Release Radar · December 2020 Edition

We’re here to bring you the latest and greatest releases for December 2020. These are exciting new releases from some of the coolest projects around. There’s everything from world-changing tech to weekend hobbies. The best part about these releases is that they’re all you. These are projects shipped by amazing developers from the open source community. Although there are many projects released every month, we don’t have enough blog space to capture everything, so we selected a handful of awesome examples. Turn on the kettle, grab the leftover turkey, and read our top ten picks.

PHP 8.0

The ever popular all-purpose scripting language (it’s like all-purpose flour) – you can use it for almost anything. PHP is however, specially suited for web development. It’s fast, flexible, and powers everything from blogs to some of our release picks. Now with PHP 8.0, you can experience improvements and new features, like union types, named arguments, matched expressions, and more. Check out a side-by-side comparison of PHP 7.0 vs. PHP 8.0 on the PHP website.

Supabase 1.0

We were very lucky to have Supabase on one of our Open Source Friday live streams. During our chat, we learned all about this platform for developing high quality apps and growing your business. With Supabase, anyone can create a backend in less than two minutes. Supabase provides you with the database, authentication, storage, and lots of custom functions. Congrats to the team on launching Supabase! If you missed our chat with Paul Copplestone of Supabase, make some space in your calendar to watch the recording.

.NET 5.0

We’re coming off the back of .NET Conf, so this is the perfect time to mention .NET 5.0. This open source developer platform gives you the opportunity to build multiple applications in multiple languages, editors, libraries, and for multiple platforms. The latest release to .NET has a huge amount of features, including support for the new C# 9.0 and F# 5.0. There’s also updates to Visual Basic and performance improvements. Oh and if you’re slightly confused, wondering what happened to .NET 4.0, there wasn’t one. The team decided to omit 4.x and go straight to .NET 5.0 to avoid confusion with .NET Framework 4.x. Well guess that makes sense! You can read more about why the team skipped 4.0 and more on the 5.0 updates over on the documentation.

Simple Icons 4.0

Want more than 1,400 icons to use as SVGs? That’s what Simple Icons are. You can use them for websites, graphics, and more. Version 4.0 comes with a brand new icon: GitHub Sponsors ! There’s a bunch of updated icons, some renamed ones, and since Mixer is out of the picture, the Mixer logo has been taken out of the mix. There are heaps of great icons for your favourite apps and products like Razer , Audio-Technica , Atom , and more. Next time you’re looking for an icon to use, head over to Simple Icons.

Cypress 6.0

Do you want fast, easy, and reliable testing for anything running in your browser? Cypress has you covered. Their latest release offers full network stubbing. Tests can now intercept, modify, and wait on any type of HTTP request coming from your app. There’s the usual bug fixes, some documentation changes, and new features. Check out the release notes to read up on all the changes. We’re talking to Cypress in just a couple of days. See all the details on the Meetup event, and tune in for a great Open Source Friday chat.

CircuitPython 6.0

Do you like microcontrollers? Then CircuitPython is definitely something you need. CircuitPython is a programming language supported by all the best microcontrollers around. There’s no upfront downloads needed, and you can start programming your microcontroller almost instantly. Now you can easily write code for your next lightsaber cosplay. With their latest release, CircuitPython 6.0 supports 38 additional microboards, more computations, and all the network modules have been completely revamped. Check out all the breaking changes in the CircuitPython release notes. What are you going to build next?

WeeChat 3.0

No not THAT WeChat, this WeeChat. WeeChat is a fast and light extensible chat client. It’s super powerful and very customisable. With multi-server and proxy support, SASL authentication, DCC, and tonnes of other features. Version 3.0 adds new options for script downloads and commands, as well as lots of new variables, arguments, functions, and the usual bug fixes. Check out all the changes, additions, and fixes on the WeeChat Changelog. Fun fact: WeeChat stands for Wee Enhanced Environment for Chat.

InfluxDB 2.0

Build, analyse, and monitor your IoT devices. That’s what InfluxDB is all about. There’s some powerful APIs and tools for building and operating time series applications. InfluxDB is fast! It has an easy-to-use dashboard and cloud database. This means you can use it anywhere and for anything—even for tracking your CS:GO stats! Their latest release makes InfluxDB available to everyone. With the public release of InfluxDB, not only is the build more stable and faster, but you can also do more. Data can be quickly manipulated through Flux, a new purpose built query language developed by InfluxDB themselves. Flux can do some really amazing things. Go check out all the use cases, and read more about InfluxDB 2.0 on the InfluxData site.

Matomo 4.0

Formerly known as Piwik, Matomo is a MySQL software program, again powered by PHP. It’s used on more than 1,400,000 websites and provides a range of analytical data. Their latest release provides more security, more privacy, and better performance— three things developers and consumers really value in this day and age. Version 4.0 comes with a massive 398 updates (or 398 closed issues). There’s so much jam packed in this release from tracking updates, to requiring PHP 7.2 and up. Check out all the changes, including shout outs to all the contributors in the release notes.

Micro 3.0

Are you building services in the cloud? Then Micro is for you. Micro addresses the key requirements needed to build services in the cloud. It provides a set of services and deals with the complexity that comes with distributed systems. Their latest release, now known as M3O, consolidates a lot of the existing tooling to make things work better and faster for you. With M3O, you can now address your entire workflow from build, run, manage, and consume. It’s a complete reimagining of developing for cloud native environments. Read up on all the amazing server changes and more on the Micro blog.

December Release Radar

Well that’s all for this month’s top release picks. Congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release, whether it was version 1.0 or version 8.0. Keep them coming people. Remember to check out the awesome project releases from our November Release Radar. If you’ve got a new release coming, we’d love to see. Use #GHReleaseRadar the next time you share your release on socials. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out. Happy coding.

Written by

Michelle Mannering

@MishManners

I'm a Content Producer working in tech & innovation. Known as the “Hackathon Queen” 👑 I'm on the GitHub DevRel team and love sharing stories from our amazing community of developers.