In another blow to the plight of achieving diversity in tech, Chinese startups have apparently started hiring “programming cheerleaders” to spur on their mostly-male developer workforce. From general chit-chat to ping-pong, the practice is catching on.

Since GitHub launched in 2008, an assortment of languages have held pole position as most popular on the Git repository hosting service. Using the Linguist library to populate their list, excluding forks, the service serves up some interesting statistics.

Google’s up and coming programming language Go is now available at version 1.5, with one very noticeable change – no more C. The team behind Google’s open source, low-level language project has called it a significant release.

Amazon’s effect on eCommerce and cloud computing is nothing short of extraordinary, however recent revelations have now put the spotlight on Amazon’s alleged “dystopian” corporate culture and employee policies.

The first Internet of Things Design Manifesto has gone live with contributions and backing from a plethora of professionals in the IoT community. Its guidelines aim to be a foundation for designers and engineers to create a myriad of products and services.

It has been more than 40 years since Gerard M. Weinberg created the concept of Egoless Programming. We take a look at the treatise now to see whether the rules contained therein still serve a purpose for the modern programmer today.

The new Ember.js 2.0 drop is all about removing features that were deprecated from version 1.13. However, the gang behind the open-source JavaScript application framework want to make sure they’re really good at removing things.

The folks at Netflix.com want your startup to be smoother and faster, so they’ve let go of their Java renderer for a Universal JavaScript solution that utilises shared rendering logic via Node.js and React.js. The changes bring about better performance for users.

Expected to be the last series under their forked banner, io.js has progressed to version 3.0.0. Breaking changes show up in the form of V8 upgrades, along with preparations around the native side of the platform for the upcoming Node.js merger.

Oracle’s Mark Reinhold has delivered a solution of sorts to the debacle that is Java’s Unsafe class. In a proposal shared via the OpenJDK mailing list, the majority of the JDK’s internal APIs would be encapsulated as part of the overall modularisation effort for Java 9.

This year’s Developer Productivity Report chose to highlight Java performance and testing, finding that developers are happier, more productive and produce better quality code when performance testing is run during the coding process.

Technology and consulting heavyweights IBM have launched developerWorks Open – a new initiative to garner further community involvement in their open source projects. They’ve also set out a plan to release more projects online by year’s end.

The newest version of JRuby, codename 9000, is accompanied by Ruby 2.2 compatibility, a new runtime, native operations for much of IO as well as some versioning changes to boot – the result of a lot of work, time and commits by 104 contributors.

Microsoft’s new and improved Visual Studio 2015 has landed, with arms open wide for development that targets all popular platforms. Microsoft wants their offering to be known as a cross-platform toolset and have the features to show for it.