Get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer with our weekly digest. It summarizes the week's news together with links to the week's book review and the titles selected for Book Watch Archive. This week Nikos Vaggalis shows how to use sqlite-zstd, a Rust library that can compress your database and Harry Fairhead expresses controversial opinions on the topic of Hackathons.

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September 8 - 14, 2022 

Featured Articles  

Use Rust To Reduce The Size Of Your SQLite Database Nikos Vaggalis Meet sqlite-zstd, a Rust library that compresses your database many fold, leading to great savings in size while conserving its search capabilities intact. + FULL STORY

Hackathons Considered Harmful Harry Fairhead Is Harry Fairhead being serious when he says that Hackathons are dangerous? Does he really want to see the zen put back into code? What exactly is the objection to being cool? + FULL STORY

Programming News and Views   

Go Developers Positive About Generics 14 Sep | Janet Swift The latest Go Developer Survey investigated the take up of three features introduced in Go 1.18 - Generics, Fuzzing and Go Workspaces, probing developers' opinions and the barriers to adoption. + FULL STORY

Linux And Android Waste Coding Effort 14 Sep | Harry Fairhead For many years it has been standard practice to test that you get the memory you ask for, but it has all be a huge waste of time. Operating systems get in on the act before you have a chance to do anything about it. + FULL STORY

Constellation - The First Confidential Kubernetes 13 Sep | Nikos Vaggalis Edgeless Systems secure the cloud's workloads by releasing the first runtime encrypted Kubernetes, able to run on a multitude of cloud providers. + FULL STORY

PyTorch Joins Linux Foundation 13 Sep | Kay Ewbank PyTorch is moving to the Linux Foundation as a top-level project under the name PyTorch Foundation. The core mission of the Linux Foundation is the collaborative development of open source software. + FULL STORY

Java Or Python For Android - Why Not Both! 12 Sep | Nikos Vaggalis Should you choose Java or Python for your next Android project? You don't have to with Chaquopy, the Python SDK that lets you write Android applications in Python. Thanks to support from Anaconda, it is now both free and open-source. + FULL STORY

NetBeans 15 Improves Language Server Protocol Support 12 Sep | Kay Ewbank Apache NetBeans 15 has been released with improvements including better support for Language Server Protocol (LSP), along with updates to Maven integration and better YAML editing. + FULL STORY

AI-Based Artwork Wins Prize 11 Sep | Kay Ewbank An art prize has been won by an artwork created using a combination of AI and PhotoShop. While the judges didn't know the origins of the work, they have said they'd still have given it first prize had they known it was AI-generated. + FULL STORY

September Offer For Coursera Plus 09 Sep | Sue Gee Coursera is the leading provider of online Computer Science and Data Science courses, at all levels beginner to advanced. An annual Coursera Plus subscription gives access to the majority of Coursera's vast catalog and until September 29th there is $100 off the normal price, a 25% discount. + FULL STORY

Android CameraX Now In Beta 09 Sep | Kay Ewbank Android CameraX 1.2 is now in beta. The CameraX library is part of Android Jetpack, and is designed to provide an API that gives developers a way to use complex camera functionality. + FULL STORY

Vulnerability Management Added To Go 1.19 08 Sep | Kay Ewbank Vulnerability management support has been added to Go 1.19. This is a first step towards helping Go developers learn about known vulnerabilities that may affect them. + FULL STORY

Running PostgreSQL Inside Your Browser 08 Sep | Nikos Vaggalis Yes it is possible thanks to, what else, WebAssembly.  And with it, the emergence of the Postgres playground, brought to us by Crunchy Data, with live-guided SQL exercises for any level. + FULL STORY

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 helps us to continue posting.

Full Review 

• Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs (Manning)
  Rating: 4 out of 5  Reviewer: Mike James

Added to Book Watch 

• Template Metaprogramming with C++ (Packt)

• Murach's PHP and MySQL, 4th Ed (Murach)

• Robot Ethics (MIT Press)
  

More recently published books can be found in Book Watch Archive.

From the I Programmer Library

Latest publications: 

• Programmer's Python: Everything Is An Object, 2nd Ed by Mike James 

This month sees the publication of the revised second edition of Programmer's Python: Everything Is An Object in which Mike James reveals how Python has a unique and unifying approach with regards to class and objects. This is the first of a set of titles at intermediate level for the programmer who wants to understand what makes Python special and sets it apart from other programming languages, hence the strap line "Something Completely Different - which is, of course, a reference to the Monty Python TV and film brand that inspired Guido Van Rossum to name his new language. The subject is roughly speaking everything to do with the way Python implements objects. That is, in order of sophistication, metaclass; class; object; attribute; and all of the other facilities such as functions, methods and the many “magic methods” that Python uses to make it all work.  

• Programmer's Python: Everything Is Data by Mike James

This is the second of that Something Completely Different titles and explores the way that data is treated in a distinctly Pythonic way. What we have in Python are data objects that are very usable and very extensible. From the unlimited precision integers, referred to as bignums, through the choice of a list to play the role of the array, to the availability of the dictionary as a built-in data type, Python behaves differently to other languages and this book is what you need to help you make the most of these special features. There are also complete chapters on Boolean logic, dates and times, regular expressions and bit manipulation.

MIke James is now working on the third book in the series, Programmer's Python: Async which not only covers the latest asyncio in depth, but has all you need to know about the many approaches to async that Python provides - threads, processes,futures,tasks, schedulers. This is the book you need to understand all the options, trade-offs and gotchas. 

These books aren’t for the complete beginner and some familiarity with both object-oriented programming and Python is assumed, with the first chapter providing a quick recap. They also share an Appendix on using Visual Studio Code from Python. 

• The Trick Of The Mind: Programming and Computational Thought by Mike James 

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.