The Core

The Programmers Guide To Kotlin - Smart Casts  
Monday 13 May

Kotlin tries to make casting easy and safe. In this extract from the book on Kotlin by Mike James we look at how to handle smart casts and type aliases. 

Programmer Puzzles

Python Puzzle - Where Did The Time Go?  
Thursday 09 May

A Python programming puzzle to get you up to speed. This one is all about time keeping, or is it? There are some strange things that go on in Python when you aren't paying attention.  

News

The End Of The App Store Era - Apple To Face Lawsuit   Wednesday 15 May

In October of last year we reported on Apple's appeal to the Supreme Court Of The United States to dismiss a lawsuit claiming that the App Store is a monopoly. SCOTUS has now granted permission for the suit to proceed and Apple is almost sure to lose. This could be the end of the era of the walled garden of app stores. 

RIP Java EE  
Wednesday 15 May

Despite long talks, Oracle has imposed requirements on the Eclipse Foundation that mean even the Java trademarks in the open source version won't be feasible. 

Microsoft's Reactive Native For Windows  
Tuesday 14 May

At Build last week, Microsoft  announced a new open-source project for React Native developers wanting to target Windows and Windows developers wanting to join the React Native bandwagon. 
React Native for Windows is on GitHub under a MIT License. 

Microsoft Gives Up On UWP  
Monday 13 May

You can't expect a clear statement from Microsoft on discontinuing any software, but it looks as if the push to make us all move to UWP apps is over. The desktop future is classic Win32 and .NET. 

RStudio Updated With Plumber Support  
Monday 13 May

RStudio has been updated with a new release that adds the ability to create, test, and publish APIs in R with Plumber and run R scripts. The new release also adds testing R code integrations for shinytest and testthat.  

Google Promotes ChromeOS at Google I/O  
Monday 13 May

Google seems determined to push heavily for ChromeOS judging from the announced goodies at its annual developer event, Gogle I/O.But is it at the expense of its other well-loved operating system, Android?  

Any Camera Can Capture Ultra Fast Action  
Sunday 12 May

Ultra high speed videos of things like water droplets hitting the ground or balloons bursting are fascinating, but they need a high priced camera to render them as slowmo - or do they? Could computational photography be the only extra you need? 

Machine Learning Applied to Game of Thrones  
Saturday 11 May

No-one wants the beloved series to end. Some, like the geeks at Pachyderm, have gone to great lengths to extend its life span, to the point of employing ML to serve the Iron Throne.  

Wanted! Technical Writers!  
Friday 10 May

Season of Docs is a new Google-supported initiative that aims to bring together technical writers with open source projects in order to improve their documentation. As with Summer of Code, Google is providing stipends to cover living costs. 

Ebay Open Sources Beam  
Friday 10 May

eBay has made its distributed knowledge graph store open source. Beam can be used to store RDF-like data and supports SPARQL-like querying. It uses Apache Kafka for storage. Beam was largely written in Go. 

Microsoft Adds Conversational AI Agents  
Thursday 09 May

Microsoft has shown off new virtual agents that are to be made available to developers. The agents were demonstrated at this year's Build conference. 

Explore AWS IoT On edX Platform  
Thursday 09 May

Amazon has partnered with edX to provide an intermediate level self-paced free course that  provides skills in building and deploying IoT solutions for commercial or consumer applications.