News

Microsoft Chooses Linux for IoT   Wednesday 18 April

Microsoft has chosen a Linux kernel for its latest move into IoT, despite the recent launch of Windows 10 IoT. Azure Sphere is the operating system that runs on micro controllers powering IoT devices. 

Fear and Lothing In the App Store 21 - Oracle Owns JavaScript and Apple Pulls App   Wednesday 18 April

It shouldn't come as a shock that Oracle owns the trademark on the term "JavaScript", but it seems to. A recent incident, Apple pulling an app because it has "JavaScript" in its name, has sparked heated discussion. 

Quantum Computing From FutureLearn   Wednesday 18 April

A brand new course on quantum computing for which the only pre-requiste is high school math and a rough idea of what atoms, electrons and photons are, started this week on the FutureLearn platform and some of the I Programmer team enrolled. 

Google Upgrades AIY Project Kits   Tuesday 17 April

This is as much about a statement that Google is still serious about its AI education efforts as it is about any new features. The two new kits are complete and ready to go. They take a sort of "batteries included" approach, although it is worth saying that no batteries are actually needed... 

Apache Drill Adds YARN Support   Tuesday 17 April

The new release of Apache Drill has added the ability to run Drill as a YARN application, along with support for HTTP Kerberos authentication using SPNEGO, and SQL syntax highlighting of queries.

Udacity Withdraws Jobs Guarantee   Tuesday 17 April

Udacity's Nanodegree Plus option, in which the Plus was that graduating students would be helped to get a job within 6 months of graduating or receive a full refund of what they had paid for tuition, has been quietly dropped. So too has the offer of half your tuition back for graduating within 12 months. 

Topcoder Marathon Match 100   Monday 16 April

Topcoder is celebrating a historic event this week with a rerun of the first Marathon Match, a Random Walking fun challenge, in which 164 members took part. Thousands are expected to join in MM100 and if you've never participated before this could be the right time to take the plunge. 

Mozilla Makes WebAssembly For The Rest Of Us   Monday 16 April

WebAssembly - it's the next big thing. Until now the problem has been that you had to be dedicated, to say the least, to get involved. Now Mozilla has a way that we can all try it out  with WebAssembly Studio. Is this really WebAssembly for the rest of us? 

PowerHammer - Leaking Data Through The Power Line  
Sunday 15 April

One of the things you just have to accept is that human ingenuity will always find a way. When it comes to security even the strongest protection will fail. An air-gapped computer has no external networking connections so it cannot leak data to the outside world. Don't you believe it. 

Deep Mimic - A Virtual Stuntman   Saturday 14 April

Although the title says "A Virtual Stuntman" it is quite difficult to know exactly what the use case for this research is. It clearly has an impact. Take a look at the video and see what you think. 

Chatbots for eCommerce   Friday 13 April

Chatbots are increasingly being used in the realm of customer service. Banks have led the way with voice automation and many businesses are following this trend. If you need to be convinced of the the role of the chatbot in e-commerce, this infographic has gathered some insights and predictions. 

CLion Improves C++17 Support   Friday 13 April

There's improved support for C++17 in CLion 2018.1 as well as WSL support  and the addition of CMake Install.  More generally, this version shows the start of the general decoupling of the CMake project model from CLion.

What Can Devs Expect at Google I/O and Microsoft Build?   Thursday 12 April

Two of the big annual developer conferences are taking place in the second week of May and now we have quite a lot of information of what is on the agenda for both of them.

DJI Drone Creates Open Drone Platform   Thursday 12 April

Drone manufacturer DJI has opened its commercial drone platform with an SDK and DJI Skyport adapter. The open platform can be used by developers can to create customised drone solutions for specific application or industry needs. 

Professional Programmer

Reading Your Way To Agile   Tuesday 17 April 

In almost a decade I Programmer's book reviewers have read and commented on over 1500 programming titles. That's only a fraction of the programming books published, but we try to cover the important ones. In Programmer's Bookshelf we recommend the books you might find helpful at different stages in your personal development. This addition is on Agile Programming.

The Core

Getting Started With TypeScript   Thursday 12 April

TypeScript is probably the most successful JavaScript replacement. While JavaScript has evolved since TypeScript was first introduced to "improve" it, there are still lots of reasons for using TypeScript. As long as you know JavaScript, TypeScript is an easy and gradual upgrade.