JetBrains has released its annual analysis of the developer ecosystem, and this year's results show the ever-increasing hold of AI along with a rise in the importance of virtual reality.

aka Dan Kornas who runs a very successful X account about everything related to engineering ML applications. And what is he using in his tutorials? Python, of course.

Could  the festive season be complete without Donald Knuth putting on his flamboyant xmas top and talking to us about something that most of us know nothing about? Of course not.

Take a break and catch up with the latest articles and news posted on this site. This week saw the publication of Programming The ESP32 In C Using the Arduino Library and we have a hands-on extract showing how to use the supplied client class to make the ESP32 S3 into a web client. 

Programmer gifts - easy idea, difficult implementation.  Here's our pick of tee-shirts for giving, buying or just wearing at any time of the year.

The GCHQ Christmas Challenge has become a pre-Christmas tradition. While it is primarily targeted at school students working in teams, GCHQ encourages both children and adults to give it a try.

Microsoft has announced version 8.4 of the .NET Community Toolkit, a collection of helpers and APIs that work for all .NET developers. The new version adds support for partial properties for the MVVM Toolkit generators along with new analyzers.

GitHub has launched GitHub Copilot Free, a free version of Copilot that provides limited access to selected features of Copilot and is automatically integrated into VS Code. The free tier is aimed at individual GitHub customers who don't have access to Copilot through an organization or enterprise. The news coincides with GitHub having 150 million developers on GitHub.

JetBrains Academy has published the results of a worldwide survey that set out to discover current trends in computer science education and the challenges involved in studying computer science. It also has interesting insights into how the use of AI Assistants varies across regions.

Google has announced an updated version of Gemini, saying that Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental will "enable even more immersive and interactive applications", along with new coding agents that can take actions on behalf of the developer.

Cloudberry is the open source equivalent of Greenplum.
Now it is fostered by the Apache Foundation as it acquires incubating status.

Ruby on Rails 8 has been released. The new version comes preconfigured with Kamal 2 for application deployment, a new proxy called Thruster, and a trio of SQLite database-backed adapters named Solid Cable, Solid Cache, and Solid Queue.

A veritable treasure trove of assorted how-to recipes for PostgreSQL, stored as a Github repository, has been started by Nikolay Samokhvalov, well known in the PostgreSQL world.

Kafka 3.9 has been released. The team says this is a major release and the final in the 3.x line. It This will also be the final major release to feature the deprecated Apache ZooKeeper mode. Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that can be used for building real-time streaming data pipelines between systems or applications.

If you are looking for a programmer present this holiday season, there is one book, or set of books, that should be top of any list... Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.

Get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer with our weekly digest. It summarizes the week's news together with the week's book review and new titles selected for Book Watch Archive. In this week's featured articles Mike James takes a look at regular expressions in Python and Ian Elliot shows how to get started with SVG.

edX is offering a 30% discount on selected courses and program bundles until December 19th. We look at  AI-related certifications that could boost your resume in 2025.

The holiday season is a good time to learn about computers - you have the time. But where to start? Our advice is to ignore the pudding and go for a Pi.