Programmer Puzzles

Sharpen your Coding Skills - Elevator Puzzle   Thursday 30 November

Introducing Melvin and Bugsy, characters who figure in a series of challenges from Joe Celko. Sharpen your coding skills with puzzles that will both amuse and torment you.

News

Mozilla v Yahoo   Wednesday 06 December

Mozilla has responded to a lawsuit from Yahoo Holding and Oath for  improper termination of the agreement make Yahoo the default search engine in Firefox by filing a cross complaint for breach of contract. 

Google Starts Its Push To Progressive Web Apps - Bye Bye Chrome Apps   Wednesday 06 December

Google has removed Chrome apps from the Chrome Web Store and has made it clear that Progressive Web Apps are what you should move to. There is a lot that is unclear about all of this and, apart from a few small things, it all feels like a marketing exercise. 

PHP 7.2 With Built-in Libsodium   Wednesday 06 December

There's a new release of  PHP that adds several features, including a new sodium extension making PHP the first programming language to adopt modern cryptography in its standard library. 

Alexa For Business - The Big Shake Up   Tuesday 05 December

Having consolidated its dominance of the home consumer market for voices assistants, Amazon is bringing Alexa's capabilities into the enterprise market with Alexa for Business. 

PyPI Granted $170,000   Tuesday 05 December

The Python software Foundation has secured a grant of $170,000 to finish the development and deployment of Warehouse, a new codebase that is to replace the Python Packaging Index (PyPI). 

Amazon Releases Managed Message Broker Service for ActiveMQ   Tuesday 05 December

Amazon has released Amazon MQ, a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ, the open-source message broker that supports queues and topics, durable and non-durable subscriptions, push-based and poll-based messaging, and filtering, providing another option for administering and maintaining ActiveMQ. 

Coding for Carrots - Today's Google Doodle   Monday 04 December

Today's Google Doodle is a delightful coding tutorial, reminding us if we need reminding, that today marks the start of Computer Science Education Week. If you are looking right now for a simple introduction to coding suitable look no further than the Google Home page.   

Amazon Neptune Graph Database   Monday 04 December

Amazon has launched Neptune, a graph database that can be used to create relationship graphs of highly connected datasets. Neptune is a fully managed service, and is among the slew of announcements made at AWS re:Invent. 

Countdown to Xmas with Santa Tracker   Sunday 03 December

Santa Trackers, from Norad and Google have become part of the Christmas tradition and both of them have now started their countdown to Christmas Eve when Santa takes off from the North Pole to deliver presents around the globe. 

Programmers Xmas - Alexa Suggest Some Presents   Saturday 02 December

You can guess the answer.

This is the first of our features on presents suitable for programmers and for programmers to give. Yes it s commercial and if you buy any of our suggestions we get a small affiliates reward which helps to keep the lights on, but our recommendations are based on our enthusiasm not financial gain. 

Google's Computer Vision Box Just $45   Friday 01 December

Google has just announced a new AIY kit to add to its existing voice/AI kit. This takes a Raspberry Pi Zero W, yes a Zero, and turns it and its camera into a neural network vision system. There are two things that are remarkable about this - one the $45 price tag and two no cloud connection is needed as all computations are done in the box! 

Amazon Glacier Select Analyzes Archived Data   Friday 01 December

Amazon has released a tool that can query archived data held in Amazon Glacier, its low cost storage for data archiving. Glacier Select improves the attractiveness of Glacier because it makes the data stored in it usable. 

Hour of Code 2017 Introduces App Lab   Friday 01 December

It's the time of year when the world-class Hour of Code once more commences; just an hour for introducing coding to the uninitiated, having them complete self guided tutorials. But is a hour sufficient? What can a beginner actually code within this limit? The answer is a bit more complicated than that, so let's find out all about it! 

Amazon's Giant Push Into Machine Learning   Thursday 30 November

Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service for the machine learning process; AWS DeepLens, a deep learning-enabled wireless video camera and four new machine learning application services were announced on the third day of this year's AWS re:Invent and are a direct challenge to Google and Microsoft. 

Kotlin 1.2 Released With Cross Platform Support   Thursday 30 November

JetBrains has just announced the release of Kotlin 1.2 and it is already supported in Android Studio 3. What's new and what's missing?

The Core

Android Programming In Java - Guidelines And Barriers   Monday 04 December

Barriers are a mysterious addition to the ConstraintLayout but in practice they are easy to use and useful - once you know what they are all about.