Top 10 news at iX Developer 2024: AI, developer experience and security

Contents

What moved the developer community in 2024? – To answer this question, the editorial team at iX Developer analyzed the number of hits on the news articles from the year that is drawing to a close and compiled the most popular ones. The topics of developer satisfaction (4 articles), AI in the working environment (5 articles) and security (4 articles), often combined, were clearly the focus of interest.

In conclusion, it can be said that AI has strongly shaped the working environment in developer teams in 2024. Almost everyone is using it, but the initial enthusiasm is waning and a basic mistrust of the generated code remains. Whether code quality increases or decreases as a result of assistants is controversial. This also applies to the question of how AI affects the working environment and job opportunities. Will developers become superfluous or will AI simply increase output? In retrospect, definitive answers to this question will only emerge in a few years' time.

What is clear, however, is that the pressure on teams is growing, particularly in connection with increasing security requirements. This is causing problems for many, with salaries not necessarily providing the expected compensation –, especially in the open source environment, where there are still many volunteers.

In the area of security, there was an increase in often very costly attacks on repositories and the supply chain.

Instead of the usual top 10, we have decided to include candidate 11, as it is almost on a par with number 10 and makes an important contribution to the topics of AI and the working environment of developers. As benchmarks, we provide two values: the percentage of how many more views a news item had compared to the average of the top 100 news items and the number of comments (as of December 16).

11th place: The future lies in small development teams with highly productive senior developers

The study analyzed the commits made by developers between 2020 and 2024 and, based on this, drew up a series of hypotheses for the future. Intelligent code generators in particular will change the working environment. One hypothesis is that teams will shrink and senior developers will be preferred. With modern language models, developers can implement large ideas with relatively few commits. This increase in productivity of highly qualified members will contribute to small teams of five or fewer people being sufficient for product development. However, both the commentators in the forum and the authors of the study themselves expressed doubts about the chosen method.

One of our bloggers also takes the opposite view: he includes more factors in his considerations than just equating AI with manpower. According to him, AI does not lead to more unemployed developers, but to more software production.

• Date: August 10, 2024
• Comments: 69

10th place: The highly acclaimed AI Devin promotes the code writer to software engineer

In a few sensational YouTube videos, the startup Cognition promises that the AI Devin not only writes blocks of code, but also completes entire software projects. In the videos, Devin only receives brief instructions and completes his tasks independently until the finished work is published. Devin also specializes in troubleshooting. Despite the 21 million dollars in investment that the company claims to have received, the project has been very quiet since the spring. Devin seems to be on his own.

• Date: March 13, 2024
• Comments: 92

9th place: Software security: developers are drowning in technical debt

70 percent of software companies suffer from security vulnerabilities in their products, while technical debt is increasing and tying up more and more team capacity. This has an impact on the mood in the teams. It is often dependent packages that cause the problems, which increases as structures become more complex. One of the report's recommendations is to focus on the approximately three percent of all gaps that pose a critical risk. Prioritization is crucial for secure software and the well-being of team members.

• Date: August 12, 2024
• Comments: 88

8th place: What the fuck! – For thirty years, a transitional solution remains as a Windows dialog – until today

A well-known Windows dialog has been around more or less unchanged for thirty years – the one for formatting a data carrier. The dialog was only intended as a quick transitional solution on the way from Windows 95 to NT. This is reported by former Microsoft developer Dave Plummer on X. He wrote all the configuration options required for formatting on a piece of paper and then used the Visual C++ 2.0 visual resource editor to build a simple vertical stack of options, roughly in the order in which users make their formatting decisions. "It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant user interface came along," Plummer thought. But the elegant UI never came, and Windows still has the same structure today.

• Date: March 28, 2024
• Comments: 196

7th place: Now the AI hype is reaching its limits

Every rush is followed by a hangover – and the GenAI rush triggered by OpenAI and Copilot is no exception. After the initial jubilation, the first doubts arose among the public: does the AI also write good, readable code that is useful not only to the author but also to later reviewers? In addition, the industry quickly became aware of the unpleasant aspects of the distribution battles for the new business. Users get the AI crammed into them with a cane, whether they like it or not – with a co-pilot button that many users find superfluous or a forced plugin in the IDE – in the style of E.T.A Hoffmann: "O Appetit – Dein Name ist Kater."

Regarding code quality, there are now studies that, on the contrary, even express an improvement in quality through AI assistants.

• Date: February 5, 2024
• Comments: 12

6th place: Falling income and rising demands

A large study by Stack Overflow of 65,000 developers has shown that their average annual income has fallen by around ten thousand US dollars. Top salaries in Germany are up to 82,000 US dollars, and up to 225,000 US dollars in the USA. Technical debt is a major source of frustration for 62.4 percent of respondents.

Something has also changed in relation to artificial intelligence compared to the previous year: Presumably as a result of unfulfilled expectations, enthusiasm for AI solutions has fallen from 77 to 72 percent. At the same time, the use of AI tools in projects has risen from 70 to 76 percent.

• Date: July 27, 2024
• Comments: 173

5th place: Millions of Docker Hub repositories infected with malware or phishing

Targeted attacks on public Git repositories were a major insecurity trend in 2024, as Trojans introduced here spread as if by themselves. The elaborate xz attack, which took years to plan, will live long in the memory. In another case, security specialists found 2.8 million malicious Docker Hub repositories, which corresponds to 19 percent of all repos there. These were imageless directories containing only metadata, in particular a description with phishing or malware links. The hackers took advantage of the fact that Docker checks images for malicious code, but not the metadata. The effort behind the campaigns was enormous, as all infected pages were slightly different and set by different users. This indicates a high potential for expectation for the criminals.

In a later interview, we spoke to Sharchar Menashe, Senior Director of JFrog, about how secure repositories and software deployment still are.

• Date: May 2, 2024
• Comments: 23

4th place: Fridge manufacturer wanted to have open source project deleted: Not a good idea!

Haier, a manufacturer of household appliances that also owns the Candy and Whirlpool brands, caused quite a stir. Haier wanted to force an open source developer to remove a plug-in for the Home Assistant from the internet. This extension for the smart home system allows appliances to be integrated into the home network and controlled automatically. Haier saw a breach of its terms of use. According to international media reports, the manufacturer finally approached the developer and proposed a joint optimization of the plug-in.

• Date: January 23, 2024
• Comments: 157