“Torc aims to empower developers with data and intelligence, protect IP, increase upskilling and career opportunities, and make the remote workforce indispensable. Understanding performance data is the best way to do that”,

said Michael P. Morris, CEO and Co-founder of Torc.

Torc has expanded Codealike’s data and reporting capabilities as part of the reboot. Members of the Torc community can visualize programming results at no cost, create compelling quantitative assets for self marketers to increase their revenue and advance and develop their careers.

Technical debt (short term technical decisions that distract developers from coding new features) costs companies tens of billions of dollars per year. Analysts at McKinsey found “tech debt” to take up 15% – 60% of a company’s entire IT budget.

According to Gartner, companies that find ways to reduce tech debt will lower service delivery times by at least 50%. With Codealike, Torc is uniquely positioned to help companies minimize tech debt, while giving developers control of their coding and performance.

Personalized coding performance data is organized in a visual way that makes it easy to understand developer strengths and improvement opportunities. Developers decide when and what Codealike statistics to share for gamified recognition, peer ranking, team interaction and virtual collaboration.

“Torc takes privacy seriously and is committed to protecting developer data; Torc Community Members decide whether or not to share information generated from using Codealike. Integrity values like this are what differentiate Torc from others in the talent network space, and we’ll continue investing in the advancement of the software community’s skills and careers”,

said David Messinger, CTO and Co-founder of Torc.

“Torc is already an amazing nearshore talent network that cares about my career, but the addition of Codealike really makes it stand out from the crowd. Access to my coding data is so important and sharing it gives even more opportunity to expand my skills and earning potential.”

said Paulo Vitor Magacho, a Torc Community Member from Brazil who uses Codealike.

New Codealike features developed by Torc bring a human-centered approach to developer productivity and maximize career and earning potential. For a limited time, developers can access Codealike’s Premium features for free by creating a Torc Community Member account and completing at least 80% of their Torc profile.

Two new features are now available in Intune. The first has to do with configuring feature updates. This allows IT administrators to create policies that control which Windows feature updates are delivered to devices. Devices will remain on the version they have specified in their policy until IT administrators set a newer version of Windows in this section.

Some other useful settings that you can configure are to choose whether the update becomes available immediately, on a specific date, or through a staged rollout. The latter option also allows you to choose when the first and last groups will receive the update, as well as the interval of days between them.

The second option mentioned above is accelerated quality updates. But there are a few settings to watch out for. One lets you choose the minimum OS version that all devices should be on, and the other lets you decide how long a device can delay an update before needing a reboot. But be careful when using the former. It only gives users a 15-minute warning after downloading the update before forcibly installing it via reboot.

Deployment of expedited updates is done without the need to pause or edit your existing monthly servicing policies. For example, you might expedite a specific update to mitigate a security threat when your normal update process wouldn’t deploy the update for some time.

Expedite updates uses available services, like WNS and push notification channels, to deliver the message to devices that there’s an expedited update to install. This process enables devices to start the download and install of an expedited update as soon as possible, without having to wait for the device to check in for updates.

But that’s not all. You can also track delivery reports on feature updates and accelerated quality updates. You can find these in the Reports tab, then select Windows updates in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager Administration Center. They display alerts, device-level granularity information, and overall results.