#AboutLastWeek: Bitcoin price nears $600, Jenkins polishes its UX and more

Bitcoin is on fire

Let’s call it a deja-vu. Bitcoin price passed the $500 threshold in late May, something which hasn’t happened in almost two years. Despite reports that it will drop once again, the price is still going strong —at press time, the price continued to increase and almost broke the $600 threshold ($582.13).

The most beloved scenario is that fears in China that the yuan could weaken may have something to do with the sudden growth. China’s decision to restrict the flow of cash out of the country has indubitably prompted concerned citizens to seek ways around capital restrictions and Bitcoin proved to be a sort of safe haven.

Du Jin, chief marketing officer at Huobi, told The Wall Street Journal that the “hot money in China has to go somewhere.” Growing concerns regarding yuan deflation may have prompted people to perceive Bitcoin as an alternative to pouring their cash inside the country (and eventually losing it as the yuan depreciates). Low confidence in this currency could be the reason behind the Bitcoin price hike.

#Bitcoin is closer to a new all-time high than people think. If $500 is broken, price could rise quickly.

— Henry Brade (@Technom4ge) May 27, 2016

Blue Ocean: Rethinking Jenkins’ user experience

Blue Ocean is reshaping Jenkins’ user experience, modeling and presenting the process of software delivery by transpiring information which is important to development teams with as few clicks as possible without sacrificing the extensibility which is core to Jenkins.

CloudBees’ James Dumay announced the arrival of Blue Ocean in a blog post in late May. He acknowledged that developers have become increasingly attracted to tools which are not only functional, but are also created to fit into their workflow in a seamless way. Jenkins was in need of a top-notch user experience — which is why Blue Ocean came into being.

.@ndeloof You have unleashed the Kraken … all jenkins users now want Blue Ocean in production :) Really great work to all of you #Jenkins

— Nicolas Géraud (@NicolasGeraud) May 27, 2016

Go 1.7 happening soon

It’s been four months since Go 1.6 was released and people are already curious to see what’s new about 1.7. According to the release notes draft, most of the changes are in the implementation of the libraries, toolchain and runtime —only a minor change has been made to the language specification. The release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility, so almost all Go programs should continue to compile and run as before.

For more information, read the release notes draft here.

A Draft of Go 1.7’s Release Notes: https://t.co/ggcd3GizwN

— Go Newsletter (@golangweekly) June 3, 2016

I guess the new killer feature in #golang 1.7 is the Fortran binding support via cgo. https://t.co/FYjbswmF27

— JBD (@rakyll) June 2, 2016

Kotlin is gaining momentum

Three months after releasing Kotlin 1.0.1, Andrey Breslav,  the lead language designer of Kotlin, shared a video in which he explained where this programming language stands and what’s next for it. Breslav announced that the development is in two lines: the incremental updates, 1.0.2, 1.0.3, which are source compatible, and 1.1 —another parallel line where they do language features, and their source compatibility is backward compatibility. 1.0 may not be able to compile 1.1.

More recently, JetBrains launched Kotlin Eclipse Plugin 0.7 and tied Kotlin’s fate to Gradle’s.

#Kotlin to become the preferred language for #Gradle plugins https://t.co/tkbHApI93A

— Benjamin ✰ (@winterbe_) June 6, 2016

Welcome Kotlin Eclipse Plugin 0.7! With support for Kotlin 1.0.2 and lots of new featureshttps://t.co/lpYIxarpAIpic.twitter.com/7U9t54OwEP

— Kotlin (@kotlin) June 3, 2016

Hadoop-as-a-Service: There is hope in the cloud

Nilay Shrivastava, Business Manager at IBM Cloud, taught us a thing or two about the benefits of using Hadoop-as-a-Service.Without further ado, here is why you should consider using Hadoop-as-a-Service: cheap infrastructure, enable faster advanced analytics, scale to unlimited resources in minutes, self-service analytics platforms and faster deployment. If you want to dive into the reasons why Hadoop-as-a-Service should spark your interest, read the entire article here.