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As promised, this month brings a bunch of new features including a big new accessibility feature and a major platform improvement. Enjoy this month’s contributions to the upcoming OS 7.1! AppCenter As we work towards our continual goal of better supporting alternative app stores, one of the challenges is ensuring that you remain safe while using apps from stores with differing security and privacy policies. This month we’ve rolled out a new set of app sandbox warnings to help you better assess risk when installing apps. AppCenter will now inform you if an app can can read your location without asking first, if it can access system folders or your home folder, if it can read and write system settings, or if it could possibly escape the sandbox altogether and gain advanced permissions. For certain types of administrative apps, having advanced system permissions makes sense, but our goal is to keep you informed and ensure that apps are always operating with your consent. Expect more of...
over a year ago

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Developer Tools, Hardware Enablement, and Multitasking Futures

Your monthly updates post is here! This month we have a couple of releases for our developer tools, plus plenty of improvements to Bluetooth, as well as a hardware enablement boost from Ubuntu and plenty to talk about in Early Access. Let’s dive in! System Settings The previously mentioned redesign of Bluetooth Settings has arrived! This redesign not only brings a bit more visual separation between paired devices and nearby devices, but also improves the keyboard navigation and screen reader experience. Plus, you can now double click rows to activate them. We resolved an issue where sometimes devices would be duplicated in the list and fixed issues when a pairing request requires entering passcodes—like with some keyboards. You’ll now also see fewer unnamed devices when discovering, enabling and disabling Bluetooth on devices that have been hardware locked should now work reliably, and to top it all off performance when listing lots of devices has also been improved. Bluetooth settings has a new design Leonhard and Ryo fixed a couple of issues with sidebar selections when navigating directly to a setting from search. Ryo fixed an issue where Sharing Settings lost its window controls when a network was not connected. And there’s now an action to jump directly to the System Updates page from the context menu in the Dock or Applications Menu or via search. Code Working with Git projects continues to get better thanks to Jeremy! There’s now a new feature to clone git repositories directly from inside Code via the projects menu in the sidebar. The item for opening project folders has moved there as well, so managing your open projects now happens all in one place no matter where they come from. You can now clone Git projects in Code He also fixed an issue with blank tooltips appearing in empty sidebar folders, a crash when deleting selected text while using the “Highlight Selection” plugin, and a freeze when editing lists with the “Markdown” plugin. Plus, the Symbols sidebar now shows a loading spinner when searching symbols takes longer than usual, and filters have been fixed for C symbols. Terminal Terminal will now warn about pasted commands that include options to skip confirmation like -y, --interactive=never, and --force. Plus we now make sure to show all found warnings about a pasted command, not just the first one found. For example, if a command like sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y fuse is pasted, we will warn about use of admin privileges, multiple commands, and that it skips confirmations, not just that it uses admin privileges. Terminal warns about more potentially dangerous commands Corentin fixed an issue where long commands could resize windows. Jeremy fixed an issue where tab labels didn’t properly update when using screen or ssh. And he made sure we properly close tabs when using the exit command. And More A few small bug fixes for our Window Manager: Corentin resolved a potential crasher, Leo improved dock hide animations, and Leonhard fixed an issue with revealing the panel over fullscreen apps. A new Hardware Enablement stack has arrived thanks to Ubuntu! This includes Linux 6.14 and Mesa 25 which brings support for newer hardware as well as some big performance gains and potential battery life improvements. OMG! Ubuntu! breaks down all the nerdy details here Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access Maps Last month, Ryo made the last release of Atlas on AppCenter because we’ll soon be shipping it by default in elementary OS as Maps! As part of our work to improve the experience on computers you take with you—like notebooks and tablets—we’ve been working on features that use your location, and shipping a Maps app is part of that work. An in-development version of the new Maps Our hope with Maps is to improve support for mapping and location features in our platform libraries and to improve experiences in other apps like Tasks and Calendar as well as 3rd party apps in AppCenter. We’ve also already made a tiny improvement to the wider Freedesktop ecosystem by documenting a standard location icon used across desktops and in Portals. We’re really looking forward to getting your feedback and learning how we can improve experiences for apps that use your location in elementary OS. Window Manager & Dock First up is some new eye candy. We’ve heard requests for transparency and blur over the years and I’m happy to report we’re now experimenting with some new effects in shell elements like the alt + tab Window Switcher. We want to make sure to carefully balance shiny effects with performance and legibility, so be sure to send in your feedback. We’re also on track to apply some blur behind the Dock soon, so watch out for that. Blur effects have landed in the window switcher and are coming to the Dock Speaking of the Dock, you may have noticed that it’s now sticking around when in Multitasking View! We’ve replaced the old workspace switcher and you can now launch apps from the Dock directly into different workspaces to quickly get things set up exactly how you like. We’ve also merged in a new feature to monitor background apps that use the cross-platform Background Portal. Here you can not only manage background apps, but also see an explanation of what exactly they’re doing while running. With these features, we’re seeing years of design and development work come together: an improved way to multitask on elementary OS whether you use a mouse at your desktop, multitouch gestures on your laptop or tablet, or rely on keyboard shortcuts to get the job done. I’m extremely proud of what the team has done here and look forward from hearing more from you about it! Background apps now show in the Dock And that’s not all. Building on the previously mentioned Gesture Controller, the new Touchpad backend for multitouch gestures has also landed. This replaces Touchégg in the Secure Session as the way to track multitouch gestures, fixes bugs, and enables new features like two-dimensional swiping between workspaces and the full Multitasking View. So if you are a fan of gestures on your notebook, we’d love for you to try it out and report back before we ship it for everyone. Hardware Support Last but not least, we’re now building Universal EFI install images for ARM64 processors. This means instead of building unique ARM images for every hardware platform, we can build a single universal image for platforms like Pinebook, Raspberry Pi, and M-series Macs. These builds are still experimental and come with a few bugs, but we’d love folks to give them a spin in a virtual machine or on a spare computer and report back. If everything looks good, we may be able to offer stable ARM64 downloads starting with OS 8.1 later this year. Sponsors I want to give special thanks this month to Ryan Prior for his extremely generous one-time sponsorship! Ryan noted that this sponsorship was dedicated to the hard work of Renato who has been translating elementary OS into Brazilian Portuguese. Thanks a ton for your work Renato! At the moment we’re at 22% of our monthly funding goal and 332 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.

2 weeks ago 17 votes
Supporting Disability Is Our Social Responsibility

July is Disability Pride Month, an opportunity for us to consider how we’re serving our disabled community and work on breaking down barriers to access. Last year we had the pleasure of being introduced to Florian—a fully blind cybersecurity enthusiast—and thanks to his feedback we completely rewrote navigation in Onboarding to be more keyboard and screen reader friendly, as well as took another look at Installation and Initial Setup to vastly improve our entire first run experience for blind folks. Plus, we implemented the screen reader interface in the Alt + Tab window switcher. Thanks to this feedback, elementary OS 8 can be installed and set up completely blind, an important win for maintaining your independence as a person with vision disabilities. Danielle Foré Founder & CEO Wed, Jul 3, 2024 7 min read Since the release of OS 8 we’ve been working on things like improving contrast, support for Dark Mode screenshots and brand colors in AppCenter, turning on or snoozing Dark Mode without canceling your schedule, expanding the scope of the “Reduce Motion” setting, and adding more options to reduce distracting notification bubbles. Plus, thanks to feedback from Aaron who you may know from his blog series on Linux accessibility, Notifications and the Shortcut Overlay both got releases that add screen reader support. As a community that includes folks with a range of disabilities ourselves, we’re deeply invested in improving access to Open Source software. We succeed at our mission when we build open computing experiences that are available regardless of ability and fail when accessibility is considered an afterthought or a nice-to-have. This month and always, Inclusive Design is at the core of what we do and we will continue to strive towards that ideal. If you want to follow along or help us address accessibility issues in elementary OS, we’d love your help! We’re tracking issues in this GitHub project. If you discover a new issue—accessibility related or otherwise—we’d love to get your feedback and we have a handy contributor guide to help you file a report here. Code A big new release of Code is here, thanks primarily to Jeremy. This release closes 19 reported issues including a couple of crashers. The “Open in…” menu is now sorted and includes an option for the Terminal pane. Plus the Terminal pane now follows Natural Copy/Paste settings from the Terminal app. The Vala symbols pane now shows a lot more information about symbols in their tooltips. Numbered lists are now handled correctly by the Markdown plugin. The Highlight Word Selection plugin now works with selections of more than one word. Several enhancements were made to managing git branches including sorting branch names alphabetically, the ability to switch to remote branches, and you’ll now be asked how to handle uncommitted changes when switching branches. You can now create edit marks by clicking in the source view gutter. They can be jumped between via the context menu or with the keyboard shortcuts Alt + ← / →. If you’re using the Flatpak version of Code on another OS, the “Open in…” menu is no longer empty and operations that require a network should now work. Plus performance was improved in several cases. Window Manager & Dock This month Leonhard and Leo closed another 19 issue reports in our window manager, including several issues related to multi-monitor, the Multitasking View, and Dock behavior. A crash that could occur when closing LibreOffice windows was fixed. Picture-in-picture will now select the correctly window when its area selection is drawn over an app’s shadow. Non-flatpak apps that don’t correctly match their launchers can now sometimes be matched by the Dock anyways. If you have “activate hotcorners in fullscreen” turned on, you can also now access the Applications Menu with Super while playing a fullscreen game, for example. Plus we made some performance improvements to drawing shadows. System Settings In Keyboard → Shortcuts → Custom you can now choose from a list of installed apps and their actions—in addition to being able to execute custom commands—thanks to Leo. This makes it super straightforward to add a keyboard shortcut for your most common workflows like composing a new email or adding a new Calendar event. You can now create custom keyboard shortcuts for apps and their actions System Settings will also now warn you if your desired keyboard shortcut conflicts with a common system shortcut like “Copy”, “Paste”, or “New Tab”. Plus we fixed an issue that would prevent certain Housekeeping configurations from running, and the “Automatic” accent color option now works more reliably. And More The Screencast Portal now features an improved design for selecting which display or window should be captured, as well as respecting options for capturing the pointer. Plus we fixed issues that prevented screenshots from including window shadows in some cases, and screenshot notifications now open the Image Viewer when clicked. Screencasts portal has a new design Jeremy fixed a number of issues in the latest release of Files including issues related to file renaming, drag-and-drop, ejecting removable drives, and an issue activating context menus from certain parts of the sidebar. And he also fixed an issue preventing bluetooth file sharing from working. Plus, Leo made sure that panel transparency and orientation lock settings get synced to the Login & Lock screen. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access Bluetooth Settings got a redesign and a reworking of its list sorting logic that should improve performance, reliability, and its screen reader experience. Especially of note, we now sort out more bluetooth devices so the list of nearby devices should be more concise and useful. Plus we fixed a few issues related to devices that require a passcode to pair, like some keyboards. This includes some fairly large changes so we could really use help testing for regressions before releasing this update for everyone. Bluetooth settings has a new design We’re also now building daily ARM64 Native images thanks to new contributer NN708. This is a universal ARM UEFI image, which means it should be a single image that runs on platforms like Raspberry Pi, Pinebook Pro, and Apple M-series Macs. This makes it a lot simpler for us to support ARM processors in future releasses of elementary OS. Please test these images on your ARM devices and report back! We now include additional processor architecture options in our issue report template to track any problems you experience. Download ARM64 Builds Sponsors At the moment we’re at 23% of our monthly funding goal and 322 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.

a month ago 29 votes
The First Pride Was a Riot, and So Are These Updates

Questionable puns aside, it’s Pride Month and we’re excited to celebrate by bringing you these updates hand-made by real LGBTQIA+ community members from around the world!—and possibly some straight cis folks too. This rainbow of releases includes some important accessibility updates, tons of bug fixes, and of course a few new features. Window Manager & Dock Another absolutely massive release of our window manager is out that fixes about 20 reported issues and a brand new Gesture Controller thanks to Leonhard and Leo. You can now Swipe up in Multitasking View to close windows, app titles in Multitasking View are now always shown—making them accessible for touch screen setups—and screenshots taken with a keyboard shortcut will send a notification that you can use to view it in Files, just to name a few headlining features. If you want to read the full release notes, Good Luck Babe they’re quite long. A new release of our Dock is also out which brings back a couple of old Plank features: showing multiple dots for apps with multiple running windows and cycling through app windows when you hold a drag-n-drop over its icon. Plus you can now open context menus with a long-press. And there’s a number of bug fixes including things related to hide modes and memory usage. Thanks again to Leo and Leonhard for their hard work here. System Settings Leonhard fixed a crash when setting custom hotcorner commands and we now only show the Applications Menu hotcorner action in its corresponding panel corner—that’s top-left for folks reading left-to-right and top-right for folks reading right-to-left. Plus there’s a new option to enable hotcorners even while an app is fullscreened. As a follow up to last month’s fixes, choosing light or dark mode in System Settings will now properly snooze your schedule instead of disabling it all together—a great convenience for those of us who suffer from eye strain or headaches and need to occasionally reach for that dark mode during the day. Plus, the Reduce Motion setting now covers a whole new range of animations—perfect for folks who get motion sick or find animations distracting. Leonardo tackled a couple of crashes in Display settings including one when mirroring, and another when new displays are attached while System Settings is open. We fixed an issue that prevented CalDAV accounts from connecting in Online Accounts settings. And Alain snuck in a few design tweaks, fixing button alignments etc. And More Thanks to feedback from Aaron, Notifications and the Shortcut Overlay both got releases that add screen reader support. Corentin addressed some Flatpak sandbox issues with an updated Apparmor Profile—especially notable if you’d had trouble with Steam. We now use BeaconDB as our location services provider. And thanks to Ryo we’re now shipping the latest version of GNOME Web which brings improved performance and web compatibility as well as a redesigned bookmarks sidebar. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Community Pride I want to take a little space to say that our community is for everyone regardless of gender or sexual identity. We’ve long been made up of lots of different kinds of folks and I’m really proud of that. Open Source software should never be a space that is restricted to a narrow set of identities. In a time where many companies are withdrawing their support for the LGBTQIA+ community, I think it’s incredibly important that we make a strong statement against hate and don’t give in to the pressure to erase queer people in some sad attempt to be “apolitical”. Free Software has always been political, and its politics are freedom and inclusivity and so are ours. Sponsors At the moment we’re at 23% of our monthly funding goal and 336 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.

2 months ago 27 votes
A Little Bit Now, A Lotta Bit Later

In mid-March we released a big bug fix update—elementary OS 8.0.1—and since then we’ve been hard at work on even more bug fixes and some new exciting features that I’m excited to share with you today! Read ahead to find out what we’ve released recently and what you can help us test in Early Access. Quick Settings Quick Settings has a new “Prevent Sleep” toggle Leo added a new “Prevent Sleep” toggle. This is useful when you’re giving a presentation or have a long-running background task where you want to temporarily avoid letting the computer go to sleep on its normal schedule. We also fixed a bug where the “Dark Mode” toggle would cancel the dark mode schedule when used. We now have proper schedule snoozing, so when you manually toggle Dark Mode on or off while using a timed or sunset-to-sunrise schedule, your schedule will resume on the next schedule change instead of being canceled completely. Vishal also fixed an issue that caused some apps to report being improperly closed on system shutdown or restart and on the lock screen we now show the “Suspend” button rather than the “Lock” button. System Settings Locale settings has a fresh layout thanks to Alain with its options aligned more cleanly and improved links to additional settings. Locale Settings has a more responsive design We’ve also added the phrase “about this device” as a search term for the System page and improved interface copy when a restart is required to finish installing updates based on your feedback. Plus, Stanisław improved stylus detection in Wacom settings preventing a crash when no stylus is found. AppCenter We now show a small label next to the download button for apps which contain in-app purchases. This is especially useful for easily identifying free-to-play games or alt stores like Steam or Heroic Games Launcher. AppCenter now shows when apps have in-app purchases Plus, we now reload app icons on-the-fly as their data is processed, thanks to Italo. That means you’ll no longer get occasionally stuck with an AppCenter which shows missing images for app’s who have taken a bit longer than usual to load. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Early Access Our development focus recently has been on some of the bigger features that will likely land for either elementary OS 8.1 or 9. We’ve got a new app, big changes to the design of our desktop itself, a whole lot of under-the-hood cleanup, and the return of some key system services thanks to a new open source project. Monitor We’re now shipping a System Monitor app by default By popular demand—and thanks to the hard work of Stanisław—we have a new system monitor app called “Monitor” shipping in Early Access. Monitor provides usage information for your processor, GPU, memory, storage, network, and currently running processes. You can optionally see system information in the panel with Monitor You can also optionally get a ton of glanceable information shown in the panel. There’s currently a lot of work happening to port Monitor to GTK4 and improve its functionality under the Secure Session, so make sure to report any issues you find! Multitasking The Dock is getting a workspace switcher Probably the biggest change to the Pantheon shell since its early inception, the Dock is getting a new workspace switcher! The workspace switcher works in a familiar way to the one you may have seen in the Multitasking View: Your currently open workspaces are represented as tiles with the icons of apps running on them; You can select a workspace to switch to it; You can drag-and-drop workspaces to rearrange them; And you can use the “+” button to create a new blank workspace. One new trick however is that selecting the workspace you’re already on will launch Multitasking View. The new workspace switcher makes it so much more accessible to multitask with just the mouse and get an overview of your workflows without having to first enter the Multitasking View. We’re really excited to hear what people think about it! You can close apps from Multitasking View by swiping up Another very satisfying feature for folks using touch input, you can now swipe up windows in the Multitasking View to close them. This is a really familiar gesture for those of us with Android and iOS devices and feels really natural for managing a big stack of windows without having to aim for a small “x” button. GTK4 Porting We’ve recently landed the port of Tasks to GTK4. So far that comes with a few fixes to tighten up its design, with much more possible in the future. Please make sure to help us test it thoroughly for any regressions! Tasks has a slightly tightened up design We’re also making great progress on porting the panel to GTK4. So far we have branches in review for Nightlight, Bluetooth, Datetime, and Network indicators. Power, Keyboard, and Quick Settings indicators all have in-progress branches. That leaves just Applications, Sound, and Notifications. So far these ports don’t come with major feature changes, but they do involve lots of cleaning up and modernizing of these code bases and in some cases fixing bugs! When the port is finished, we should see immediate performance gains and we’ll have a much better foundation for future releases. You can follow along with our progress porting everything to GTK4 in this GitHub Project. And More When you take a screenshot using keyboard shortcuts or by secondary-clicking an app’s window handle, we now send a notification letting you know that it was succesful and where to find the resulting image. Plus there’s a handy button that opens Files with your screenshot pre-selected. We’re also testing beaconDB as a replacement for Mozilla Location Services (MLS). If you’re not aware, we relied on MLS in previous versions of elementary OS to provide location information for devices that don’t have a GPS radio. Unfortunately Mozilla discontinued the service last June and we’ve been left without a replacement until now. Without these services, not only did maps and weather apps cease to function, but system features like automatic timezone detection and features that rely on sunset and sunrise times no longer work properly. beaconDB offers a drop-in replacement for MLS that uses Wireless networks, bluetooth devices, and cell towers to provide location data when requested. All of its data is crowd-sourced and opt-in and several distributions are now defaulting to using it as their location services data provider. I’ve set up a small sponsorship from elementary on Liberapay to support the project. If you can help support beaconDB either by sponsoring or providing stumbler data, I’d highly encourage you to do so! Sponsors At the moment we’re at 23% of our monthly funding goal and 336 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.

3 months ago 39 votes
elementary OS 8.0.1 Available Now

It’s been a little over 100 days since elementary OS 8 was released, and we’re proud to announce another round of updates, including a fresh new download. We’ve been hard at work this winter addressing issues that you reported and we’ve added a couple new creature comforts along the way. This bug fix release also includes the latest Ubuntu LTS Hardware Enablement Kernel, so it’s worth checking out if you downloaded OS 8.0 and it disagreed with your hardware. AppCenter We now properly use dark mode brand colors and dark mode screenshots thanks to Italo. Plus, when developers provide screenshots for multiple desktop environments, we now prefer the ones intended for our desktop environment, Pantheon. We support the new <Developer> Appstream tag, thanks to Juan. And we now support the contribute URL type. AppCenter now shows dark mode screenshots when available Italo also fixed some issues with release notes overflowing out of their container, and we slightly redesigned the release notes window in the Updates page. He also addressed a few other issues in the Updates page that could occur while things were being updated or refreshed and made sure AppCenter recovers gracefully when its cache is emptied. Release notes dialogs have been slightly redesigned Search is also much faster thanks to Leonhard. And for developers, Ryo fixed loading your local metadata for testing with the --load-local terminal option. Files & Terminal Jeremy fixed another half-dozen reported issues in Files, including an issue that prevented entering file paths in search mode, an issue that prevented scrolling after deleting files, and an issue where files would disappear when dropped on an unmounted drive. The New file submenu now respects the hierarchy of folders in Templates. We now also respect the admin:// uri protocol for opening a path as an administrator, and Files is now styled correctly when run as administrator. He also fixed an issue where Terminal tabs took multiple clicks to focus, and an issue where keyboard shortcuts stopped working for tabs that had been dragged into their own new window. Plus, file paths and names are also now properly quoted when drag-and-dropped from Files into Terminal. System Settings System Settings now allows configuring its notifications in System Settings → Notications. So you can turn off bubbles if you don’t want to receive notifications about updates, for example. We’ll also no longer automatically download updates when on metered connections and send a notification instead, thanks to Leonhard. Plus we no longer check for updates in Demo Mode. Updates now show their download size and you can see progress towards our monthly sponsorship goal In System, Vishal made sure we show how large an update will be before downloading it and that we skip held-back packages—such as phased or staged updates—when preparing the updates bundle so that it will more reliably succeed. Alain added a progress bar while downloading. And Ryo made sure the last refresh time is more accurate when no updates are available. Alain also added a new progress bar that represents how close we are to meeting our monthly sponsorship goal. In Applications, you can now disallow notifications access. This is especially useful for apps which use the notifications portal, but don’t properly report their notification usage and can’t be controlled in the Notifications settings page. Reign in apps that don’t appear in Notifications settings In Network there are two new settings: whether a network should be automatically connected to when available and whether to reduce background data usage when connected to that network. Disable autoconnect or mark a network as metered We also updated the pointer icons in Mouse & Touchpad settings and the checkmarks in Locale settings will now respect your chosen accent color. Plus settings pages with sidebars now remember the width you adjusted them to, thanks to Alain. Installation & Onboarding David fixed a crash with certain partitioning schemes in the Installer’s custom install view. And the Encryption step was redesigned to fit on a single page, solving an issue with confusing navigation. Plus, onboarding will now always stay centered on the screen, even when resized. Panel & Quick Settings Ilya fixed an issue with the panel height when using the Classic session and HiDPI displays. The app context menu in the Applications menu now shows a “Keep in Dock” checkbox, just like in the Dock thanks to Stella. In the Power menu, we now show the device model if available, and avoid erroneously showing an empty battery icon thanks to Alain. In the Sound menu, Dmitry fixed loading album art from certain apps like Google Chrome, and we fixed an issue where player icons could become too large. See who else is logged in and quickly switch accounts from Quick Settings In Quick settings, Leonhard fixed an issue with performing updates while shutting down. And Alain added a new page where you can see which other people are logged in and quickly switch between accounts. Dock Leo added a bit more spacing between launchers and their running indicators, and fixed an issue where larger icons could be clipped at the peak of their bounce animation. Apps who don’t notify on startup will no longer bounce in the dock indefinitely, thanks to Leonhard. We fixed an issue where the dock would still receive click events while hidden in the Classic session. Plus the dock now has an opaque style when “Panel Translucency” is turned off in System Settings → Desktop → Dock & Panel. Window Manager We have another huge release of our window manager thanks to Leonhard and Leo. This release fixes five potential crashes, over a dozen reported issues, fixes related to both the Classic and Secure sessions, issues related to HiDPI, and more, plus performance improvements. It’s worth reading the full release notes on GitHub if you have been waiting for the fix for a specific issue. And More OS 8.0.1 includes the latest long-term support Hardware Enablement stack from Ubuntu, including Linux 6.11. This brings improved performance for AMD processors, support for Intel “Lunar Lake” processors, and filesystem performance improvements in some cases. Plus support for certain webcams, USB network devices, joysticks, and more. Leo fixed an issue where connecting Bluetooth devices could cause the Lock Screen to freeze. You can now close the captive network assistant with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Q, thanks to Stanisław. And Alain fixed copying screenshots to the clipboard. We fixed an issue where wired network connections could fail to connect due to a change in Ubuntu. We’re pursuing this issue upstream and working on a way to ship the fix as an update, but for now fixing this issue requires either manual intervention through Terminal or a reinstall. We also now pre-install an AppArmor profile that fixes a number of Flatpak-related issues like not being to install certain runtime updates or apps not launching in the guest session or Demo mode. Special thanks to Uncle Tallest for investigating this issue and helping folks in our Discord who ran into it. And of course this release comes with a ton of translation updates! Special thanks to our hard-working internationalization community and especially Ryo who fixed a number of issues with things that couldn’t be localized properly in the previous release. Get elementary OS 8.0.1 elementary OS 8.0.1 is available as a pay-what-you-can purchase at elementary.io today. Localized direct downloads and a torrent magnet link are provided. OS 8 FAQ Download elementary OS 8.0.1 Sponsors have been able to download OS 8.0.1 release candidates since last week, so if getting things before anyone else is important to you, consider sponsoring us on GitHub

5 months ago 65 votes

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strongly typed?

What does it mean when someone writes that a programming language is “strongly typed”? I’ve known for many years that “strongly typed” is a poorly-defined term. Recently I was prompted on Lobsters to explain why it’s hard to understand what someone means when they use the phrase. I came up with more than five meanings! how strong? The various meanings of “strongly typed” are not clearly yes-or-no. Some developers like to argue that these kinds of integrity checks must be completely perfect or else they are entirely worthless. Charitably (it took me a while to think of a polite way to phrase this), that betrays a lack of engineering maturity. Software engineers, like any engineers, have to create working systems from imperfect materials. To do so, we must understand what guarantees we can rely on, where our mistakes can be caught early, where we need to establish processes to catch mistakes, how we can control the consequences of our mistakes, and how to remediate when somethng breaks because of a mistake that wasn’t caught. strong how? So, what are the ways that a programming language can be strongly or weakly typed? In what ways are real programming languages “mid”? Statically typed as opposed to dynamically typed? Many languages have a mixture of the two, such as run time polymorphism in OO languages (e.g. Java), or gradual type systems for dynamic languages (e.g. TypeScript). Sound static type system? It’s common for static type systems to be deliberately unsound, such as covariant subtyping in arrays or functions (Java, again). Gradual type systems migh have gaping holes for usability reasons (TypeScript, again). And some type systems might be unsound due to bugs. (There are a few of these in Rust.) Unsoundness isn’t a disaster, if a programmer won’t cause it without being aware of the risk. For example: in Lean you can write “sorry” as a kind of “to do” annotation that deliberately breaks soundness; and Idris 2 has type-in-type so it accepts Girard’s paradox. Type safe at run time? Most languages have facilities for deliberately bypassing type safety, with an “unsafe” library module or “unsafe” language features, or things that are harder to spot. It can be more or less difficult to break type safety in ways that the programmer or language designer did not intend. JavaScript and Lua are very safe, treating type safety failures as security vulnerabilities. Java and Rust have controlled unsafety. In C everything is unsafe. Fewer weird implicit coercions? There isn’t a total order here: for instance, C has implicit bool/int coercions, Rust does not; Rust has implicit deref, C does not. There’s a huge range in how much coercions are a convenience or a source of bugs. For example, the PHP and JavaScript == operators are made entirely of WAT, but at least you can use === instead. How fancy is the type system? To what degree can you model properties of your program as types? Is it convenient to parse, not validate? Is the Curry-Howard correspondance something you can put into practice? Or is it only capable of describing the physical layout of data? There are probably other meanings, e.g. I have seen “strongly typed” used to mean that runtime representations are abstract (you can’t see the underlying bytes); or in the past it sometimes meant a language with a heavy type annotation burden (as a mischaracterization of static type checking). how to type So, when you write (with your keyboard) the phrase “strongly typed”, delete it, and come up with a more precise description of what you really mean. The desiderata above are partly overlapping, sometimes partly orthogonal. Some of them you might care about, some of them not. But please try to communicate where you draw the line and how fuzzy your line is.

22 hours ago 6 votes
Logical Duals in Software Engineering

(Last week's newsletter took too long and I'm way behind on Logic for Programmers revisions so short one this time.1) In classical logic, two operators F/G are duals if F(x) = !G(!x). Three examples: x || y is the same as !(!x && !y). <>P ("P is possibly true") is the same as ![]!P ("not P isn't definitely true"). some x in set: P(x) is the same as !(all x in set: !P(x)). (1) is just a version of De Morgan's Law, which we regularly use to simplify boolean expressions. (2) is important in modal logic but has niche applications in software engineering, mostly in how it powers various formal methods.2 The real interesting one is (3), the "quantifier duals". We use lots of software tools to either find a value satisfying P or check that all values satisfy P. And by duality, any tool that does one can do the other, by seeing if it fails to find/check !P. Some examples in the wild: Z3 is used to solve mathematical constraints, like "find x, where f(x) >= 0. If I want to prove a property like "f is always positive", I ask z3 to solve "find x, where !(f(x) >= 0), and see if that is unsatisfiable. This use case powers a LOT of theorem provers and formal verification tooling. Property testing checks that all inputs to a code block satisfy a property. I've used it to generate complex inputs with certain properties by checking that all inputs don't satisfy the property and reading out the test failure. Model checkers check that all behaviors of a specification satisfy a property, so we can find a behavior that reaches a goal state G by checking that all states are !G. Here's TLA+ solving a puzzle this way.3 Planners find behaviors that reach a goal state, so we can check if all behaviors satisfy a property P by asking it to reach goal state !P. The problem "find the shortest traveling salesman route" can be broken into some route: distance(route) = n and all route: !(distance(route) < n). Then a route finder can find the first, and then convert the second into a some and fail to find it, proving n is optimal. Even cooler to me is when a tool does both finding and checking, but gives them different "meanings". In SQL, some x: P(x) is true if we can query for P(x) and get a nonempty response, while all x: P(x) is true if all records satisfy the P(x) constraint. Most SQL databases allow for complex queries but not complex constraints! You got UNIQUE, NOT NULL, REFERENCES, which are fixed predicates, and CHECK, which is one-record only.4 Oh, and you got database triggers, which can run arbitrary queries and throw exceptions. So if you really need to enforce a complex constraint P(x, y, z), you put in a database trigger that queries some x, y, z: !P(x, y, z) and throws an exception if it finds any results. That all works because of quantifier duality! See here for an example of this in practice. Duals more broadly "Dual" doesn't have a strict meaning in math, it's more of a vibe thing where all of the "duals" are kinda similar in meaning but don't strictly follow all of the same rules. Usually things X and Y are duals if there is some transform F where X = F(Y) and Y = F(X), but not always. Maybe the category theorists have a formal definition that covers all of the different uses. Usually duals switch properties of things, too: an example showing some x: P(x) becomes a counterexample of all x: !P(x). Under this definition, I think the dual of a list l could be reverse(l). The first element of l becomes the last element of reverse(l), the last becomes the first, etc. A more interesting case is the dual of a K -> set(V) map is the V -> set(K) map. IE the dual of lived_in_city = {alice: {paris}, bob: {detroit}, charlie: {detroit, paris}} is city_lived_in_by = {paris: {alice, charlie}, detroit: {bob, charlie}}. This preserves the property that x in map[y] <=> y in dual[x]. And after writing this I just realized this is partial retread of a newsletter I wrote a couple months ago. But only a partial retread! ↩ Specifically "linear temporal logics" are modal logics, so "eventually P ("P is true in at least one state of each behavior") is the same as saying !always !P ("not P isn't true in all states of all behaviors"). This is the basis of liveness checking. ↩ I don't know for sure, but my best guess is that Antithesis does something similar when their fuzzer beats videogames. They're doing fuzzing, not model checking, but they have the same purpose check that complex state spaces don't have bugs. Making the bug "we can't reach the end screen" can make a fuzzer output a complete end-to-end run of the game. Obvs a lot more complicated than that but that's the general idea at least. ↩ For CHECK to constraint multiple records you would need to use a subquery. Core SQL does not support subqueries in check. It is an optional database "feature outside of core SQL" (F671), which Postgres does not support. ↩

yesterday 6 votes
Omarchy 2.0

Omarchy 2.0 was released on Linux's 34th birthday as a gift to perhaps the greatest open-source project the world has ever known. Not only does Linux run 95% of all servers on the web, billions of devices as an embedded OS, but it also turns out to be an incredible desktop environment! It's crazy that it took me more than thirty years to realize this, but while I spent time in Apple's walled garden, the free software alternative simply grew better, stronger, and faster. The Linux of 2025 is not the Linux of the 90s or the 00s or even the 10s. It's shockingly more polished, capable, and beautiful. It's been an absolute honor to celebrate Linux with the making of Omarchy, the new Linux distribution that I've spent the last few months building on top of Arch and Hyprland. What began as a post-install script has turned into a full-blown ISO, dedicated package repository, and flourishing community of thousands of enthusiasts all collaborating on making it better. It's been improving rapidly with over twenty releases since the premiere in late June, but this Version 2.0 update is the biggest one yet. If you've been curious about giving Linux a try, you're not afraid of an operating system that asks you to level up and learn a little, and you want to see what a totally different computing experience can look and feel like, I invite you to give it a go. Here's a full tour of Omarchy 2.0.

2 days ago 7 votes
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

In 2020, Apple released the M1 with a custom GPU. We got to work reverse-engineering the hardware and porting Linux. Today, you can run Linux on a range of M1 and M2 Macs, with almost all hardware working: wireless, audio, and full graphics acceleration. Our story begins in December 2020, when Hector Martin kicked off Asahi Linux. I was working for Collabora working on Panfrost, the open source Mesa3D driver for Arm Mali GPUs. Hector put out a public call for guidance from upstream open source maintainers, and I bit. I just intended to give some quick pointers. Instead, I bought myself a Christmas present and got to work. In between my university coursework and Collabora work, I poked at the shader instruction set. One thing led to another. Within a few weeks, I drew a triangle. In 3D graphics, once you can draw a triangle, you can do anything. Pretty soon, I started work on a shader compiler. After my final exams that semester, I took a few days off from Collabora to bring up an OpenGL driver capable of spinning gears with my new compiler. Over the next year, I kept reverse-engineering and improving the driver until it could run 3D games on macOS. Meanwhile, Asahi Lina wrote a kernel driver for the Apple GPU. My userspace OpenGL driver ran on macOS, leaving her kernel driver as the missing piece for an open source graphics stack. In December 2022, we shipped graphics acceleration in Asahi Linux. In January 2023, I started my final semester in my Computer Science program at the University of Toronto. For years I juggled my courses with my part-time job and my hobby driver. I faced the same question as my peers: what will I do after graduation? Maybe Panfrost? I started reverse-engineering of the Mali Midgard GPU back in 2017, when I was still in high school. That led to an internship at Collabora in 2019 once I graduated, turning into my job throughout four years of university. During that time, Panfrost grew from a kid’s pet project based on blackbox reverse-engineering, to a professional driver engineered by a team with Arm’s backing and hardware documentation. I did what I set out to do, and the project succeeded beyond my dreams. It was time to move on. What did I want to do next? Finish what I started with the M1. Ship a great driver. Bring full, conformant OpenGL drivers to the M1. Apple’s drivers are not conformant, but we should strive for the industry standard. Bring full, conformant Vulkan to Apple platforms, disproving the myth that Vulkan isn’t suitable for Apple hardware. Bring Proton gaming to Asahi Linux. Thanks to Valve’s work for the Steam Deck, Windows games can run better on Linux than even on Windows. Why not reap those benefits on the M1? Panfrost was my challenge until we “won”. My next challenge? Gaming on Linux on M1. Once I finished my coursework, I started full-time on gaming on Linux. Within a month, we shipped OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux. A few weeks later, we passed official conformance for OpenGL ES 3.1. That put us at feature parity with Panfrost. I wanted to go further. OpenGL (ES) 3.2 requires geometry shaders, a legacy feature not supported by either Arm or Apple hardware. The proprietary OpenGL drivers emulate geometry shaders with compute, but there was no open source prior art to borrow. Even though multiple Mesa drivers need geometry/tessellation emulation, nobody did the work to get there. My early progress on OpenGL was fast thanks to the mature common code in Mesa. It was time to pay it forward. Over the rest of the year, I implemented geometry/tessellation shader emulation. And also the rest of the owl. In January 2024, I passed conformance for the full OpenGL 4.6 specification, finishing up OpenGL. Vulkan wasn’t too bad, either. I polished the OpenGL driver for a few months, but once I started typing a Vulkan driver, I passed 1.3 conformance in a few weeks. What remained was wiring up the geometry/tessellation emulation to my shiny new Vulkan driver, since those are required for Direct3D. Et voilà, Proton games. Along the way, Karol Herbst passed OpenCL 3.0 conformance on the M1, running my compiler atop his “rusticl” frontend. Meanwhile, when the Vulkan 1.4 specification was published, we were ready and shipped a conformant implementation on the same day. After that, I implemented sparse texture support, unlocking Direct3D 12 via Proton. …Now what? Ship a great driver? Check. Conformant OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 3.0? Check. Conformant Vulkan 1.4? Check. Proton gaming? Check. That’s a wrap. We’ve succeeded beyond my dreams. The challenges I chased, I have tackled. The drivers are fully upstream in Mesa. Performance isn’t too bad. With the Vulkan on Apple myth busted, conformant Vulkan is now coming to macOS via LunarG’s KosmicKrisp project building on my work. Satisfied, I am now stepping away from the Apple ecosystem. My friends in the Asahi Linux orbit will carry the torch from here. As for me? Onto the next challenge!

2 days ago 10 votes
Changing Careers to Software Development in Japan

TokyoDev has published a number of different guides on coming to Japan to work as a software developer. But what if you’re already employed in another industry in Japan, and are considering changing your career to software development? I interviewed four people who became developers after they moved to Japan, for their advice and personal experiences on: Why they chose development How they switched careers How they successfully found their first jobs What mistakes they made in the job hunt The most important advice they give to others Why switch to software development? A lifelong goal For Yuta Asakura, a career in software was the dream all along. “I’ve always wanted to work with computers,” he said, “but due to financial difficulties, I couldn’t pursue a degree in computer science. I had to start working early to support my single mother. As the eldest child, I focused on helping my younger brother complete his education.” To support his family, Asakura worked in construction for eight years, eventually becoming a foreman in Yokohama. Meanwhile, his brother graduated, and became a software engineer after joining the Le Wagon Tokyo bootcamp. About a year before his brother graduated, Asakura began to delve back into development. “I had already begun self-studying in my free time by taking online courses and building small projects,” he explained. “ I quickly became hooked by how fun and empowering it was to learn, apply, and build. It wasn’t always easy. There were moments I wanted to give up, but the more I learned, the more interesting things I could create. That feeling kept me going.” What truly inspired me was the idea of creating something from nothing. Coming from a construction background, I was used to building things physically. But I wanted to create things that were digital, scalable, borderless, and meaningful to others. An unexpected passion As Andrew Wilson put it, “Wee little Andrew had a very digital childhood,” full of games and computer time. Rather than pursuing tech, however, he majored in Japanese and moved to Japan in 2012, where he initially worked as a language teacher and recruiter before settling into sales. Wilson soon discovered that sales wasn’t really his strong suit. “At the time I was selling three different enterprise software solutions.” So I had to have a fairly deep understanding of that software from a user perspective, and in the course of learning about these products and giving technical demonstrations, I realized that I liked doing that bit of my job way more than I liked actually trying to sell these things. Around that time, he also realized he didn’t want to manually digitize the many business cards he always collected during sales meetings: “That’s boring, and I’m lazy.” So instead, he found a business card-scanning app, made a spreadsheet to contain the data, automated the whole process, and shared it internally within his company. His manager approached him soon afterwards, saying, “You built this? We were looking to hire someone to do this!” Encouraged, Wilson continued to develop it. “As soon as I was done with work,” he explained with a laugh, “I was like, ‘Oh boy, I can work on my spreadsheet!’” As a result, Wilson came to the conclusion that he really should switch careers and pursue his passion for programming. Similarly to Wilson, Malcolm Hendricks initially focused on Japanese. He came to Japan as an exchange student in 2002, and traveled to Japan several more times before finally relocating in 2011. Though his original role was as a language teacher, he soon found a job at a Japanese publishing company, where he worked as an editor and writer for seven years. However, he felt burned out on the work, and also that he was in danger of stagnating; since he isn’t Japanese, the road to promotion was a difficult one. He started following some YouTube tutorials on web development, and eventually began creating websites for his friends. Along the way, he fell in love with development, on both a practical and a philosophical level. “There’s another saying I’ve heard here and there—I don’t know exactly who to attribute it to—but the essence of it goes that ‘Computer science is just teaching rocks how to think,’” Hendricks said. “My mentor Bob has been guiding me through the very fundamentals of computer science, down to binary calculations, Boolean logic, gate theory, and von Neumann architecture. He explains the fine minutia and often concludes with, ‘That’s how it works. There’s no magic to it.’ “Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I can’t help but be mystified at the things we are all now able to do, such as having video calls from completely different parts of the world, or even me here typing on squares of plastic to make letters appear on a screen that has its own source of light inside it. . . . [It] sounds like the highest of high-fantasy wizardry to me.” I’ve always had a love for technomancy, but I never figured I might one day get the chance to be a technomancer myself. And I love it! We have the ability to create nigh unto anything in the digital world. A practical solution When Paulo D’Alberti moved to Japan in 2019, he only spoke a little Japanese, which limited his employment prospects. With his prior business experience, he landed an online marketing role for a blockchain startup, but eventually exited the company to pursue a more stable work environment. “But when I decided to leave the company,” D’Alberti said, “my Japanese was still not good enough to do business. So I was at a crossroads.” Do I decide to join a full-time Japanese language course, aiming to get JLPT N2 or the equivalent, and find a job on the business side? . . . Or do I say screw it and go for a complete career change and get skills in something more technical, that would allow me to carry those skills [with me] even if I were to move again to another country?” The portability of a career in development was a major plus for D’Alberti. “That was one of the big reasons. Another consideration was that, looking at the boot camps that were available, the promise was ‘Yeah, we’ll teach you to be a software developer in nine weeks or two months.’ That was a much shorter lead time than getting from JLPT N4 to N2. I definitely wouldn’t be able to do that in two months.” Since D’Alberti had family obligations, the timeline for his career switch was crucial. “We still had family costs and rent and groceries and all of that. I needed to find a job as soon as possible. I actually already at that point had been unsuccessfully job hunting for two months. So that was like, ‘Okay, the savings are winding up, and we are running out of options. I need to make a decision and make it fast.’” How to switch careers Method 1: Software Development Bootcamp Under pressure to find new employment quickly, D’Alberti decided to enter the Le Wagon Coding Bootcamp in Tokyo. Originally, he wavered between Le Wagon and Code Chrysalis, which has since ended its bootcamp programs. “I went with Le Wagon for two reasons,” he explained. “There were some scheduling reasons. . . . But the main reason was that Code Chrysalis required you to pass a coding exam before being admitted to their bootcamp.” Since D’Alberti was struggling to learn development by himself, he knew his chances of passing any coding exam were slim. “I tried Code Academy, I tried Solo Learn, I tried a whole bunch of apps online, I would follow the examples, the exercises . . . nothing clicked. I wouldn’t understand what I was doing or why I was doing it.” At the time, Le Wagon only offered full-time web development courses, although they now also have part-time courses and a data science curriculum. Since D’Alberti was unemployed, a full-time program wasn’t a problem for him, “But it did mean that the people who were present were very particular [kinds] of people: students who could take some time off to add this to their [coursework], or foreigners who took three months off and were traveling and decide to come here and do studying plus sightseeing, and I think there were one or two who actually asked for time off from the job in order to participate.” It was a very intense course, and the experience itself gave me exactly what I needed. I had been trying to learn by myself. It did not work. I did not understand. [After joining], the first day or second day, suddenly everything clicked. D’Alberti appreciated how Le Wagon organized the curriculum to build continuously off previous lessons. By the time he graduated in June of 2019, he’d built three applications from scratch, and felt far more confident in his coding abilities. “It was great. [The curriculum] was amazing, and I really felt super confident in my abilities after the three months. Which, looking back,” he joked, “I still had a lot to learn.” D’Alberti did have some specific advice for those considering a bootcamp: “Especially in the last couple of weeks, it can get very dramatic. You are divided into teams and as a team, you’re supposed to develop an application that you will be demonstrating in front of other people.” Some of the students, D’Alberti explained, felt that pressure intensely; one of his classmates broke down in tears. “Of course,” he added, “one of the big difficulties of joining a bootcamp is economical. The bootcamp itself is quite expensive.” While between 700,000 and 800,000 yen when D’Alberti went through the bootcamp, Le Wagon’s tuition has now risen to 890,000 yen for Web Development and 950,000 for Data Science. At the time D’Alberti joined there was no financial assistance. Now, Le Wagon has an agreement with Hello Work, so that students who are enrolled in the Hello Work system can be reimbursed for up to 70 percent of the bootcamp’s tuition. Though already studying development by himself, Asakura also enrolled in Le Wagon Tokyo in 2024, “to gain structure and accountability,” he said. One lesson that really stayed with me came from Sylvain Pierre, our bootcamp director. He said, ‘You stop being a developer the moment you stop learning or coding.’ That mindset helped me stay on track. Method 2: Online computer science degree Wilson considered going the bootcamp route, but decided against it. He knew, from his experience in recruiting, that a degree would give him an edge—especially in Japan, where having the right degree can make a difference in visa eligibility “The quality of bootcamps is perfectly fine,” he explained. “If you go through a bootcamp and study hard, you can get a job and become a developer no problem. I wanted to differentiate myself on paper as much as I could . . . [because] there are a lot of smart, motivated people who go through a bootcamp.” Whether it’s true or not, whether it’s valid or not, if you take two candidates who are very similar on paper, and one has a coding bootcamp and one has a degree, from a typical Japanese HR perspective, they’re going to lean toward the person with the degree. “Whether that’s good or not, that’s sort of a separate situation,” Wilson added. “But the reality [is] I’m older and I’m trying to make a career change, so I want to make sure that I’m giving myself every advantage that I can.” For these reasons, Wilson opted to get his computer science degree online. “There’s a program out of the University of Oregon, for people who already had a Bachelor’s degree in a different subject to get a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. “Because it’s limited to people who already have a Bachelor’s degree, that means you don’t need to take any non-computer science classes. You don’t need any electives or prerequisites or anything like that.” As it happened, Wilson was on paternity leave when he started studying for his degree. “That was one of my motivations to finish quickly!” he said. In the end, with his employer’s cooperation, he extended his paternity leave to two years, and finished the degree in five quarters. Method 3: Self-taught Hendricks took a different route, combining online learning materials with direct experience. He primarily used YouTube tutorials, like this project from one of his favorite channels, to teach himself. Once he had the basics down, he started creating websites for friends, as well as for the publishing company he worked for at the time. With every site, he’d put his name at the bottom of the page, as a form of marketing. This worked well enough that Hendricks was able to quit his work at the translation company and transition to full-time freelancing. However, eventually the freelancing work dried up, and he decided he wanted to experience working at a tech company—and not just for job security reasons. Hendricks saw finding a full-time development role as the perfect opportunity to push himself and see just how far he could get in his new career. There’s a common trope, probably belonging more to the sports world at large, about the importance of shedding ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ in the pursuit of one’s passion . . . and that’s also how I wanted to cut my teeth in the software engineering world. The job hunt While all four are now successfully employed as developers, Asakura, D’Alberti, Wilson, and Hendricks approached and experienced the job hunt differently. Following is their hard-earned advice on best practices and common mistakes. DO network When Hendricks started his job hunt, he faced the disadvantages of not having any formal experience, and also being both physically and socially isolated from other developers. Since he and his family were living in Nagano, he wasn’t able to participate in most of the tech events and meet-ups available in Tokyo or other big cities. His initial job hunt took around a year, and at one point he was sending so many applications that he received a hundred rejections in a week. It wasn’t until he started connecting with the community that he was able to turn it around, eventually getting three good job offers in a single week. Networking, for me, is what made all the difference. It was through networking that I found my mentors, found community, and joined and even started a few great Discord servers. These all undeniably contributed to me ultimately landing my current job, but they also made me feel welcome in the industry. Hendricks particularly credits his mentors, Ean More and Bob Cousins, for giving him great advice. “My initial mentor [Ean More] I actually met through a mutual IT networking Facebook group. I noticed that he was one of the more active members, and that he was always ready to lend a hand to help others with their questions and spread a deeper understanding of programming and computer science. He also often posted snippets of his own code to share with the community and receive feedback, and I was interested in a lot of what he was posting. “I reached out to him and told him I thought it was amazing how selfless he was in the group, and that, while I’m still a junior, if there was ever any grunt work I could do under his guidance, I would be happy to do so. Since he had a history of mentoring others, he offered to do so for me, and we’ve been mentor/mentee and friends ever since.” “My other mentor [Bob Cousins],” Hendricks continued, “was a friend of my late uncle’s. My uncle had originally begun mentoring me shortly before his passing. We were connected through a mutual friend whom I lamented to about not having any clue how to continue following the path my uncle had originally laid before me. He mentioned that he knew just the right person and gave me an email address to contact. I sent an email to the address and was greeted warmly by the man who would become another mentor, and like an uncle to me.” Although Hendricks found him via a personal connection, Cousins runs a mentorship program that caters to a wide variety of industries. Wilson also believes in the power of networking—and not just for the job hunt. “One of the things I like about programming,” he said, “is that it’s a very collaborative community. Everybody wants to help everybody.” We remember that everyone had to start somewhere, and we’ll take time to help those starting out. It’s a very welcoming community. Just do it! We’re all here for you, and if you need help I’ll refer you. Asakura, by contrast, thinks that networking can help, but that it works a little differently in Japan than in other countries. “Don’t rely on it too much,” he said. “Unlike in Western countries, personal referrals don’t always lead directly to job opportunities in Japan. Your skills, effort, and consistency will matter more in the long run.” DO treat the job hunt like a job Once he’d graduated from Le Wagon, D’Alberti said, “I considered job-hunting my full-time job.”  I checked all the possible networking events and meetup events that were going on in the city, and tried to attend all of them, every single day. I had a list of 10 different job boards that I would go and just refresh on a daily basis to see, ‘Okay, Is there anything new now?’ And, of course, I talked with recruiters. D’Alberti suggests beginning the search earlier than you think you need to. “I had started actively job hunting even before graduating [from Le Wagon],” he said. “That’s advice I give to everyone who joins the bootcamp. “Two weeks before graduation, you have one simple web application that you can show. You have a second one you’re working on in a team, and you have a third one that you know what it’s going to be about. So, already, there are three applications that you can showcase or you can use to explain your skills. I started going to meetups and to different events, talking with people, showing my CV.” The process wasn’t easy, as most companies and recruiters weren’t interested in hiring for junior roles. But his intensive strategy paid off within a month, as D’Albert landed three invitations to interview: one from a Japanese job board, one from a recruiter, and one from LinkedIn. For Asakura, treating job hunting like a job was as much for his mental health as for his career. “The biggest challenge was dealing with impostor syndrome and feeling like I didn’t belong because I didn’t have a computer science degree,” he explained. “I also experienced burnout from pushing myself too hard.” To cope, I stuck to a structured routine. I went to the gym daily to decompress, kept a consistent study schedule as if I were working full-time, and continued applying for jobs even when it felt hopeless. At first, Asakura tried to apply to jobs strategically by tracking each application, tailoring his resume, and researching every role. “But after dozens of rejections,” he said, “I eventually switched to applying more broadly and sent out over one hundred applications. I also reached out to friends who were already software engineers and asked for direct referrals, but unfortunately, nothing worked out.” Still, Asakura didn’t give up. He practiced interviews in both English and Japanese with his friends, and stayed in touch with recruiters. Most importantly, he kept developing and adding to his portfolio. DO make use of online resources “What ultimately helped me was staying active and visible,” Asakura said. I consistently updated my GitHub, LInkedIn, and Wantedly profiles. Eventually, I received a message on Wantedly from the CTO of a company who was impressed with my portfolio, and that led to my first developer job.” “If you have the time, certifications can also help validate your knowledge,” Asakura added, “especially in fields like cloud and AI. Some people may not realize this, but the rise of artificial intelligence is closely tied to the growth of cloud computing. Earning certifications such as AWS, Kubernetes, and others can give you a strong foundation and open new opportunities, especially as these technologies continue to evolve.” Hendricks also heavily utilized LinkedIn and similar sites, though in a slightly different way. “I would also emphasize the importance of knowing how to use job-hunting sites like Indeed and LinkedIn,” he said. “I had the best luck when I used them primarily to do initial research into companies, then applied directly through the companies’ own websites, rather than through job postings that filter applicants before their resumés ever make it to the actual people looking to hire.” In addition, Hendricks recommends studying coding interview prep tutorials from freeCodeCamp. Along with advice from his mentors and the online communities he joined, he credits those tutorials with helping him successfully receive offers after a long job hunt. DO highlight experience with Japanese culture and language Asakura felt that his experience in Japan, and knowledge of Japanese, gave him an edge. “I understand Japanese work culture [and] can speak the language,” Asakura said, “and as a Japanese national I didn’t require visa sponsorship. That made me a lower-risk hire for companies here.” Hendricks also felt that his excellent Japanese made him a more attractive hire. While applying, he emphasized to companies that he could be a bridge to the global market and business overseas. However, he also admitted this strategy steered him towards applying with more domestic Japanese companies, which were also less likely to hire someone without a computer science degree. “So,” he said, “it sort of washed out.” Wilson is another who put a lot of emphasis on his Japanese language skills, from a slightly different angle. A lot of interviewees typically don’t speak Japanese well . . . and a lot of companies here say that they’re very international, but if they want very good programmers, [those people] spend their lives programming, not studying English. So having somebody who can bridge the language gap on the IT side can be helpful. DO lean into your other experience Several career switchers discovered that their past experiences and skills, while not immediately relevant to their new career, still proved quite helpful in landing that first role—sometimes in very unexpected ways. When Wilson was pitching his language skills to companies, he wasn’t talking about just Japanese–English translation. He also highlighted his prior experience in sales to suggest that he could help communicate with and educate non-technical audiences. “Actually to be a software engineer, there’s a lot of technical communication you have to do.” I have worked with some incredible coders who are so good at the technical side and just don’t want to do the personal side. But for those of us who are not super-geniuses and can’t rely purely on our tech skills . . . there’s a lot of non-technical discussion that goes around building a product.” This strategy, while eventually fruitful, didn’t earn Wilson a job right away. Initially, he applied to more than sixty companies over the course of three to four months. “I didn’t have any professional [coding] experience, so it was actually quite a rough time,” he said. “I interviewed all over the place. I was getting rejected all over town.” The good news was, Wilson said, “I’m from Chicago. I don’t know what it is, but there are a lot of Chicagoans who work in Tokyo for whatever reason.” When he finally landed an interview, one of the three founders of the company was also from Chicago, giving them something in common. “We hit it off really well in the interview. I think that kind of gave me the edge to get the role, to be honest.” Like Wilson, D’Alberti found that his previous work as a marketer helped him secure his first developer role—which was ironic, he felt, given that he’d partially chosen to switch careers because he hadn’t been able to find an English-language marketing job in Japan. “I had my first interview with the CEO,” he told me, “and this was for a Japanese startup that was building chatbots, and they wanted to expand into the English market. So I talked with the CEO, and he was very excited to get to know me and sent me to talk with the CTO.” The CTO, unfortunately, wasn’t interested in hiring a junior developer with no professional experience. “And I thought that was the end of it. But then I got called again by the CEO. I wanted to join for the engineering position, and he wanted to have me for my marketing experience.” In the end we agreed that I would join in a 50-50 arrangement. I would do 50 percent of my job in marketing and going to conferences and talking to people, and 50 percent on the engineering side. I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll take that.’ This ended up working better than D’Alberti had expected, partially due to external circumstances. “When COVID came, we couldn’t travel abroad, so most of the job I was doing in my marketing role I couldn’t perform anymore. “So they sat me down and [said], ‘What are we going to do with you, since we cannot use you for marketing anymore?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’m still a software developer. I could continue working in that role.’ And that actually allowed me to fully transition.” DON’T make these mistakes It was D’Alberti’s willingness to compromise on that first development role that led to his later success, so he would explicitly encourage other career-changers to avoid, in his own words, “being too picky.” This advice is based, not just on his own experience, but also on his time working as a teaching assistant at Le Wagon. “There were a couple of people who would be like, ‘Yeah, I’d really like to find a job and I’m not getting any interviews,’” he explained. “And then we’d go and ask, ‘Okay, how many companies are you applying to? What are you doing?’ But [they’d say] ‘No, see, [this company] doesn’t offer enough’ or ‘I don’t really like this company’ or ‘I’d like to do something else.’ Those who would be really picky or wouldn’t put in the effort, they wouldn’t land a job. Those who were deadly serious about ‘I need to get a job as a software developer,’ they’d find one. It might not be a great job, it might not be at a good company, but it would be a good first start from which to move on afterwards. Asakura also knew some other bootcamp graduates who struggled to find work. “A major reason was a lack of Japanese language skills,” he said. Even for junior roles, many companies in Japan require at least conversational Japanese, especially domestic ones. On the other hand, if you prioritize learning Japanese, that can give you an edge on entering the industry: “Many local companies are open to training junior developers, as long as they see your motivation and you can communicate effectively. International companies, on the other hand, often have stricter technical requirements and may pass on candidates without degrees or prior experience.” Finally, Hendricks said that during his own job hunt, “Not living in Tokyo was a problem.” It was something that he was able to overcome via diligent digital networking, but he’d encourage career-changers to think seriously about their future job prospects before settling outside a major metropolis in Japan. Their top advice I asked each developer to share their number one piece of advice for career-changers. D’Alberti wasn’t quite sure what to suggest, given recent changes in the tech market overall. “I don’t have clear advice to someone who’s trying to break into tech right now,” he said. “It might be good to wait and see what happens with the AI path. Might be good to actually learn how to code using AI, if that’s going to be the way to distinguish yourself from other junior developers. It might be to just abandon the idea of [being] a linear software developer in the traditional sense, and maybe look more into data science, if there are more opportunities.” But assuming they still decide ‘Yes, I want to join, I love the idea of being a software developer and I want to go forward’ . . . my main suggestion is patience. “It’s going to be tough,” he added. By contrast, Hendricks and Wilson had the same suggestion: if you want to change careers, then go for it, full speed ahead. “Do it now, or as soon as you possibly can,” Hendricks stated adamantly. His life has been so positively altered by discovering and pursuing his passion, that his only regret is he didn’t do it sooner. Wilson said something strikingly similar. “Do it. Just do it. I went back and forth a lot,” he explained. “‘Oh, should I do this, it’s so much money, I already have a job’ . . . just rip the bandaid off. Just do it. You probably have a good reason.” He pointed out that while starting over and looking for work is scary, it’s also possible that you’ll lose your current job anyway, at which point you’ll still be job hunting but in an industry you no longer even enjoy. “If you keep at it,” he said, “you can probably do it.” “Not to talk down to developers,” he added, “but it’s not the hardest job in the world. You have to study and learn and be the kind of person who wants to sit at the computer and write code, but if you’re thinking about it, you’re probably the kind of person who can do it, and that also means you can probably weather the awful six months of job hunting.” You only need to pass one job interview. You only need to get your foot in the door. Asakura agreed with “just do it,” but with a twist. “Build in public,” he suggested. “Share your progress. Post on GitHub. Keep your LinkedIn active.” Let people see your journey, because even small wins build momentum and credibility. “To anyone learning to code right now,” Asakura added, “don’t get discouraged by setbacks or rejections. Focus on building, learning, and showing up every day. Your portfolio speaks louder than your past, and consistency will eventually open the door.” If you want to read more how-tos and success stories around networking, working with recruitment agencies, writing your resume, etc., check out TokyoDev’s other articles. If you’d like to hear more about being a developer in Japan, we invite you to join the TokyoDev Discord, which has over 6,000 members as well as dedicated channels for resume review, job posts, life in Japan, and more.

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