Programmer Puzzles

Jigsaw Puzzles and The MacMahon Squares   Thursday 08 February

Another puzzle featuring Joe Celko's characterful pair, Melvin Frammis, an experienced developer at International Storm Door & Software, and his junior programmer sidekick, Bugsy Cottman. This classic puzzle looks deceptively simple but can you produce some beautiful code to solve it?

News

Google Tries For Email Takeover with AMP   Wednesday 14 February

Since its inception in 2015, AMP - Accelerated Mobile Pages that can be served more efficiently by (mostly Google) servers has been under suspicion as just another Google web takeover plan. Now you can add email to the conspiracy theory because we are about to have AMP for email. 

TensorFlow For R   Wednesday 14 February

The team at RStudio has created a set of R interfaces to TensorFlow, in recognition of the way the Google machine learning framework has become popular since it was open sourced two years ago. 

QuickBooks Hackathon Comes To London   Wednesday 14 February

The Small Business Hackathon London takes place February 24-25th at CodeNode in the heart of London's  Tech City. It's an intense team event in which Intuit challenges you to create a solution that saves a small business time or money over the space of 24 hours. 

EyeShot 11 Adds Collision Detection   Tuesday 13 February

A new version of Eyeshot, a native CAD control for the .NET Framework, has been released. devDept's Eyeshot lets you add CAD features to WinForms and WPF applications simply by dragging an item from the Visual Studio toolbox onto your form or window. 

GitHub Project Trends   Tuesday 13 February

With 2018 underway, GitHub has been busy analysing contributor, visitor, and star activity from last year to discover which were the fastest growing software communities. 

Help Choose Next EE4J Name   Monday 12 February

The renaming of Java EE is going to be decided by a public vote to choose between two options - 'Jakarta EE' and 'Enterprise Profile'. The need for renaming has been forced on the community by Oracle's refusal to allow the use of 'Java' as part of the name. 

Blazor .NET In The Browser   Monday 12 February

Microsoft has yet another way to create web apps, as if we or it needed one. Blazor could be called .NET in the browser and this might make you think of Silverlight, but things aren't quite as simple. 

New Emojis For 2018   Monday 12 February

Unicode has finalized the list of new emojis for 2018, coming to mobile phones in August or September. Hot face and woozy face extend the range of options to convey your state of mind and as well as new objects and animals there are variations on the existing man and woman emojis. 

Intel Drone Show That Never Happened   Sunday 11 February

A spectacular drone display planned for the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea had to be called off due to safety concerns. It became fake news as many outlets ran the advance publicity supplied by Intel. 

Microsoft Build Clashes With Google I/O   Saturday 10 February

The respective Microsoft and Google Developer conferences are the year's highlights for many - and many of us have allegiances to both. This year the dates of the two events coincide. Was it deliberate and if so who will it benefit? 

Python 3.7 Adds Data Handling Classes   Friday 09 February

The first of four beta previews of Python 3.7 is now available, with a new DataClasses module, an easier way to enter the debugger, and a UTF-8 mode that uses UTF-8 encoding by default. 

Mozilla's Browser Compatibility Project   Friday 09 February

One big problem with web development is making your website accessible to everybody who wants to visit it, irrespective of the device or browser the are using. Mozilla's browser compatibility project aims to help. 

Google Play Removed 700,000 Bad Apps Last Year   Thursday 08 February 

Google says it removed more than 700,000 apps that broke the rules on Google Play last year, 70 percent more than the previous year. The apps that were removed violated the policies on Google Play for a number of reasons. 

MIT IQ Quest Launched   Thursday 08 February

How does human intelligence work, in engineering terms? How can we use that deep grasp of human intelligence to build wiser and more useful machines, to the benefit of society? These are the questions that the newly launched  MIT Intelligence Quest sets out to tackle. 

The Core

Just JavaScript - ES2015 Class   Monday 12 February

One of the biggest criticisms of JavaScript by programmers more familiar with other languages is that it does not have classes. For the JavaScript enthusiast, on the other hand, this is one of its big attractions. So what do we make of the introduction of class in ES2015? From Ian Elliot's forthcoming book Just JavaScript: An Idiomatic Approach, ISBN 978-1871962574.