Devnexus 2024 was held from April 9-11, 2024, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia . Key takeaways included the benefits of introducing Java to high school and college students, and the importance of knowledge management within software development . The event featured 160 speakers from the Java community who delivered six full-day workshops and talks on 14 tracks .

Microsoft announced the new MSTest SDK built on top of the MSBuild Project SDK system . There are features such as easier usage of Mstest Runner extensions, support running tests in Native AOT mode and better default suggestions . It is possible to use any target framework supported by MSTed .

Microsoft and IBM have open-sourced on git the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License . The public git repository contains unreleased beta binaries, the ibmbio.com source, and the scanned PDFs of the Multitasking MS-Dol-DOS . The open-source source code for versions 1.25 and 2.0 via the Computer History Museum . Microsoft has also released Word, GW-BASIC and Windows File Manager .

JEP 476, Module Import Declarations (Preview) promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 23; Hibernate ORM 6.5; and JobRunr 7.1.1 have been released . BellSoft has released versions 24.0.1 for JK 22, 231.3.3 for JDk 21 and 230.4 for their Liberica Native Image Kit builds as part of the Oracle Critical Patch Update for April 2024 .

Git is a popular tool for version control in software development . Mixing personal and work Git accounts may lead to a polluted Git history . The presented solution automatically loads Git credentials based on a directory path using a special global Git configuration, which does not require additional tools . Git does not allow account configuration for a group of repositories in one place .

Hannah Foxwell's QCon talk at QCon London 2024 will be broadcasted over the coming months . She discusses key elements for fostering a cohesive and productive team environment . Foxwell advocates for inclusive and accessible events during working hours to ensure everyone feels welcome and valued in the workplace . She also stressed the need for transparency in budget allocation and promotion opportunities .

OpenAI announced the release of new features in their fine-tuning API . The features include the ability to create a model checkpoint after every training epoch, compute metrics over the entire validation dataset, and integrate with 3rd-parties such as Weights and Biases . The model playground now has a side-by-side model comparison feature that allows users to enter a single prompt and compare the output of different standard models .

Eb Ikonne: 'Much of the change we experience in our software organizations is coercive' To catalyze change, he suggested identifying allies, inviting people to participate in the change, and creating and sustaining engagement through storytelling . Even people in software engineering management positions feel they cannot spark change without formal authority, Ikonne said .

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Gecko is a text embedding model that Google created by distilling knowledge from large language models into a general-purpose model . Google created a fine-tuning dataset, dubbed FRet (Few-shot Prompted Retrieval) using queries generated from LLMs .