News

What Do Developers Dislike?   Wednesday 01 November

The Stack Overflow blog has just revealed Perl to be the most disliked programming language, which will be controversial in some circles. But to use a well-worn cliche, there's more to it than that. 

Open Source Sparse Tensor Computation Is Fast   Wednesday 01 November

Tensors are data tables in n dimensions and when they occur they are often sparse, i.e. most of the entries are zero. In the past we have hand-crafted code to work efficiently with sparse tensors, but now we have a compiler that can automatically generate code that can run up to 100 times faster.  

Azure Gets Strato Upgrade And Extended Its Free Tier   Wednesday 01 November

Microsoft has added free access to popular products for 12 months to what you can expect from a free trial account on Azure. Although not one of them, the Strato product has been updated on Azure.  

Hewlett-Packard Archive Destroyed   Tuesday 31 October

A valuable archive of the history of Silicon Valley was among the victims of the Tubbs fire, the wildfire that has caused widespread destruction in Northern California, killing at least 23 people and destroying 6,800 homes. 

Anaconda Adds 100 New Packages   Tuesday 31 October

There's a new distribution of the Python and R data science package distribution formerly known as Continuum Analytics. The distribution has been renamed as Anaconda and has more than 100 new packages. 

Do We Need Software Heroes?   Monday 30 October

The super developer is a well-known stereotype, and perhaps one we rely on and even worship - a little too much. New research suggests that the hero may be more essential than we could have hoped for. 

Redesign For Amazon Developer Portal   Monday 30 October

Amazon has overhauled the landing page for the Amazon Developer bringing together all the opportunities for developing on Amazon's range of platforms and technologies. There's also a new standalone Amazon Appstore for Android. 

Microsoft Kills The Kinect   Sunday 29 October

This is a very strange "end of era" story. The Microsoft Kinect 3D sensor is dead and gone. How can such a ground breaking device be removed? Before you ask, there doesn't seem to be an alternative.  

Design Your Own Self-Driving Car   Saturday 28 October

We don't all have the money or time to build a self-driving car, but the software angle is still something you can have fun with. Who knows, you might even demonstrate that you can do it better.  

Android Studio 3.0 Released   Friday 27 October

After a very long process of improvement we have the final version of Android Studio 3 and this is the moment that Kotlin enters the arena as the default way to create an app. 

Spark Gets NLP Library   Friday 27 October

There's a new Natural Language Processing library for Apache Spark, that extends the Machine Learning logic of Spark to provide NLP annotations for machine learning pipelines that scale in a distributed environment. 

Android 8.1 Introduces Neural Networks API   Thursday 26 October

Google has released the first developer preview of Android 8.1. It includes a new Neural Networks API to accelerate on-device machine intelligence and optimizations for Android Go, as well as smaller enhancements to Oreo resulting from user and developer feedback. 

SciPy1.0 Released   Thursday 26 October

SciPy, the widely used open source Python library used for scientific and technical computing, has reached the milestone of a Version 1.0 release. This maturity is completed by a governance model and the appointment of Pauli Virtanen‏  as its BDFL. 

Apache PredictionIO Reaches Top Level Status   Thursday 26 October

PredictionIO is an open source machine learning platform that has been primarily supported by Salesforce. Having been donated to Apache last summer,  it has now graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project, making it more generally available.

Professional Programmer

Insider's Guide To Udacity Android Developer Nanodegree Part 5 - Make Your App Material   Monday 30 October

Having embarked on this account of the Android Developer Nanodegree, designed by Google and delivered through Udacity's platform, in March, we've already covered a lot of skills. This part  tackles mission impossible, turning a Coder into a Designer.

The Core

Getting Started With Google Apps Script   Saturday 28 October

Apps Script is a language and framework that deserves to be better known. Using it you can write programs that work with almost any Google service from Gmail, through Calendar, to spreadsheeting. You can even use it to work with non-Google APIs. It is the glue that binds all of these facilities together and the good news is that it is very easy to use. So let's get started...