Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Property-based testing is a software testing technique that checks whether a program satisfies general rules, called properties, across many automatically generated inputs. Instead of writing tests for individual examples, developers define how their code should behave and let a testing framework search for inputs that break those rules.

CircleCI Functions are now available in beta, giving developers and coding agents a faster, more reliable way to set up CI pipelines using reusable, tested steps. Functions are the next evolution of CircleCI orbs. They make common CI tasks, like installing programming languages, configuring AWS credentials, and setting up Docker, available as ready-to-use programs that agents can discover, configure, and validate before running a pipeline.

Ask a team running an agent in production whether last week’s change made it better. Most can’t say. They swapped a model or rewrote a skill, eyeballed a few runs, and moved on. That works for a demo. It doesn’t work for an agent that touches production, where customers want two things that pull against each other: precision where a mistake is expensive, and low cost where the work is routine. A root cause someone acts on has to be right.

Microsoft fixed more than 1,400 vulnerabilities in its October Patch Tuesday. That’s one month, and it’s more than in all of 2025. Two weeks later, Anthropic said an unreleased Claude model had found and exploited serious vulnerabilities in Chrome, Safari, Android, Windows, and Linux. AI is finding bugs faster than anyone can fix them. Inside CertKit, we’ve been quoting Dickens, “It the worst of times.” AI makes our small team fast.

The customer satisfaction survey is more than a metric. It is the tool that connects users’ real-world experiences to the decisions shaping the future of Collective IQ. At Almaden, we believe that a product is not built solely on technical requirements or market trends. Above all, it is built by listening to the people who use it every day. That is why Net Promoter Score (NPS) plays a central role in our strategy. It is not just a number.

Many engineering organizations first encounter SOC 2 when a customer or prospect requests proof of compliance before proceeding with a relationship. Access controls, change management processes, logging configurations, vulnerability scanning, and incident response procedures all need to be in place, documented, and producing evidence before an auditor evaluates them. A 2026 benchmark of 75 SOC 2 examinations found that these engineering-owned areas were the most common sources of exceptions.

If you work with robots, perhaps you’ve come up against a common, but annoying situation: the one field run that mattered is the one nobody recorded. Or it was recorded but the ROS 2 bag (a recording of ROS 2 topics) is sitting in the robot’s storage, at a customer site, three time zones away. This issue is commonly caused by manually starting ros2 bag record and using scp to copy gigabytes off the robot after every test, which just does not scale.

Q3 2026 has been one of the greatest quarters for VictoriaMetrics Cloud, and that is thanks to the whole team, including open source, of course. The big milestone is that VictoriaTraces is now part of VictoriaMetrics Cloud, which means that the full VictoriaStack lives in one managed place, with a single bill and the same experience users already know.

We gave five metrics backends the same budget, the same week of data and the same ten queries, then ran those queries at rising concurrency. At one query at a time, the open source engines looked strong. Under concurrency, two of them stopped answering, and the rest slowed down by an order of magnitude.

Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) have long played an important role in IT Service Management, providing a structured record of technology assets, their configurations and relationships. For enterprises managing complex IT environments, they remain a valuable foundation for understanding infrastructure and supporting operational processes.