Every day I Programmer has new material written by programmers, for programmers. This week Harry Fairhead and Mike James show how to get a Raspberry Pi Pico to handle simple input using MicroPython and Mike James explores a conundrum - that programmers don't make anything. Plus the week's books and news.
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January 13 - 19, 2022
Featured Articles
The Pico In MicroPython: Simple Input Harry Fairhead & Mike James
Input is difficult because the world can make it happen at any time and you have to be ready for it. Simple input isn't so simple. This is an extract from our book all about the Raspberry Pi Pico in MicroPython.
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We Make Nothing Mike James
Literally we make nothing. Give me a pound of program, a foot, a kilogram or a meter of your latest program, no not the paper you printed it on, your program, the real thing. You can't - because you make nothing...
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Programming News and Views
Amazon Offers Debugger For Machine Learning Models 20 Jan | Alex Denham
Amazon has developed a method that automatically discovers machine learning model errors on particular types of input and provides a way to correct them. Defuse is a tool that the developers say can be used to train more robust models.
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Apache Ignite Adds Change Data Capture 20 Jan | Kay Ewbank
Apache Ignite has been updated with improvements including Change Data Capture (CDC), an Index Query API, and several vulnerability fixes. Ignite is a distributed database for high-performance computing with in-memory speed.
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Faker Rebooted As Community-Controlled Project 19 Jan | Sue Gee
After faker.js was deliberately deleted by its owner Marak Squires the project is again available on npm under new management. The new GitHub repo is faker-js/faker and the project has seen a massive amount of activity in its first two weeks and appears to have a promising future ahead of it.
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The Year of AI 2021 - The Best Papers 19 Jan | Nikos Vaggalis
While 2021 was a difficult year due to the pandemic, it was also a year full of advancements in the field of AI. Louis Bouchard has compiled a great list with the best research papers that were published during the year.
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IPython 8 Improves Code Reformatting 18 Jan | Kay Ewbank
IPython has been updated with improvements including code reformatting, ghost suggestions, and better tracebacks which highlight the error node. IPython 8 comes three years after the release of version 7.0.
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The PostgresSQL Transition Guide Helps You Make The Switch 18 Jan | Nikos Vaggalis
There is now an English version of a guide that goes through the considerations you have to make in order to migrate to PostgreSQL from another Database Management System.
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Boom Time For Developer Recruitment 17 Jan | Sue Gee
Post-pandemic the demand for programming skills is higher than ever. The pandemic has also had a lasting impact on how and where developers are expected to work, which should please the majority of existing employees as well as new recruits.
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AngularJS Reaches End Of Life 17 Jan | Kay Ewbank
The developers of AngularJS have announced that it has officially reached the end of its life, at least in terms of support and updates. The advice for current users is to upgrade applications that use it to the AngularJS successor, Angular.
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The Challenge Of Robot Locomotion 16 Jan | Lucy Black
Legs or wheels - four or two? These are fundamental design choices if you are building a robot. For drones there are other issues starting with the problem of staying airborne. There is however scope for clever design to promote versatility. Anyone interested in re-inventing the wheel?
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Amazon Retiring Alexa Internet 14 Jan | Sue Gee
Amazon has called time for Alexa.com, the resource that has ranked websites in terms of their popularity based on global web traffic for over 25 years. Will we miss it or was it really past its sell-by date?
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IBM Open Sources CodeFlare 14 Jan | Kay Ewbank
IBM has announced improvements to CodeFlare, its serverless framework that aims to reduce the time and effort developers spend training and preparing AI and machine learning models for deployment in hybrid cloud environments. CodeFlare has also now been made open source.
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Developer Sabotages Own Code 13 Jan | Sue Gee
The developer of two popular JavaScript libraries has sabotaged them, apparently as a protest for not getting financial recompense from corporates for his work. GitHub temporarily suspended his account in what many would regard as an unwarranted intervention.
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Google Announces Framework For Data Science Predictions 13 Jan | Kay Ewbank
Google has released Prediction Framework, which the developers describe as a time saver for data science prediction projects. The framework provides a way to put together a reusable project that includes all the steps of a prediction project: data extraction, preparation, filtering, prediction and post-processing.
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Books of the Week
If you want to purchase, or to know more about, any of the titles listed below from Amazon, click on the book jackets at the top of the right sidebar. If you do make Amazon purchases after this, we may earn a few cents through the Amazon Associates program which is a small source of revenue that enables us to continue posting.
Full Review
Mike James concludes his review:
This is a beginner's book for the beginner who wants to learn something about Lisp-like languages. It doesn't cover all of the details of Racket, no mention is made of macros for example, and it doesn't explain why and how Racket is different from other Lisp-like languages, notably Clojure. As far as it goes it is a good introduction, as long as you like introductions that major on examples.
Added to Book Watch
More recently published books can be found in Book Watch Archive.
From the I Programmer Library
Recently published:
Programmers think differently from non-programmers, they see and solve problems in a way that the rest of the world doesn't. In this book Mike James takes programming concepts and explains what the skill involves and how a programmer goes about it. In each case, Mike looks at how we convert a dynamic process into a static text that can be understood by other programmers and put into action by a computer. If you're a programmer, his intent is to give you a clearer understanding of what you do so you value it even more.
Deep C#: Dive Into Modern C# by Mike James
In Deep C#, I Programmer's Mike James, who has programmed in C# since its launch in 2000, provides a “deep dive” into various topics that are important or central to the language at a level that will suit the majority of C# programmers. Not everything will be new to any given reader, but by exploring the motivation behind key concepts, which is so often ignored in the documentation, the intention is to be thought-provoking and to give developers confidence to exploit C#’s wide range of features.
I Programmer has reported news for over 10 years. You can access I Programmer Weekly back to January 2012 for all the headlines plus the book reviews and articles.
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