Developers' Top Pain Points in Open Source Runtimes
December 03, 2018

Bart Copeland
ActiveState

ActiveState surveyed developers and programmers in 92 countries to better understand their pain points and assess how businesses can better work with their organizations. The survey results establish a starting point for understanding the challenges that coders (developers, engineers, data scientists, QA and so on) confront when working with open source runtimes.

Blocks to Productivity

One fact the survey highlighted is that developers need to streamline their workflow in order to increase productivity. Developers and programmers spend only two to four hours of their day programming, on average. Productivity is disrupted due to time spent managing other issues such as polyglot environments and retrofitting. Enterprises are lacking resources that developers need to streamline their workflow.

The survey confirmed that security, defined here as being up to date with the latest or most secure version of packages used, is suffering. Management is unable to assess risks due to lack of visibility. For instance, 61 percent of respondents found it difficult or very difficult to get information about package quality – security, activity or updates.

Production code isn't being tracked, creating a gap in vulnerability assessment. This creates additional issues in security as there is lack of visibility of where code is specifically running that requires updates or patches. Consequently, half of developers surveyed expressed a deep concern about security.

In addition, new tool adoption turns out to be more cumbersome than helpful. In fact, developers already spend 74 % of their time managing dependencies and development tools. A whopping 67 % – more than two-thirds – opted out of implementing a new programming language due to the hassle of incorporating a new programming language. Not surprisingly, adding or incorporating a programming language into an organization was rated the most difficult challenge, by a significant margin; 56% of all respondents rated this as difficult or very difficult.

Bridging the Developer-Enterprise Gap

The above survey data is an invaluable tool to measure and track progress towards solving open source runtime pains that developers are experiencing. In order to relieve developers of these pains and better enable quicker release updates, we need to look at a top-down and bottom-up approach. The gap between the developer and the enterprise needs to be bridged through clear communication of needs.

One approach is to have a "bill of materials" of all the packages running in production as well as the applications and their respective dependencies of where the code is running.

Another approach is to facilitate the developer implementing what's required from a license and security perspective. Solving developers' problem spots will increase their productivity and their job satisfaction, benefiting developers and their organizations alike.

Bart Copeland is CEO and President of ActiveState
Share this

Industry News

April 02, 2025

Kong announced the launch of the latest version of Kong AI Gateway, which introduces new features to provide the AI security and governance guardrails needed to make GenAI and Agentic AI production-ready.

April 02, 2025

Traefik Labs announced significant enhancements to its AI Gateway platform along with new developer tools designed to streamline enterprise AI adoption and API development.

April 02, 2025

Zencoder released its next-generation AI coding and unit testing agents, designed to accelerate software development for professional engineers.

April 02, 2025

Windsurf (formerly Codeium) and Netlify announced a new technology partnership that brings seamless, one-click deployment directly into the developer's integrated development environment (IDE.)

April 02, 2025

Opsera raised $20M in Series B funding.

April 02, 2025

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, is making significant updates to its certification offerings.

April 01, 2025

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the Golden Kubestronaut program, a distinguished recognition for professionals who have demonstrated the highest level of expertise in Kubernetes, cloud native technologies, and Linux administration.

April 01, 2025

Red Hat announced new capabilities and enhancements for Red Hat Developer Hub, Red Hat’s enterprise-grade internal developer portal based on the Backstage project.

April 01, 2025

Platform9 announced that Private Cloud Director Community Edition is generally available.

March 31, 2025

Sonatype expanded support for software development in Rust via the Cargo registry to the entire Sonatype product suite.

March 31, 2025

CloudBolt Software announced its acquisition of StormForge, a provider of machine learning-powered Kubernetes resource optimization.

March 31, 2025

Mirantis announced the k0rdent Application Catalog – with 19 validated infrastructure and software integrations that empower platform engineers to accelerate the delivery of cloud-native and AI workloads wherever the\y need to be deployed.

March 31, 2025

Traefik Labs announced its Kubernetes-native API Management product suite is now available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

March 27, 2025

webAI and MacStadium(link is external) announced a strategic partnership that will revolutionize the deployment of large-scale artificial intelligence models using Apple's cutting-edge silicon technology.

March 27, 2025

Development work on the Linux kernel — the core software that underpins the open source Linux operating system — has a new infrastructure partner in Akamai. The company's cloud computing service and content delivery network (CDN) will support kernel.org, the main distribution system for Linux kernel source code and the primary coordination vehicle for its global developer network.