Professional Programmer

How To Successfully Teach Computing Disciplines To The Uninitiated   Monday 18 February

How can you turn a student with little background in computation into a competent programming computer user? Could the solution be R and data science.

Babbage's Bag

Coding Theory   Thursday 14 February

Information theory – perhaps one of the most remarkable inventions of the twentieth century - naturally leads on to the consideration of how information can be coded and hence coding theory.

News

Is Rust Really Safe?   Wednesday 20 February

Rust is the great hope for a safe low-level programming language. This is often expressed in the motto "fearless concurrency", but who is to say that it really is better. Perhaps it's just as bad in different ways.

GitHub Bounty Program Increases Rewards   Wednesday 20 February

GitHub's Security Bug Bounty Program is now five years old and has been updated again with better rewards and a wider remit. Now a Microsoft-owned company, GitHub has also added Legal Safe Harbor terms to its policy to offer researchers better legal protection.

Developers Break Out Of The App Store   Tuesday 19 February

It's not so much a breakout, more a sort of bending of the rules. After Google and Facebook were shamed by Apple because they misused their enterprise developer certificates, it now appears that the practice is fairly common.

Insights From Devskiller's Code Skills Testing   Tuesday 19 February

For the first time Devskiller is sharing the insights gathered as a result of testing 112,654 developers from over 120 countries for companies in over 40 countries over the course of 2018.

GitHub Launches Draft Pull Requests   Monday 18 February

GitHub has added a way to show other developers that a pull request is code that is work in progress or even just an idea on how you're thinking of creating code.

Are You Ready For Kick Start?   Monday 18 February

Registration is now open for Kick Start one of Google's three coding contests. Aimed at students and those new to coding competitions, its 24-hour practice round takes place online on February 23-24 and then there are nine three-hour rounds of the contest at monthly intervals.

The Ai-Da Delusion - Machines Don't Have Souls   Sunday 17 February

A new robot con is on the rise - the robot artist that is personified by its promoters to fool the gullible. Meet Ai-Da, a toy with some software designed to be taken seriously by people who should know better.

Google Does Domaining Like Big Time Extortion   Saturday 16 February

Google Domains has the rights to the .dev Top Level Domain and intends to make as much money from it as possible - $11,500 just for early access to the scramble to register the most desirable names.

DigitalOcean Launches Managed Database Service   Friday 15 February

DigitalOcean has launched a Managed Database service for PostgreSQL, with plans to add support for other database engines  throughout the year. The service provides fully hosted and managed database engines.

Arduino IoT Cloud Public Beta   Friday 15 February

Everyone seems to want to provide an IoT solution, but it's a tough market to crack. Now Arduino has an easy to use cloud solution, but can you trust it? And is it even needed?

Memory Safety Bugs Form 70 Percent Of Vulnerabilities   Thursday 14 February

Almost three quarters of all vulnerabilities found in Microsoft products come into the category of memory safety issues, according to a talk by a Microsoft Engineer at this year's BlueHat conference.

Final EU Copyright Directive Spells Disaster   Thursday 14 February

The European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission has now agreed a compromise text for the EU copyright directive and the process has entered into its final phase in which it will either be adopted or rejected by a plenary session of MEPs.