Feature Articles

Professional Credentials For Computer Science Careers
Sue Gee

Software Development is a career where you can thrive without professional certificates. On the other hand it can be personally fulfilling as well as financially advantageous. If you have extra time on your hands due to the Covid-19 lockdown, it could be just the time to embark on a training course.

The UK played a significant role in the early development of the computer and not just the theory. Real machines were designed and built using home grown components, something that no computer firm could attempt today, and there was even a good helping of academic and commercial co-operation of the sort that governments have been trying to foster ever since.

News

C Is Number One Language Again
06 May | Harry Fairhead

Yes, I know its all meaningless and you can't base any decision on it, but given I'm a C groupie you can't expect me to ignore the latest Tiobe index which puts C back at number one! It displaces JavaScript and we can still expect Python to dislodge them both before long.

GitHub and Major League Hacking (MHL) have set up the MHL Fellowship, a remote internship program to support the next generation of developers along with open source projects.

If you want to earn credit towards a Master's Degreee - or just augment your resume with a credential at Masters-degree level Couresa has a new option -  the AI and Machine Learning MasterTrack Certificate, a subset of the Arizona State University Master of Computer Science. Enrollment for the next session is open until August 6.

With tracks on Java, Kotlin and Python and with many hands-on projects, the new JetBrains Academy  is currently free under an Early Access Program. This is an opportunity not to be missed.

Microsoft has changed the name of Visual Studio Online to Visual Studio Codespaces. The reasoning is to make it clear that this is more than just an editor in the browser. Along with the new name, Microsoft says it has added new features and lowered prices.

This isn't really news, but I think it's fun and deserves to be better known. It's the robot panda problem, otherwise known as the Bamboo Garden Trimming (BGT) problem. What is special about it is that it is easy to state and understand and very approachable whether you are an amateur or a serious computer scientist.

The results of the fourth annual Rust Survey have been released, covering the responses of almost 4,000 developers. Rust  began life at Mozilla and has been around for ten years. The latest release is Rust 1.42.

To complement the launch of its new AI for Healthcare nanodegree program, Udacity is presenting its first-ever virtual conference that will explore how AI can be applied to healthcare. AI for Healthcare in the Time of COVID-19 takes place on May 12th & 13th.

Python Summit has gone virtual for obvious reasons. There are lots of interesting talks, but the one that piqued my interest was on the gradual addition of gradual typing to Python. I was going to call the news "Python typing considered harmful", but then I thought better of it.

This year's BUILD conference is not going to be the event that was originally billed. Instead of an in-person, 2-day event with tickets costing $2,395 it has been transformed into a 48-hour digital experience that is free and open to all. More importantly the focus of the event will be firmly on developers. 

The Khronos Group has announced OpenCL 3.0, the latest version of its open framework for programming GPUs and other compute accelerators.

IBM has announced the Elyra AI Toolkit, a new open source project that extends the JupyterLab user interface to simplify the development of data science and AI models.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced official recommendations for Web of Things Architecture and Web of Things Thing Descriptions. They are designed to make it easier to integrate across Internet of Things platforms and applications.