Professional Programmer

Why Do We Try To Make Programming Like Something Else?   Thursday 31 January

There has been a long tendency in the development of programming to try to turn it into something else - mathematics, logic, engineering - anything as long as we can get away from programming. Why, when what makes software different from all of the above is clearly its strength and not its weakness? 

The Core

Android Programming In Kotlin: Resources   Monday 04 February

Resources are a central part of Android programming, but how do you get at them from code and what are conditional resources? Here's how to do it in Kotlin, in an extract from my published book  Android Programming in Kotlin: Starting With An App .

News

Chrome Prototype To Throttle Your Web Pages  
Wednesday 06 February

How to make the web go faster? It's easy, you simply impose guillotine policies on what is being downloaded. If a web page loads a resource that is "too big" - just block it! 

New Public Datasets Added To AWS  
Wednesday 06 February

Amazon has announced nine new AWS public datasets for researchers and developers interested in machine learning, environmental science, geospatial, astronomy, cybersecurity, and housing. 

ESRI Relaunches ArcGIS For Devs  
Tuesday 05 February

ESRI has relaunched ArcGIS for Developers, making it cheaper and easier to access. The facilities for developers deploying commercial apps have also been revamped. ArcGIS is a platform for creating, managing, sharing, and analyzing spatial data. 

Software Bypasses Drug Patents 
Tuesday 05 February
It is nice to sometimes be reminded that not all our current crop of breakthroughs are AI-based. This one is just clever computing combined with some deep knowledge of chemistry.   

Google Firestore Released  
Monday 04 February

The Google Cloud Firestore serverless document database is now generally available. Firestore was announced in 2018 as part of the Google Firebase platform, and in addition to being unrestricted, it is now available in more areas. 

Facebook's Automated Bug Fixers  
Monday 04 February

The developers at Facebook are using AI-based tools to automatically find and fix bugs in the code for the Facebook app. Two tools, Sapienz and SapFix, are used to carry out testing and to locate and fix bugs. 

Instant Print 3D Objects Using Tomography  
Sunday 03 February

Instead of making you wait hours or days, a new approach to 3D printing gives you the object almost at once. It seems like magic, but it's all down to an adaptation of an already wildly successful algorithm. 

Our Robot Overlords Attempt To Master Jenga  
Saturday 02 February

For any human who has sustained injury from falling Jenga blocks the news that a robot has developed enough touch and vision to do the task is bitter-sweet.

Guido van Rossum Core Developer Grant Launched  
Friday 01 February

The EuroPython Society has launched a new grant program and has named it in recognition of Guido van Rossum's almost 20 years of leading the Python Core Developer team. 

Coursera Self-Driving Car Specialization  
Thursday 31 January

The University of Toronto  has launched a four-course, advanced level specialization for those who want to be part of the autonomous vehicle revolution on the Coursera platform. The first course is available and the others will be rolled out over the next few months. 

Fear And Loathing In The App Store 22 - Apple Revokes Facebook's Developer Certificate   Thursday 31 January

Apple just revoked Facebook's developer certificate because it broke the terms of the agreement and now none of its internal iOS apps run. Apple has even more power than you might have imagined.
Update: Google's certificate also revoked. 

Rust Improves Tracing   Thursday 31 January

Rust 1.32 follows the release of Rust 2018 in December. The updated version adds what the developers describe as 'a few quality of life improvements', as well as switching the default allocator, and making additional functions const.