July Week 5
Written by Editor   
Saturday, 05 August 2017

It's hard to keep up with all the developments in the developer world. I Programmer's team cover a wide range of topics, this week including Bitcoin and the Amazon Robotics Challenge, with comment and analysis.

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IP2

July 27 - August 2, 2017 

 

Book Reviews

  • Scaling Teams: Strategies for Building Successful Teams
    Kay Ewbank awarded this book a rating of 4 out of 5 and concluded:
    For a book aimed at effective management, this was a surprisingly lucid read. The examples make sense, the advice is sensible, and while there's a certain amount of management-speak, it doesn't get in the way. If you're in charge of a team that's growing, it's worth a read.

  

  • Abusing the Internet of Things
    The subtitle Blackouts, Freakouts and Stakeouts appealed to Harry Faihead. He gave it a rating of 4.5 out of 5 and concluded: 
    If you are going to design an IoT device then this is a good source book for how other people did it wrong and it is probably worth reading just to find out what is not adequate security.

 

News

Bitcoin Splits!   Wednesday 02 August

Despite a recent news report saying that a Bitcoin split had been averted, the split has happened due to a new faction seemingly appearing out of nowhere with an alternative proposal for the future of the cryptocurrency.

 

 

Android Gets A Peer-to-peer Network API   Wednesday 02 August

This could be big news if sufficient programmers take it seriously and think up creative uses and killer apps. Nearby Connections 2.0 provides fully off-line networking via WiFi, Bluetooth BLE and classic and the only question is what to do with this exciting feature?

 

 

Uber Drivers Gaming the Algorithm   Wednesday 02 August

As well as finding "management by algorithm" objectionable, Uber drivers are finding ways of exploiting the algorithms in their own favor. In particular they organize mass ‘switch-offs’  to cause price surges 

 

 

IntelliJ Beefs Up Java 9 Support   Tuesday 01 August

JetBrains Intellij IDEA has been updated with new features and better support for Java 9, including for Jigsaw, the element that makes Java 9 modular.

 

 

Low Cost Robot Wins Amazon Robotics Challenge   Tuesday 01 August

A team from the Australian Center for Robotic Vision has won the 2107 Amazon Robotics Challenge with a low-cost robot with an innovative design that works like a 3D printer mechanism.

 

 

Google Discovers That Neural Networks Just Need More Data   Monday 31 July

A recent research report outlines the fact that we just don't feed them enough - data that is. Neural networks simply need more data to be even better.

 

 

Firefox 55 Is Great Yet Its Marketshare Is In Freefall   Monday 31 July

Mozilla just sent out an email to its developer mailing list which basically says "you're a dev, you know stuff now tell your friends - Firefox is great!". And you know what? It is.

 

 

Pigments - Beyond RGB   Sunday 30 July

You probably know that you can represent any color with three numbers corresponding to Red, Green and Blue intensities, but this might not be the best way to do the job. What about pigments?

 

 

Imagine Cup Winners 2017   Saturday 29 July

Health projects dominated this year's Imagine Cup and X.GLU, the team from the Czech Republic who lifted the trophy, won the contest with a smart glucose meter designed to help children with diabetics better cope with their condition.

 

 

Where To Find Top U.S. Developers   Friday 28 July

You might imagine that California, where Silicon Valley is located and with the highest concentration of  software developers, would be the state with the United States' top coders. In fact, according to HackerRank, it comes in third place, behind Washington and Wyoming.

 

 

Top 10 From Around The Web: eCommerce Development   Friday 28 July

eCommerce is the focus of this trawl around the web to bring you items of interest that you otherwise might not have found. We start with a look at integrating a payment gateway and continue with items on Magento, Shopify and Volusion plus a comparison between WordPress and Bigcommerce for eCommerce. 

 

 

Commercial Ruby Distro Enters Beta   Thursday 27 July

ActiveRuby, a commercially supported Ruby distribution is now available as a beta version from ActiveState as part of its push to expand the portfolio of languages for which it provides support.

 

 

Revealing the Who and Why of Node.js Use   Thursday 27 July

Having released the findings of its second annual survey, the Node.js Foundation says that Node.js is emerging as a universal development framework with a broad diversity of applications. We look at who is using Node and for what.

 

Professional Programmer

Helping Ops Make Your Life Easier   Monday 31 July

DevOps. It’s meant to be a marriage between Agile software development and enterprise systems management comprised of Development QA, and Technology Operations. Often we hear about DevOps more as a sort of dysfunctional family, complete with bickering and miscommunication between the developers and those in operations.

 

Babbage's Bag

The Monte Carlo Method   Thursday 27 July

Monte Carlo methods are powerful ways of getting answers using random numbers to problems that really don't seem to have anything much to do with randomness. For example, you can find Pi and multiply two matrices together all by generating random numbers.

 

 

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Last Updated ( Saturday, 19 August 2017 )