Michelle Duke
I'm a Content Producer working in tech & innovation. Known as the “Hackathon Queen” 👑 I'm on the GitHub DevRel team and love sharing stories from our amazing community of developers.
Our community—along with ourselves—took a much needed break over the festive season. Now everyone is back into the full swing of work, and the open source community is showing us…
Our community—along with ourselves—took a much needed break over the festive season. Now everyone is back into the full swing of work, and the open source community is showing us it’s all hands on deck. We had dozens of submissions for the February Release Radar—a testament to the amount of code being shipped by the community. Whilst we can’t showcase every single open source project that shipped a major version update for February, we’ve hand picked a few just for you. And without further ado, let’s check out this month’s Release Radar.
Starting off with a big one is Moby, formerly known as Docker Engine. Moby is the original Linux Container runtime. It’s the most used set of development tools when it comes to Linux Containers. Whilst there are lots of changes to this latest update, one big highlight is BuildKit/Buildx is now available as the default build experience on Linux. There’s also better support for alternate container runtimes, and SwarmKit gains new features such as experimental support for Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugins. Congrats to the team on shipping your first major release in two years 🥳.
#developers, What is downloaded ~30 million times / month, just shipped a new release, and loved by all?! The @Docker Engine, that's what! Read all about the latest here:https://t.co/8tXijrxUcl
— Scott Johnston (@scottcjohnston) February 6, 2023
If you’ve been on the internet—let’s be real, who hasn’t—you can’t escape the insane number of AI chatbots, and AI generated images. DALL-E is one of the most popular AI systems for creating images. Now there’s a way you can use Dall-E on the command line. DalleCLI provides you with the ability to use DALL-E straight from the terminal. Generate, edit, and filter images using the DALL-E 2 API. Start by installing DalleCLI now: ~$ pip3 install dallecli
. Congrats to the team on shipping your first major release 🥳.
You might have heard the term “chaos engineering” in your travels. It refers to putting stress on a system to see how resistant the system, and understand where the vulnerabilities lie. Infection Monkey is a tool for helping you test this resilience. It’s specifically designed to target perimeter breaches and internal server infection. The latest update comes with a new mission—to focus on adversary emulation. There’s also enhanced security, faster and more reliable simulation times, and more streamlined feature sets. You can read up on all the changes on the Infection Monkey changelog.
If you have maps on your website, or use maps in any way, you’ll know that having a pretty looking map on your website is a must. That’s exactly what Pretty Maps does—draw pretty maps! Using Python and OpenStreetMap, you can create customised maps from an address, coordinates, or a custom boundary. There’s a few different presets you can use to make your map exactly the way you like it. Congrats to the team on shipping your first major release 🥳.
As featured in last year’s February Release Radar, Homebrew is back with another major version update. Apple and Linux users have loved Homebrew for years, making it easier to install software on your operating system. The latest release makes Homebrew much faster by using JSON downloads instead of installing from the local Homebrew core. Homebrew analytics are now sent to both Google Analytics and InfluxDB, and there are a few other changes you can browse on the Homebrew blog.
We featured Snippets for VSCode in the November 2021 Release Radar. Phew, that’s a while ago now! Since then, this neat extension for VS Code has implemented a highly requested feature. If you’ve used Snippets for VS Code before, you will have found it fun playing around with your code snippets without quitting the editor. Now, this extension supports drag and drop functionality! Hooray ✨. It makes organising your snippets a whole lot simpler. There are tonnes of features available, and you can read the full list in the Snippets for VSCode README.
We know from the State of the Octoverse, that Rust is one of the fastest growing languages on GitHub. Qdrant is one such new project that’s been built with Rust. It’s a vector search engine that can help you build AI products. It does this by providing a search for the nearest high-dimensional vectors, and turns neural network encoders into fully fledged applications. Essentially, it allows people to search by images, rather than text. For example, order food by the look of the dish, even if they don’t know the name. Qdrant will look for similar dishes and thus assign the dish its name based on the image. Congrats on shipping your first major release 🥳.
With so many people around the world working remotely, or trying to catch up with friends and family abroad, it’s often rough to try and find a time where you are all free. Introducing Rallly. It’s a self-hostable poll for helping you and your friends find the best date and time for a meeting. Forget the back and forth emails with your boss, Rallly has you covered. Clone the repository and run it locally. You can now choose your preferred language, when the week should start (Monday or Sunday), and your preferred time format (12 or 24 hour).
Eeekkk, I don’t need my brain chopped—luckily Brainchop is not about cutting up people’s heads. Instead it’s a web-based tool for scientists and clinicians to analyse Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRIs) of various brains. Brainchop jumps on the AI bandwagon, using pre-trained deep learning models. The client privacy concerns are also taken care of with client-side processing. The latest update adds many features directly to the browser experience. Read up on the changes on the changelog.
Having been featured in the October 2020, April 2021, and April 2022 Release Radars, we had to keep the streak going and include GitMoji CLI for 2023! GitMoji CLI allows you to use gitmoji from the command line. Add cute emojis to every single commit message. You can see the GitMoji team have coded each of their commit messages with a specific emoji. The latest update requires users to have Node version 16 or higher.
Well, that’s all for this month’s top release picks. Thank you to everyone who submitted a project to be featured, and we’re just sad that we couldn’t include them all. Whether your project was featured here or not, congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release. It doesn’t matter if this was your project’s first version, or you launched version 23.0.
If you missed our last Release Radar, check out the amazing open source projects that released major version projects during the festive season. We love featuring projects submitted by the community. If you are working on an open source project and shipping a major version soon, we’d love to hear from you. Check out the Release Radar repository, and submit your project to be featured in the GitHub Release Radar.
GitHub’s annual month-long game jam, where creativity knows no limits! Throughout November, dive into your favorite game engines, libraries, and programming languages to bring your wildest game ideas to life. Whether you’re a seasoned dev or just getting started, it’s all about having fun and making something awesome!
Git 2.47 is here, with features like incremental multi-pack indexes and more. Check out our coverage of some of the highlights here.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the stars of the Open Source Zone at GitHub Universe 2024 🔎