News

GitHub Removes jQuery. Why?   Wednesday 01 August

In an almost super-human effort, GitHub has removed all trace of jQuery from its fontend code. This is interesting, but the real question is why? The most obvious answer is that programming is subject to the same whims of fashion as other technical disciplines - perhaps even more so because change is mostly easy. 

Firefox Gets Time Travel Debugging   Wednesday 01 August

No it's not anything to do with Dr Who nor H.G Wells nor a flux capacitor (Google them!). This is the best debugging technology you can get and it's coming to Firefox (we hope). 

TypeScript 3.0 Adds Project References   Tuesday 31 July

The latest release of TypeScript has been released. Version 3.0 has improved project reference support, a new 'unknown' type, and the ability to use tuples in parameter lists. 

New Malmo Collaborative AI Contest   Tuesday 31 July

A new AI challenge for collaborative AI using Microsoft's Project Malmo platform has just started on Crowd AI, a platform for open data science challenges built, and currently maintained, by the Digital Epidemiology Lab at EPFL in Switzerland. 

GitHub Partners With Google To Improve Continuous Integration   Monday 30 July

Google Cloud Build has been released on GitHub Marketplace to bring fully managed continuous integration to the GitHub platform. 

Visual Studio Python Gets AI-Based IntelliCode  
Monday 30 July

Microsoft is introducing support for Python in the IntelliCode extension for Visual Studio Code, as well as new improvements in editing for Python developers in Visual Studio Code. 

Imagine Cup Winners 2018   Sunday 29 July

This year's Imagine Cup is over and the winners who have claimed the trophy are Team smartARM from Canada with a robotic arm that uses AI technology to adjust its grip.  

Google Docs Gets AI-Based Grammar Checker  
Friday 27 July

Google has introduced new features based on AI for its G Suite Docs and email products. Google Docs is getting AI based grammar suggestions, while business email in G Suite will get smart replies.  

Instabug Analyzes 100,000,000 Bugs   Friday 27 July

What can be learned from 100 million bugs from mobile apps? Instabug, a company that provides bug and crash reporting, has analyzed all the bugs captured since it was founded in 2012. 

GitLab Adds Security Dashboards   Thursday 26 July

The latest update for GitLab is designed to provide better security visibility, alongside contextual views, better code search, and improvements to the UX. GitLab is a web-based repository manager for Git that supports concurrent devops and issue-tracking.  

Google Reveals Contact Center AI   Thursday 26 July

At this week's Google Cloud Next ’18 conference, Fei-Fei Li demonstrated a new AI system designed to be the next generation of automated customer-service voices. Contact Center AI it is now in alpha and there's a form to complete to request access.

The Core

Android Programming In Java - Android Events  
Monday 30 July

Working with Android Studio makes building the UI easy with an interactive editor, but you still need to find out how to handle the things it isn't quite so good at - events. Even if you are a skilled Java programmer you are likely not to be familiar with events and now Android has multiple ways of dealing with them. 

Babbage's Bag

Kolmogorov Complexity Thursday 26 July

This xkcd cartoon provides an ideal excuse to explain Kolmogorov complexity. It is an interesting topic and one that gets right to the heart of programming of how programming relates to ideas like information and entropy. This is a subject that still has lots of mysterious connections with things outside of computing.