technical SEO important?
• Understanding crawling and how to optimize for it
• Create an SEO-friendly site architecture
• Submit your sitemap to Google
• Understanding indexing and how to optimize for it
• Use the noindex tag carefully
• Additional technical SEO best practices

Creating an SEO-friendly site structure, submitting your sitemap to Google, and using noindex and canonical tags appropriately should get your pages crawled and indexed. But if you want your website to be fully optimized for technical SEO, consider additional best practices. Good read!

In August 2023, the Go team at Google conducted our bi-annual survey of Go developers. We recruited participants via a public post on the Go blog and a randomized prompt in VS Code, resulting in 4,005 responses. We primarily focused survey questions around a few topics: general sentiment and feedback about developing with Go, technology stacks used alongside Go, how developers start new Go projects, recent experiences with toolchain error messages, and understanding developer interest around ML/AI. By Todd Kulesza.

Some interesting points in results from the survey:

• Go developers said they are more interested in AI/ML tooling that improves the quality, reliability, and performance of code they write, rather than writing code for them
• The top requests for improving toolchain warnings and errors were to make the messages more comprehensible and actionable
• Our experiment with project templates (gonew) appears to solve critical problems for Go developers (especially developers new to Go) and does so in a way that matches their existing workflows for starting a new project
• Three out of every four respondents work on Go software that also uses cloud services
• Developer sentiment towards Go remains extremely positive, with 90% of survey respondents saying they felt satisfied while working with Go during the prior year

Survey typically finds that the longer someone has worked with Go, the more likely they are to report being satisfied with it. This trend continued in 2023; among respondents with less than one year of Go experience, 82% reported satisfaction with the Go development experience, compared to the 94% of Go developers with five or more years of experience. Follow the link for full results. Really good read for anybody interested in Go!

Go, also known as Golang, is celebrated for its simplicity, readability, and efficiency. While the language itself encourages clean and idiomatic code, there are various advanced techniques and best practices that can significantly enhance the performance of your Go applications. In this in-depth guide, we will explore key strategies for optimizing Go code, covering a range of aspects from profiling to HTTP server optimization. By @withcodeexample.com.

The article reads about:

• Profiling
  • CPU Profiling in Go
  • Memory Profiling in Go
• Concurrency
• Goroutines
• Channels
• Memory Pooling
• Benchmarking

… and more. In the world of Go programming, mastering advanced optimization techniques is crucial for building high-performance applications. This guide has explored profiling, concurrency, memory pooling, benchmarking, and caching, providing a toolkit to boost your Go applications. Good read!

An Ansible® module is a small program that performs actions on a local machine, application programming interface (API), or remote host. Modules are expressed as code, usually in Python, and contain metadata that defines when and where a specific automation task is executed and which users can execute it. By @redhat.com.

Further you will learn:

• How do modules work?
• Creating and sharing Ansible modules
• Using modules with event-driven automation

While modules play an essential role in playbook execution, they also hold value for organizations looking to take a more advanced, proactive approach to IT management with event-driven automation. Nice one!

Microservices grew in popularity from 2014 on—especially as companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Etsy made microservices a focal point both for their architectures and for their long-term abilities to iterate. Migration became the headline topic. If you were on a monolith, how were you going to migrate? When? It had to be soon. By Rich Moy.

The article then reads about:

• What is monolithic architecture?
• Advantages of monolithic architecture
• Disadvantages of monolithic architecture
• What is microservices architecture?
• The emergence of blended commerce platforms

The lists of pros and cons for monolithic and microservices architecture often muddy the waters for retailers searching for the right solution for their business. Monoliths require less overhead, but they’re difficult to scale. Microservices architecture gives you more flexibility and development control, but they can be unwieldy to manage, and fully custom builds may create performance issues and failure cascades. Good read!

In the rapidly evolving tech landscape, grasping the nuances of software system improvement and maintenance is more vital than ever. Key methodologies like DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Platform Engineering are not just buzzwords; they’re essential pillars in the realm of technology companies. Understanding these concepts can significantly impact your organization’s efficiency and resilience. By Mat Caniglia.

DevOps, a synergy of software development and IT operations, streamlines these traditionally separate domains to enhance speed and quality in software delivery. On the other hand, SRE, a discipline brought to the forefront by Google, is dedicated to bolstering system reliability and smooth operation – think of it as an elite team ensuring peak system performance under all circumstances.

This long resource then describes:

• Definition and origin of DevOps
  • Core responsibilities and goals of a DevOps team
  • Essential DevOps tools and practices
  • DevOps’ impact on the software development lifecycle
• What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and its connection to Google?
• Introduction to Platform Engineering
• Integrating DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering in an Organization
• Recommendations for small businesses

For small businesses, adopting the right methodologies in the early stages can be crucial for their growth and long-term success. Choosing between DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering depends on the specific needs and strategy of the company. DevOps unites development and operations to improve speed and efficiency, how SRE focuses on the reliability and scalability of systems, and how Platform Engineering facilitates tools and platforms to streamline the development process. Nice one!

Generative AI is increasingly used to draft, edit, annotate and debug code. It’s not just industry software developers who are taking advantage of the tools it has to offer. Those who develop and use software for academic research are benefitting from them too. So how do you make the best use of generative AI for coding in a research context? As software engineers with The Alan Turing Institute’s Research Engineering Group (REG) and PhD Enrichment scheme, we’ve been asking ourselves just this question. Here, we share our thoughts, along with some tips for researchers. By Ed Chalstrey and Anastasiia Grishina.

The article answers these questions:

• How can generative AI help?
• Which tools can I use?
• What tasks can I get help with?
• What should I be wary of?

In the same way that generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney can be used to generate or modify written text, images or video – based on a “prompt” – they can be used to generate or modify code. For example, using a section of code as a prompt, you can add “explain each line of this code”, to which the AI will respond with a line-by-line explanation, perhaps modifying the code itself with helpful comments. These new tools can help to reduce the time spent trawling through search engine results, reading online tutorials and posting coding questions on websites like Stack Overflow. For researchers, they mean less time spent learning to code and more time on the research questions at hand. Nice one!