News

I Programmer Moves On In Order To Stay Put  
Wednesday 27 June

You might have noticed that I Programmer has changed to HTTPS access only. Less noticeable is our shift to Amazon AWS. It has been an interesting time. 

Breaking Enigma Code In Minutes   Wednesday 27 June

Using AI processes across 2,000 DigitalOcean servers, engineers at Enigma Pattern accomplished in 13 minutes and at a cost of just $7 the feat for which Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, working on a basis provided by Polish cryptographers, built the Bombe and Colossus machines at Bletchley Park during WWII. 

EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum Blockchain AMA   Wednesday 27 June

The EU Blockchain Observatory is a recent initiative, launched in February 2018, which is backed by the European Commission with the primary aim of educating the EU's public on Blockchain technology.This very interesting AMA really served that purpose by answering  the public's challenging questions, which were mainly tweeted under the #AMABlockchain hashtag. 

GitLab Adds Auto DevOps   Tuesday 26 June

GitLab 11.0 has been released with support for Auto DevOps and License Management. The open source GIT based repository management software system first announced Auto DevOps last year. 

DevTube - A Curated Collection of Videos   Tuesday 26 June

There's a new resource for developers. Dev.Tube is where you will find YouTube videos from conferences collected by developers for developers. The website already includes 10,000 videos - of which 1289 are flagged as New having been uploaded since its launch.

Atom Improves Find In Context   Monday 25 June

Atom 1.28 has been released with improvements including a more context-aware Find-In-Project results view. It also now has support for custom color profiles. 

European Perl Conference In Glasgow, Massive Summer Event   Monday 25 June

Yes, with more than 50 talks, workshops and networking events, YAPCEU:: 2018 promises to be massive. Not  everything will be strictly about Perl 5 and 6, sessions on ethics, career building and recruiting are also included. 

AI Used to Open Closed Eyes   Sunday 24 June

Facebook Researchers have used a novel approach for correcting photographs, specifically for in-painting open eyes when the subject of a photograph blinks or closes their eyes just as the shutter clicks.   

Bombe Goes On Display To Celebrate Alan Turing Anniversary   Saturday 23 June

Today, on the 106th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, the UK National Museum of Computing is opening a gallery dedicated to the Bombe. Designed by Turing, this electro-mechanical machine was used to speed up the cracking of encrypted messages during WW II. 

All A Flutter - Google's Cross Platform App Framework Ready To Go   Friday 22 June

Google's Flutter is about to be released as a Version 1 product, ready for you to use. The question is should you be interested in a way to create almost native apps that run on iOS or Android? I suppose it depends on what "almost native" means? 

Udacity Announces Blockchain Nanodegree   Friday 22 June

Udacity's latest new Nanodegree gives programmers the opportunity to master the blockchain development skills that are in high demand across industries, and at companies ranging from startups to large, established organizations.  

Apache Phoenix Improves HBase Support   Thursday 21 June

Apache Phoenix 4.14 has been released with support for HBase 1.4 along with support for GRANT and REVOKE. Phoenix adds support for SQL-based OLTP and operational analytics for Apache Hadoop using Apache HBase as its backing store. It also provides integration with other projects in the Apache ecosystem such as Spark, Hive, Pig, Flume, and MapReduce. 

GitHub Education A Free Program   Thursday 21 June

GitHub has a new program that aims to get GitHub adopted by educational and training institutions. The GitHub Education bundle includes free access to GitHub Enterprise and the support offered by its Business Plan in addition to developers tools for students and workflows for teachers. 

The Core

Just JavaScript - The Object Expression   Monday 25 June

As in most programming languages, the expression is an important part of JavaScript, but it isn't quite the same. This is where the idea that JavaScript has some weird type conversions arises. But in reality JavaScript isn't too fussy about type and it doesn't really do conversions. This is an extract from Ian Elliot's recent book which takes "an idiomatic approach" to JavaScript.

History

From Baby to Mark I   Thursday 21 June

The Manchester Baby, known formally as the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine, was one of the first stored program computers. It used a CRT tube to store data and worked sequentially a bit at a time. It took about an hour to find a factor of a number, but it was revolutionary.