News

Programming For Love or Money   Wednesday 21 February

Programming is a passion as well as a job. However there have to be limits on the amount of time devoted to it in order to preserve sanity. A  research study has looked into the extent to which programmers work outside office hours.

Progressive Web Apps Do Seem To Be The Next Big Thing   Wednesday 21 February

We know that we work in a field where fashion swings back and forth. The next big thing is what we all want to use, and it looks as if Progressive Web Apps are it.

Atom 1.24 Adds Asynchronous Content Menus   Wednesday 21 February

There's a new version of Atom, GitHub's open-source text editor. Atom 1.24 has read-only TextEditors, asynchronous context menus, and automatic scrolling on folding and unfolding.

Google Summer Of Code 2018 Larger Than Ever   Tuesday 20 February

Google Summer of Code gives students an opportunity to make a substantive contribution to Open Source projects with the motto "Flip  bits not burgers" has recruited more mentoring organizations than ever  for its 13th year. 

MongoDB 4.0 Gets Multi-Doc ACID Support   Tuesday 20 February

The next release of MongoDB will finally have support for multi-document ACID transactions, and there's a beta version available now with the new technology. 

Go 1.10 Adds Automatic Caching   Monday 19 February

There's a new release of Go with automatic caching of build and test results. Version 1.10 is the first major release after the announcement of Go 2.0. 

Amazon Creating AI Chips For Alexa   Sunday 18 February

To maintain the advantage established with Alexa, Amazon appears to be moving towards developing its own artificial intelligence chips to be used in Echo devices and other hardware.

You Just Need A Bigger Pong   Sunday 18 February

Pong was one of the first games I programmed and I've always liked its simplicity, but you can't play it for long. Now make it life sized and that's a very different matter.

Slalom Skiing New Robot Sport   Saturday 17 February

The world’s first robot ski tournament was staged this week in South Korea alongside the PyeongChang Winter Olympics with eight humanoid robots taking part. It was the smallest robot that won the $10,000  prize for slalom skiing.

Intel Extends Bug Bounty Program   Friday 16 February

To support its Security-First Pledge made as a response to Meltdown and Spectre, Intel is opening up its Bug Bounty Program to all security researchers, raising bounty awards and offering a new program focused specifically on side channel vulnerabilities.

Next.js 5 Improves Webpack Support   Friday 16 February

The latest version of Next.js has been released with better server-side Webpack support and first-class TypeScript support. Next.js is a toolkit for universal, server-rendered (or statically pre-rendered) React.js applications.

New Alexa Skills Kit Developer Console   Thursday 15 February

Amazon has launched a Developer Console for helping you to create manage and publish Alexa Skills. Available in beta it can be used to create new skills or edit existing ones, although some features are not supported.

Go SDK For Azure Released   Thursday 15 February

There's a new SDK for Azure that lets you develop apps for Azure in Go. The SDK has support for connecting to data sources including Cosmos DB and Azure Storage, deploying Azure resources programmatically, and authenticating users.

Professional Programmer

Debugging and the Experimental Method   Thursday 15 February

How do you debug a program? What approaches and qualities of mind are needed to get the job done? In many ways debugging a program is quite different from the act of programming and we need to be clear about it so that we can both do it better and  teach it better.

The Core

Data Validation The Easy Way   Tuesday 20 February

Checking data can be difficult, simply because of the need to keep cleaning the reference data. Who can afford the resources to do the job? The best solution for most of us is to use a cloud-based service and Melissa has now made it easy for you to try it out.