Jewelbots, the first programmable friendship bracelet, which aims to get more girls into coding, announced some highly-requested updates to the technology, including the ability to code with friends.

The friendship code is fully documented here. Users will have to add a new board to the Arduino IDE in order to get started. Another requested feature from users was better instructions on how to get started. Users wanted more detail and better usability, according to CEO and founder of Jewelbots Sara Chipps. The Jewelbots team already released its new instructions, and so far the feedback has been positive, Chipps explains. 

NodeSource releases Certified Modules for Node.js
The Node.js company NodeSource announced the release of Certified Modules designed to provide a reliable and secure way for developers to take advantage of more than 400,000 modules available in the Node.js ecosystem.

A key features of this release includes security vulnerability monitoring, which allows teams to update or swap modules accordingly. In addition, teams can take advantage of third-party modules securely and perform compliance checks before pushing code into production.

More information on this release can be found here.

CoreOS and Docker jointly donate to CNCF
CoreOS and Docker made a combined proposal to add CoreOS’s rkt and Docker’s containerd as new projects for inclusion in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). These proposals are the first step towards new projects that ensure the container community will thrive.

Rkt and containerd are able to download, verify and set up container images, and both projects consume OCI images and Docker Images. The difference between rkt and containerd is that rkt can be used to integrate and execute specialized containers that are critical for production.

More information on this proposal can be found here.

GNU Guile 2.2 released
Guile announced the release of GNU Guile 2.2, which includes a new optimizing compiler and a high performance register virtual machine.

Guile 2.2 aims to remove limitations on programs by lowering the memory usage and speeding up the eval interpreter. This release also provides better support for multi-core programming, and the ability to remove any fixed stack size limit.

See the release notes for more details.

Alison launches free software testing diploma
The e-learning provider Alison launched a free software testing diploma today. This is aimed at high school graduate level individuals, and it is an informal qualification that explores verification and validation processes in testing.

“For anyone considering a career in software testing, Alison’s free software testing diploma is a good way to get a feel for the field you’re planning to enter,” said Andrew Madigan, head of technology at Alison. “It’s a comprehensive introduction to the verification and validation processes in software testing.”

More information can be found here.