The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mala Mahadevan
Notes: Questions and Topics
CrowdStrike in Review
The first topic of the night covered the recent CrowdStrike incident. Mala pointed us to one article and I brought up an article in The Register. There’s a fair amount that we know about the story, so we covered what we had, including a brief discussion of travel issues. I was fortunate in that my travel happened after American Airlines figured out their issues, but Friend of the Show Marshall had some tales of woe in Atlanta.
Languages and the Stack Overflow 2024 Survey
Our next topic came from Friend of the Show Mark Gordon, who asked what languages developers are into these days. I shared my list: C# and Java are common but not necessarily popular languages. Python, Rust, and Kotlin are popular languages (as is Go, though I forgot to mention that one), with Python really dominating the mainstream in a bunch of fields. And, of course, for any front-end development, there’s the JavaScript Framework of the Month Club: React, Vue, Express, etc.
This also happened to coincide with Stack Overflow’s 2024 survey of nearly 50,000 developers. We looked at the languages on this list and talked about which languages are over-represented (due to the survey being a sample of Stack Overflow users, who are themselves a biased sample of the overall developer population). A few languages like COBOL are underrepresented, I argued, as people aren’t going to Stack Overflow to answer COBOL questions. We also talked about longevity in systems: C++ and C are both still high on the list, even though I’d imagine that most new development isn’t happening in those languages. But that’s the effect of legacy in programming languages.
GitHub Forks and Repo Privacy
Our final topic was an article from Joe Leon at Truffle Security, looking at accessing deleted and private repo data on GitHub by use of forks. My stance on this is, it’s worth knowing that there’s a risk from forks, but the behavior makes sense and enables open-source projects to offer the ability for people to make pull requests without needing to grant write permissions to randos. GitHub can also rightly say RTFM, where they clearly indicate the consequences of enabling forks on a repository. So if you are administrator of GitHub repos in an enterprise, read the article, understand what it means, and carry on.