Timeline - 2020-24
2020β
π Playwright, a framework for reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps, was first released as open source by Microsoft on January 31, 2020. It was created by engineers who had previously worked on Puppeteer at Google, extending cross-browser automation to Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit under a single API.
π₯οΈ PowerShell 7.0 was released on March 4, 2020, dropping the "Core" suffix and serving as the successor to both Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell Core 6.x with improved Windows module compatibility.
βοΈ Istio 1.5 was released on March 5, 2020, dramatically simplifying the experience of installing, running, and upgrading Istio by "embracing the monolith" and consolidating the control plane into a single new binary, Istiod.
π Hyrum's law, an observation that "with a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody," was articulated by Google engineer Hyrum Wright and named by his colleague Titus Winters in the book Software Engineering at Google, published in March 2020.
βοΈ On April 7, 2020, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee voted to accept Argo as an incubation-level hosted project, a set of Kubernetes-native tools for running and managing jobs and applications on Kubernetes.
π Vite, a frontend build tool created by Evan You, was first announced on April 20, 2020, leveraging native ES Modules to eliminate bundling during development and achieve near-instant hot module replacement. Vite 2.0, redesigned to be framework-agnostic, was released in February 2021.
π₯οΈ GitHub Codespaces was announced on May 6, 2020, as a limited public beta at GitHub Satellite 2020, providing fully-featured cloud-hosted development environments directly within GitHub powered by Visual Studio Code.
π GitHub Advanced Security was announced in May 2020 at GitHub Satellite 2020, introducing code scanning in beta and secret scanning for private repositories in limited public beta to help automate security directly into the developer workflow.
π Deno v1.0.0, a secure-by-default runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript with a single-executable design, was officially released on May 13, 2020.
π In May 2020, Discord transitioned its primary domain from discordapp.com to discord.com, signaling its broader goal of becoming a place for all communities, not just gamers.
π§ Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model released in June 2020 that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. Given an initial text as prompt, it will produce text that continues the prompt.
βοΈ Apple announced its plan to transition the Mac from Intel processors to its own Apple Silicon at WWDC on June 22, 2020, marking the third major processor architecture transition in Mac history.
π The Rust for Linux project was announced in July 2020 in the Linux kernel mailing list with goals of leveraging Rust's memory safety to reduce bugs when writing kernel drivers.
π₯οΈ Visual Studio Codespaces consolidated into GitHub Codespaces on September 4, 2020, with Microsoft announcing that the two distinct experiences were causing confusion and that the Azure-based Visual Studio Codespaces portal would be retired on February 17, 2021.
π GitHub code scanning reached general availability in September 2020, four months after the beta release, having been used to scan more than 12,000 repositories and finding over 20,000 security issues including remote code execution, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting flaws.
βοΈ On September 21, 2020, Homebrew version 2.5.2 was released with support for bottle taps (binary package repositories) via GitHub Releases.
π’ On October 6, 2020, Google rebranded G Suite as Google Workspace, introducing a new integrated user experience and unified brand identity for its communication and collaboration apps.
π Jakarta Server Faces 3.0.0 was released on October 28, 2020, with the package name changed from javax to jakarta as part of the Jakarta EE transition
βοΈ The first Apple Silicon Macs β the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini with the M1 chip β were announced on November 10, 2020, and began shipping on November 17, 2020, delivering significant performance and energy efficiency improvements over their Intel predecessors.
π’ Microsoft released .NET 5.0 on November 10, 2020. The "Core" branding was removed and version 4.0 was skipped to avoid conflation with .NET Framework, which remains the Windows-specific product. It addresses the patent concerns related to the .NET Framework.
βοΈ macOS 11 Big Sur was released on November 12, 2020, the first version to increment the major version number beyond 10 since the original Mac OS X release in 2001. It was also the first macOS release to support Apple Silicon (M1) Macs, featuring a redesigned user interface inspired by iOS.
π’ The most recent major update to "The Scrum Guide" was published by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland on November 18, 2020.
π Ruby 3.0.0 was released on Christmas Day in 2020.
π In December 2020, PrestoSQL was rebranded as Trino.
π In 2020, with the introduction of the LAMBDA function, Microsoft Excel became a Turing-complete programming language, allowing users to define new functions written in Excel's own formula language.
π Tomcat 10.0, released in 2020, implemented Servlet 5.0 and JSP 3.0, and was the first version to migrate from the javax.* to the jakarta.* package namespace following the transfer of Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation as Jakarta EE.
2021β
π In January 2021, Elastic announced it was relicensing Elasticsearch and Kibana from the Apache License 2.0 to dual licensing under the Server Side Public License and the Elastic License, in response to Amazon Web Services offering Elasticsearch and Kibana as a service without adequate collaboration.
π On January 21, 2021, Amazon Web Services announced a fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the Apache License 2.0, which it rebranded as OpenSearch in April 2021 due to trademark conflicts.
π’ On February 8, 2021, the formation of the Rust Foundation was announced by its five founding companies (AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla).
βοΈ Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot was introduced in February 2021, providing a managed mode for clusters.
βοΈ The IEEE 802.11ax-2021 standard (Wi-Fi 6) was approved on February 9, 2021.
π In March 2021, Lucene changed its logo, and Apache Solr became a top-level Apache project again, independent from Lucene.
π Secret scanning for private repositories became generally available on March 31, 2021, for all GitHub Advanced Security customers on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, with expanded pattern coverage from 24 to 37 partners and having helped organizations find and revoke more than 5,000 secrets during the beta period.
π In May 2021, the IETF standardized QUIC in RFC 9000.
π QUIC support in Firefox arrived in May 2021.
π§ Vertex AI, a unified, managed machine learning platform, was announced at Google I/O in May 2021.
βοΈ NocoDB, an open-source no-code platform that turns any database into a smart spreadsheet, was officially launched on May 26, 2021.
βοΈ Terraform 1.0 was released on June 08, 2021.
βοΈ Deno Deploy, a distributed HTTP service that allows users to run JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly at the edge, was launched on June 23, 2021.
π§ GitHub Copilot is a cloud-based artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI to assist users of Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains integrated development environments (IDEs) by autocompleting code, announced for technical preview on June 29, 2021.
π₯οΈ With the 0.5 release of Neovim on July 2, 2021, it gained built-in support for the Language Server Protocol (LSP), Tree-sitter, and more complete Lua support.
π’ Salesforce officially completed its acquisition of Slack for approximately $27.7 billion on July 21, 2021, marking one of the largest acquisitions in the software industry.
π’ Microsoft discontinued the hosted Skype for Business Online service on July 31, 2021, fully transitioning its communication and collaboration capabilities to Microsoft Teams.
π§ OpenAI Codex is an artificial intelligence model developed by OpenAI that parses natural language and generates code in response, serving as the foundation for GitHub Copilot. As a descendant of OpenAI's GPT-3 model fine-tuned for programming applications, Codex was released on August 10, 2021.
π₯οΈ GitHub Codespaces, a cloud-hosted development environment powered by Visual Studio Code, reached general availability for GitHub Team and Enterprise Cloud customers on August 11, 2021.
π’ The eBPF Foundation was launched under the Linux Foundation in August 2021. Founding members included Google, Facebook, Isovalent, Microsoft, and Netflix, reflecting eBPF's growing importance in the industry.
π OpenSSL 3.0 was released on September 7, 2021.
βοΈ Windows 11 was officially released on October 5, 2021, featuring a major visual redesign with a centered Taskbar and Start menu, improved window snapping ("Snap Layouts"), and a focus on enhanced security requirements.
π₯οΈ On October 27, 2021, GitHub released the GitHub Copilot Neovim plugin as a public repository.
βοΈ GitHub Actions added support for OpenID Connect (OIDC) on October 27, 2021, enabling secure cloud deployments with short-lived tokens that are automatically rotated for each deployment.
π Log4Shell was a zero-day vulnerability in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework, involving arbitrary code execution that had existed unnoticed since 2013 and was privately disclosed to the Apache Software Foundation on November 24, 2021 by Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud's security team.
βοΈ GitHub Actions reusable workflows became generally available on November 24, 2021, allowing users to reuse entire workflows as if they were actions and reducing duplication.
βοΈ Azure Container Apps, a fully managed serverless container service built on Kubernetes, was introduced in public preview on November 2, 2021.
βοΈ Knative reached version 1.0 in November 2021, with all its repositories designated by the community as stable and suitable for commercial use.
π’ Grafana acquired k6 in 2021.
π Ruby on Rails 7.0 was released on December 15, 2021, replacing Node.js and Webpack with import maps by default and introducing the Hotwire family of libraries.
π Vitest was first released in December 2021 as a Vite-native unit testing framework for JavaScript, reusing Vite's transform pipeline and configuration to deliver near-instant test startup for Vite-based projects. Vitest 1.0 reached production-ready status in December 2023.
π§ LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is a family of conversational large language models developed by Google, originally introduced as Meena in 2020 and evolved into the first-generation LaMDA announced at the 2021 Google I/O keynote, followed by the second generation the following year.
2022β
βοΈ On March 2, 2022, Knative was accepted as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project, after Google submitted it for consideration in November 2021.
π Go 1.18 was released on March 15, 2022, adding support for generic programming (type parameters), the most significant language change since Go 1.0 and a long-requested community feature.
βοΈ Chocolatey 1.0.0 was officially released on March 18, 2022, marking a major milestone in version stability and enterprise readiness after over a decade of development.
π§ PaLM (Pathways Language Model) is a 540 billion parameter transformer-based large language model developed by Google AI, first announced in April 2022 and remaining private until Google launched a public API in March 2023.
π§ On May 11, 2022, Google unveiled LaMDA 2, the successor to LaMDA, during the 2022 Google I/O keynote.
π’ Meta transferred Jest to the OpenJS Foundation in May 2022, reflecting the framework's growth beyond Meta's internal use into a community-maintained project hosted alongside Node.js, jQuery, and webpack.
βοΈ Kubernetes 1.24, released in May 2022, removed "dockershim," officially ending built-in support for Docker as a container runtime in favor of the Container Runtime Interface (CRI).
βοΈ Azure Container Apps, a fully managed serverless container service built on Kubernetes, reached general availability on May 24, 2022.
π§ On June 21, 2022, GitHub announced that Copilot was out of "technical preview" and made available as a subscription-based service for individual developers.
π Fresh 1.0, a full-stack web framework for Deno that uses an "islands" architecture for zero-config and high performance, was released on June 28, 2022.
π Bun, a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime and toolkit written in Zig and powered by JavaScriptCore, entered public beta with the release of version 0.1.0 on July 5, 2022.
βοΈ On August 25, 2022, Heroku announced plans to eliminate its free tier plans, citing fraud and abuse as the primary reasons, with the removal scheduled for November 28, 2022.
βοΈ Systemd support became available in WSL on September 21, 2022.
βοΈ Istio was accepted to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on September 30, 2022 at the incubating maturity level.
π§ ReAct (Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models), a general paradigm that combines reasoning and acting with Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform tasks, was first submitted to arXiv by researchers from Princeton University and Google Research on October 6, 2022.
π’ On October 13, 2022, Microsoft announced it would phase out the "Microsoft Office" brand in favor of "Microsoft 365," subsequently rebranding Office.com and the Office mobile apps to reflect this shift.
βοΈ Linux 6.0 was released on October 2, 2022, focusing on performance improvements for modern CPU architectures and including the initial groundwork for Rust support in the kernel.
π In October 2022, a pull request for accepting the implementation for Rust for Linux was approved by Torvalds.
π§ LangChain, an open-source framework designed to simplify the creation of applications using large language models (LLMs), was launched by Harrison Chase in October 2022.
π₯οΈ GitHub Codespaces was made available to all individual users on November 9, 2022, including a free monthly usage quota for the free tier.
βοΈ On December 6, 2022, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced that Argo had graduated, joining the ranks of Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy as a top-level project.
π OCaml 5.0 was released on December 16, 2022, featuring a complete rewrite of the runtime to support shared-memory parallelism and effect handlers for lock-free concurrency.
βοΈ Linux 6.1 was released in December 2022, including the ability to write eBPF programs in Rust, further expanding the ecosystem for safe and performant kernel-level observability and networking.
π§ ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022, built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 families of large language models and fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
π Support for npm packages via the npm: specifier became stable in Deno v1.28 on November 14, 2022, allowing the runtime to tap into the vast existing JavaScript ecosystem.
π HTTP/3, the successor to HTTP/2, was published in 2022.
2023β
π§ On February 7, 2023, Microsoft announced a major overhaul to Bing including the addition of chatbot functionality marketed as "the new Bing".
π§ Azure OpenAI Service reached general availability on January 17, 2023, providing enterprise access to OpenAI's large language models.
π§ Llama (acronym for Large Language Model Meta AI, and formerly stylized as LLaMA) is a family of autoregressive large language models (LLMs) released by Meta AI starting in February 2023.
π§ Notion AI, an integrated AI assistant for the Notion workspace, reached general availability on February 22, 2023, after a private alpha period that began in November 2022.
π§ Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a multimodal large language model created by OpenAI as the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models, launched on March 14, 2023 and made publicly available through the paid ChatGPT Plus chatbot, OpenAI's API, and the free Microsoft Copilot chatbot.
π§ BabyAGI, a task-driven autonomous agent created by Yohei Nakajima, was publicly shared on Twitter on March 28, 2023. Written as a 105-line Python script using GPT-4, Pinecone, and LangChain, it demonstrated autonomous task planning and execution, going viral and accumulating over 16,000 GitHub stars.
π§ AutoGPT, an open-source autonomous AI agent created by Toran Bruce Richards of Significant Gravitas Ltd., was released on GitHub on March 30, 2023. One of the first applications to showcase GPT-4's autonomous capabilities, it broke down user-defined goals into sub-tasks using tools like web browsing, file management, and API calls, becoming the fastest-growing open-source project in GitHub history with over 100,000 stars within weeks.
π§ Amazon Bedrock was first announced on April 13, 2023, in a limited preview as a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI startups and Amazon available via an API.
π§ Bard is a conversational artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google, based on the LaMDA family of large language models. It was developed as a response to the rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT, and was released in a limited capacity in March 2023 to lukewarm responses.
π§ Claude 1, the original large language model developed by Anthropic, was released in March 2023, establishing the foundation for Anthropic's family of conversational AI models.
βοΈ Chocolatey 2.0.0 was released on May 31, 2023, featuring a major update to the underlying NuGet client libraries and introducing support for Semantic Versioning (SemVer) 2.0.0.
βοΈ Istio moved to the graduated maturity level within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on July 12, 2023, less than a year after entering the incubator.
π Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) was officially renamed to Microsoft Entra ID on July 15, 2023.
π Go 1.21 was released on August 8, 2023, introducing built-in min, max, and clear functions, a new log/slog structured logging package, and formal toolchain management.
βοΈ HashiCorp relicensed Terraform and its other products from the Mozilla Public License v2.0 to the Business Source License (BUSL) v1.1 on August 10, 2023, a source-available license that prohibits competitive use, triggering the community response that produced the OpenTF manifesto.
βοΈ Dagu, a local-first and DAG-based workflow engine designed as a "zero-ops" alternative to more complex orchestrators like Apache Airflow, was first released as open source on GitHub on August 11, 2023.
βοΈ Following HashiCorp's announcement to move Terraform to a non-open-source license, the OpenTF project (later rebranded as OpenTofu) was officially forked on August 25, 2023. It joined the Linux Foundation on September 20, 2023.
π Bun 1.0, marking the transition of the runtime to a stable, production-ready version with an integrated bundler and test runner, was officially released on September 8, 2023.
π§ Amazon Bedrock reached general availability (GA) on September 28, 2023, launching with support for foundation models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Stability AI, and Amazon.
π§ In November 2023, GitHub Copilot Chat was updated to use OpenAI's GPT-4 model.
π§ Google Gemini is a family of multimodal large language models developed by Google DeepMind as the successor to LaMDA and PaLM 2, comprising Gemini Ultra, Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Gemini Nano. It was announced on December 6, 2023 as a direct competitor to OpenAI's GPT-4.
π Mojo is a programming language in the Python family currently under development, available in browsers via Jupyter notebooks and locally on Linux and macOS, first appearing in 2023.
π§ LocalAI is a free, open-source OpenAI alternative that acts as a drop-in replacement REST API compatible with OpenAI API specifications for local inferencing, first appearing in 2023.
π₯οΈ Cursor, an AI-native fork of Visual Studio Code (VS Code) developed by Anysphere, was publicly launched in 2023.
2024β
π§ In February 2024, Google launched Gemini 1.5 in a limited capacity, positioned as a more powerful and capable model than 1.0 Ultra.
π§ LangGraph, a library built on top of LangChain to enable the creation of stateful, multi-actor applications with LLMs by creating cyclic graphs, was announced on January 17, 2024.
βοΈ OpenTofu reached general availability (GA) with its 1.6.0 release on January 10, 2024, marking its first stable production-ready version.
π§ On February 8, 2024, Google introduced the AI Premium plan for Google One, which provides access to Gemini Advanced and Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet.
π§ On February 27, 2024, GitHub Copilot Enterprise reached general availability at $39 per month, extending the Business plan with the ability to reference an organization's internal codebase and knowledge base.
π§ Devin, branded as the "world's first fully autonomous AI software engineer," was officially released by Cognition AI on March 12, 2024.
βοΈ Envoy Gateway 1.0 was released on March 13, 2024, reaching general availability as a performant and functional implementation of the Kubernetes Gateway API.
π GitHub announced Copilot Autofix for GitHub Advanced Security in public beta on March 20, 2024, providing AI-powered remediation that analyzes vulnerabilities in code and offers suggestions to help developers fix them.
π§ The Claude 3 family of large language models was announced by Anthropic on March 4, 2024, introducing three model tiers: Claude 3 Opus (maximum capability), Claude 3 Sonnet (balanced performance), and Claude 3 Haiku (low latency and cost). The Claude 3 family marked Anthropic's first multimodal models, adding vision capabilities (image understanding) to all three tiers. Opus and Sonnet were made generally available on March 4, 2024, while Haiku became generally available on March 13, 2024.
π Bun 1.1, which introduced stable support for Windows and significant performance improvements for common operations, was released on April 1, 2024.
π§ On April 29, 2024, GitHub introduced Copilot Workspace as a technical preview, a Copilot-native developer environment that turns a natural-language GitHub issue into a spec, a plan, and code changes.
π§ GPT-4o (GPT-4 Omni) is a multilingual, multimodal generative pre-trained transformer designed by OpenAI, announced by OpenAI's CTO Mira Murati during a live-streamed demonstration on May 13, 2024 and released the same day.
π§ Firebase Genkit, an open-source framework by Google for building and deploying AI-powered applications, was first introduced during the Google I/O 2024 keynote on May 14, 2024.
π Copilot Autofix for CodeQL code scanning alerts reached general availability on August 14, 2024, enabling developers to fix code vulnerabilities more than three times faster with a median time of 28 minutes compared to 1.5 hours manually.
π On August 29, 2024, Elastic added the GNU Affero General Public License as a third licensing option for Elasticsearch, declaring the software "Open Source, Again."
𧩠Unicode 16.0 was released on September 10, 2024, adding 5,185 new characters including seven new scripts and seven new emoji, for a total of 154,998 characters.
π Deno v2.0.0 was officially released on October 9, 2024, focusing on full backward compatibility with Node.js and npm alongside long-term support (LTS) for enterprise use.
π§ On September 16, 2024, Microsoft announced "Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2," introducing "Copilot agents"βspecialized AI assistants that can be built in Copilot Studio or directly within SharePoint. These agents entered general availability on October 17, 2024.
π PostgreSQL 17 was released on September 26, 2024, providing significant performance boosts to vacuuming and I/O, along with expanded JSON functionality.
βοΈ The IEEE 802.11be-2024 amendment (Wi-Fi 7) was approved by the IEEE SA Standards Board on September 26, 2024.
π§ BabyAGI v2, a major rewrite of the original BabyAGI framework by Yohei Nakajima, was released in September 2024. It introduced the functionz framework for storing functions and metadata in a database, reflecting advancements in GPT-4o, Claude tool use, and structured outputs since the original release.
π§ Anthropic introduced the Computer Use capability in public beta for Claude 3.5 Sonnet on October 22, 2024, enabling the model to navigate desktop environments by interpreting screenshots and simulating mouse and keyboard inputs.
π§ The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, open-source framework introduced by Anthropic on November 25, 2024 to standardize the way artificial intelligence systems like large language models integrate and share data with external tools, systems, and data sources.
π§ OpenAI o3 is a reflective generative pre-trained transformer model developed by OpenAI as a successor to OpenAI o1, designed to devote additional deliberation time for questions requiring step-by-step logical reasoning, announced on December 20, 2024.
π§ Devin became generally available in December 2024, offered to engineering teams starting at $500 per month with no seat limits, alongside a Slack integration, an IDE extension, and an API.
βοΈ In 2024, the Single UNIX Specification Issue 8 adopted more inclusive terminology for pseudoterminals, officially replacing the traditional "master" and "slave" labels with "manager" and "subsidiary" respectively.
π Elixir v1.18 was released on December 19, 2024, featuring built-in JSON support and the first iteration of type-checking for calls.