Featured Articles

The Story Of The Apple Macintosh
Historian

If you think of Apple, you probably think of the iPhone or iPad, but the name Mac was once much more important to Apple. The Mac was a groundbreaking computer that introduced the world to the GUI and many things we now take for granted. 

Gain A Computer Science Credential In 2020

Sue Gee

Being able to study online opens up the opportunity for gaining an academic credential to people who embarked on a programming career without one and to those who are looking to move into a more specialized area such as Data Science. 

Controls beyond the button? Here's a basic guide in Kotlin, an extract from my published book Android Programming in Kotlin: Starting With An App.

News

HackerRank Finds New Generation Gaps
05 Feb | Janet Swift

HackerRank has produced its 2020 Developer Skills Report, calling it the largest survey of its kind ever released. There's too much to digest in one look, so we are starting with its findings on education and training from the point of view of devs and hiring managers. 

New research suggests that a random neural network may have the same power as a fully trained network and uncovering this is just a matter of pruning the connections. Is this profound? Is this obvious? Does it have implications for real neural networks? 

Apache Druid, a high performance real-time analytics database, designed for workflows where fast queries and ingest really matter, has been updated with improvements including better compaction and batch ingestion. 

Google is closing down App Maker, its development tool for non-programmers. The announcement was made two weeks after it acquired AppSheet, a tool aimed at a similar market to App Maker. 

The developers of MongoDB have announced that you can now use GraphQL in JavaScript applications to interact with MongoDB documents. The facility has been added through Stitch integration in MongoDB Atlas clusters. 

If you are not a graphics expert then the headline might not make much sense, but Vulkan is the next generation replacement for OpenGL and work has started on a driver for the Pi. 

This year's collection of new emojis for smartphones has been announced by Unicode Consortium, and includes a gender-neutral Santa, men in wedding dresses and the transgender flag. 

Robots come in many shapes and sizes. Here is another one to add to the catalog. OmBURo has the form of a unicycle and is intended as a mobility mechanism to be used in tight spaces shared with humans.

The errors in Microsoft's ways are still coming home to roost. Now we have the demise of the UWP Ad Platform. Will UWP go the same way?

CodinGame has explored this issue with a survey of its dev community. Among key insights, its new report reveals which country is the best to work in.

A survey by Active State discovered that while almost half of respondents had planned for Python 2 EOL, and many had already migrated to Python 3, almost a third had made no preparations, leaving them unsure what to do with unsupported Python 2 applications. 

Google's customized search engine for 'scientists, data journalists, and data geeks' is now out of beta, and offers indexed searches for almost 25 million datasets. Dataset Search now has added filters so you can look for specific types of dataset, or only those that are free from the provider.

Books of the Week

Full Review

Game Development Using Python

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Mike James begins his review with:

Games are a good way to learn Python and Python is a good way to learn about games.

Added to Book Watch

TinyML: Machine Learning with TensorFlow Lite (O'Reilly)

Hands-On Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia (Packt)