It's time for would-be participants in this year's Google Summer of Code to register and submit their proposals to the mentor organizations that interest them.. But did you know that now it's not just for students? The new criterion is being new to open source - so if you missed out when younger, it's not too late to apply. 

This week included Pi Day, providing an excuse for more musings on irrational and transcendental numbers. Fittingingly our top feature is on the Raspberry Pi Pico, a small device which is easy to program in Micro Python. We also revisited Codd's Rules which underpin the basis of SQL, Structured Query Language.  

Google has added Google Maps Platform to its Dev Library. The Google Maps Platform is a set of APIs and SDKs that can be used to embed Google Maps into mobile apps and web pages, or to retrieve data from Google Maps.

Following a well-established pattern both Google's and Microsoft's Developer Conferences will take place in May. While Google I/O will be mostly virtual, with just a small audience present at its Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California.  Microsoft Build will take place in Seattle as a live, in-person event. 

Version 4.1 of Apache Cassandra, the open source NoSQL distributed database, has been released. The team says this release paves the way to a more cloud-native future for the project by externalizing important key functions, extending Apache Cassandra, and enabling an expanded ecosystem without compromising the stable core code.

Chainguard, the co-creator of Sigstore, has conducted a survey to better understand if and how software supply best practices
are utilized by the industry. We take a look at the findings.

Moving into the 10th place on the TIOBE is a milestone for any programming language, giving it a place on the popularity chart which is refreshed at monthly intervals. Can we expect Go to rise towards the top of the chart? There's a long way to go.

OpenAI has just announced GPT-4. The future may not be here just yet, but it's very close. Is this really the breakthrough moment for AI?

Google has introduced Service Weaver, an open source framework for building and deploying distributed applications. Service Weaver allows you to write your application as a modular monolith and deploy it as a set of microservices.

It's Pi day again... Even after so many, I still have things to say and think about this most intriguing number. The most important things about Pi is that it is irrational and one of the few transcendental numbers we can identify - why exactly?

GitHub Enterprise 3.8 has been released with improvements including support for GitHub Projects along with new security and admin features, and expanded Actions support. 

In a very interesting webinar streamed live as part of the recent JConference, Antoine Sabot-Durand talked about "hostility" between J2EE/Jakarta and Spring and the differences between them from decades ago to the recent times.

A remote kissing device that woks with a smartphone is available on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao for the equivalent of $38 per unit. Will buying two of them sustain a long-distance relationship?

This weekly digest is an extended version of the newsletter emailed to subscribers every Wednesday. As well as listing the week's news items, it also includes the week's Book Review and additions to Book Watch. Top of the list come the week's two feature articles. This week we answer the question "What Is MLOPs" and look at the little known history of An Wang, the inventor of Core Memory.

Microsoft has announced that its search engine Bing has passed 100 million daily active users. This must surely help the Edge Browser gain some traction.

API hub provider Rapid has announced a public beta of a new API Hub for Business that is designed to give organizations a way to quickly launch a custom hub.

Google has released a search option that can be used to look for datasets and to get access to the data quickly based on the search results.

Zenhub has launched an issue management feature for its developer team collaboration product. Zenhub is a project management tool that is natively integrated into GitHub. The company has also announced $10 million in funding to expand the use of Zenhub’s project management platform beyond technical teams using GitHub.