Angular Documentary Debuts With Star-Studded Cast of Devs
A documentary about Angular, created by tech documentary company Honeypot, dropped on YouTube Wednesday.
The hour-long video contains enough human drama to be fascinating and viewable even for non-Angular developers. It explores both the technical and non-technical struggles of the framework’s creators and maintainers.
Angular co-creator Miško Hevery begins the documentary by explaining that the original idea behind AngularJS was to create a tool for designers and other non-developers. The documentary follows the development of the open source framework through some intense periods at Google, including when they thought Angular might be scrapped.
It also explores Angular 2, which was a rewrite of the framework, and how it was based on TypeScript.
From a JavaScript framework standpoint, it’s a “star-studded cast,” as the summary puts it, that includes not just Angular people, but other significant players in the space. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re curious about one of the web’s most popular frameworks.
Honeypot has also created documentaries about React, Ruby on Rails and Node.js.
A Look at PHP and Ecosystem Adoption
Laravel News recently did a deep-dive on what the State of Developer Ecosystem Survey data by JetBrains revealed about PHP. That involved analyzing the responses of 2,660 PHP developers from around the world.
The research found that 66% of users are PHP veterans who have used the technology for at least six years. Thirty-three percent reported using it five or less years, with 15% having used it for two year or less.
Adoption is slowing: Eighty-six percent of PHP developers are using version 8 in 2024, compared to the 96% who had adopted version 7 in 2020, a similar length of time after its release.
The piece also looks at which PHP framework and platforms are the most popular. Laravel topped the list with 61% using it — the same as last year. Surprisingly, only 23% report using WordPress, although that’s up one percentage point from last year. Symphony (21%), CodeIgniter (11%) and Yii (8%) use beat out Drupal (5%) for regular use as well.
Overwhelmingly, the most popular IDE was PHPStorm (and IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate + PHP plugin) with 58%, followed by VS Code with 35% adoption.
The data also showed AI use, with 59% of PHP developers reporting they regularly use ChatGPT and 32% saying they regularly use GitHub Copilot.
Bad Bots Besting Captchas?
The AI bots … they’re learning. After The New Stack wrote about the spamming of open source repos by AI, developer Steffen Voß reached out to us via Mastodon about his experience with AI. He runs two Mediawikis and for some months now, it has appeared that AI is answering the CAPTCHA-questions to flood both wikis. He’s not the only one who has reported this issue.
Pinecone AI Assistant Speeds Build of AI Agents
Pinecone AI Assistant is now generally available for developers to try out. The managed service simplifies making custom AI assistants trained on your own datasets.
Pinecone AI Assistant is an API service that can power chat and agent-based applications as well, the company’s blog explained.
One way it simplifies developing agents or assistants is that it abstracts away the systems and steps required to build Retrieval Augmented Generation-powered applications. Developers can launch production-grade applications in under 30 minutes with the tool regardless of experience, the blog post stated.
Mark Kashef, CEO for Prompt Advisors, which makes AI Agents, is quoted as saying Pinecone AI Assistant accelerated its time to implement by 70% and cut maintenance and scaling costs by 30% for its operations.
Developers can try it out by installing a Python SDK and Assistant plugin:
- To use the Python SDK, install the plugin:
pip install --upgrade pinecone pinecone-plugin-assistant requests - If you are using Jupyter Notebook or Google Colab use:
!pip install --upgrade pinecone pinecone-plugin-assistant requests
The post also showed you how to include metadata and query the assistant and links to more detailed documentation.
Mira Network Launches New $10M Grant Program
Mira Network, a decentralized AI infrastructure company, launched a new $10 million builder grant program for AI projects this week.
Called Magnum Opus, the program aims to accelerate “groundbreaking projects at the intersection of generative AI, autonomous systems, and decentralized technology.”
Mira plans to select 15-20 teams for its first cohort, selected on a rolling process. But competition appears to be stiff already, with early participants including AI and tech pioneers from Google, Epic Games, OctoML, MPL, Amazon, and Meta, the company noted. That said, Mira added it does “value potential.”
Depending upon the needs of the project, the grant incorporates technical guidance, product strategy, design expertise, go-to-market planning, investor introductions, ecosystem connections and — of course — infrastructure.
