Given our expectations of Xbox games, you might consider writing a game within a 13K limit, which is the challenge for the annual js13K competition far too restrictive. Its results are now out and prove that it is possible to produce a game that is fun to play.  

Oracle has announced plans for Java SE and EE at JavaOne that will see improvements and changes to the licensing. 

A movie about a program that beats a human at a game? Probably not what you might expect, but AlphaGo is a movie about man versus machine and in this case the machine wins.

OpenAI has some results which are interesting even if you are not an AI expert. Set AI agents to play against each other and they spontaneously invent tackling, ducking, faking and diving - just watch the video.

If you want to keep up with what's important from the point of view of the developer, you can rely on the IProgrammer team to sift through the news to select items that are of interest and to gather and review the books you might want to read. 

Sundar Pichai has announced that Google is distributing $1 billion to nonprofits in education and professional training. He also launched a new initiative, Grow with Google.

Gluon, a new open source deep learning interface intended to allow developers to more easily and quickly build machine learning models  has been announced in a joint statement from Amazon and Microsoft. 

GitHub is a phenomenal success as its latest annual report, The State of the Octoverse 2017, reveals. In 2017 the GitHub community reached 24 million developers affiliated to 1.5 million organisations working across 67 million repositories, 25 million of them public repositories and located in 200 countries of the world.

There's a new release of the MapR database, MapR-DB. Version 6 adds native secondary indexes and improved OJAI APIs.

Google made Kotlin its lead language for Android development back in May of this year (2017) and it has been interesting to watch for signs of its take up or outright rejection. Now we have the first signs that Android programmers are voting with their feet and moving steadily to Kotlin. 

What proportion of Android apps in the Play store include security-related code snippets copied directly from Stack Overflow? Does the copied code increase or decrease application security?

There's a new version of RStudio with improvements including an object explorer. 

This year's Europe Code Week lasts from October 7th to 22nd and, with spin-offs taking place in African and Latin America, is expected to reach millions of participants who will try out some coding, make an app, tinker with hardware and have lots of fun.

Software never dies so "dead" is perhaps too strong a way to put it, but if you still think that Windows Phone is something to bet your future on you need to think very carefully about the nature of reality. Microsoft has now gone about as far as it can in saying that Windows Mobile is no more. 

The latest announcement from the newly restored Arduino company, from Massimo Banzi, has raised more questions than it answers. The short version is Arduino partners with ARM. But what exactly does this mean?

There's a new release of Orion, the Eclipse cloud IDE, with improvements to the Node.js server, language tooling, and trial debugger support.