The team behind the functional programming language Scala have updated their 2016 release schedule, revealing the areas where community contribution is welcome. Library authors and updates to documentation are all highlighted as ways to help.

Fans of Apple technology descended on the west coast to attend their Worldwide Developers Conference, which other than talking about OS X El Captain, announced that Swift 2.0 was going open source. Cue applause.

A new version of TypeScript has been unveiled with long awaited support for async functions for ECMAScript 6 (ES6). Future support plans are already in place for ES3 and ES5, too. TypeScript 1.7 also includes polymorphic this typing plus some breaking changes.

Co-creator of the D programming language Andrei Alexandrescu has taken it upon himself to assess the languages most likely to challenge the position that C currently holds in software development. He’s also encouraged reps from Go and Rust to give their honest opinions, too.

Microsoft and Red Hat have joined forces in the world of hybrid cloud computing, announcing greater flexibility for deploying Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure. The deal also shines a light on .NET Core technology, sharing even more of the open source love.

Have you been waiting for more code ‘soundness’ with Rust? Wait no more. A stable and steady agenda from the Rust core team gives us Rust 1.4, with Cargo and Windows support getting a boost along with type system tweaks. Stability has made its mark.

If you can keep up with a fast-paced upgrade schedule and want access to new features sooner, then the release of Node.js 5.0 is right up your alley. The team behind the JavaScript-based runtime environment have now unveiled two release lines.

New JavaScript library Vue.js has reached milestone 1.0.0, with creator Evan You insipired by the Google-sponsored project Polymer. Vue.js has been described as a set of optional tools that work together really well for frontend developers.

Co-founder of Neo4j Emil Eifrem has introduced the Oracle-backed openCypher Project – an open source enterprise that aims to provide a common graph query language for any data store, tooling or application provider to query graph data.

Developer performance and how it impacts the industry is a big deal – so much so that Jacob Kaplan-Moss made an attempt to tackle it during his PyCon 2015 keynote. Calling himself a mediocre programmer, he confronts the programming talent myth.

Spotify’s famously engineered agile practices have become the stuff of lean legend. The company is growing at a rapid rate and continues to employ its unique brand of agile methodology, which is intricately linked to its organic organisational culture.

The new Node.js 4.2 release has been christened “Argon”, the first drop under the new Long Term Support plan that provides various levels of support over a 30 month period. The plan aims to help operations teams and enterprise application development.

Do you really want to hire somebody that’s good at making themselves look good? Or are you looking for a certain skill-set? Perhaps you need to shape your job spec differently, or recognise non-traditional talent. How do you define expertise?

Are you a junior or a senior developer? Perhaps you’re somewhere in the middle, but how do you know for sure? We look into what differentiates each rank and how experience plays the major part in determining your position and authority.