Apache has released Hudi 1.0, described as a landmark achievement that defines what the next generation of data lakehouses should achieve. Hudi pioneered transactional data lakes in 2017. 

Meta has taken us a long way towards creating a Babel Fish, a tool that helps individuals translate speech between any two languages. This is thanks to SEAMLESSM4T which is open-source for non-commercial use and which Meta hopes will propel further research on inclusive speech translation technologies.

IBM has produced a cookbook of tips and methodologies on how to use RAG to power up any kind of business applications. Microsoft and Docling both provide tools for data ingestion from a range of document formats 

Google has announced that the latest 'feature drop' version of Android Studio, Ladybug is now stable. The new version includes ways to interact with Gemini in Android Studio, Animation Preview support for Wear Tiles, and an App Links Assistant.

ELIZA was the world's first chatbot, more than 50 years before the term itself was coined. She was the brainchild of Joseph Weizenbaum who wrote the original program in the 1960s at MIT.  The original source-code for ELIZA was never published, and remained lost until rediscovered by researchers engaged in the Eliza Archaeology Project. 

This week's top featured article is an extract from Programming the ESP32 in MicroPython, 2nd Edition which now also covers the ESP32 S3 and the Arduino Nano ESP32. If you prefer C for your IoT projects then you have a choice, Programming the ESP32 in C Using The Espressif IDF and Programming the ESP32 in C Using The Arduino Library. 

The developers at Modal have created the GPU Glossary to help themselves and others get to grips with termionology related to NVIDIA GPU hardware and software. They have managed to collect, clean, normalize and present the dispersed information on the subject.

ENRICH 2025, the European Robotics Hackathon, is open now for team entries. To be held at the Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant in Austria, the aim is to develop robots that can carry out tasks in a nuclear reactor. 

Express.js 5 has been released, ten years after Express.js 4. The new release has dropped support for outdated versions of Node.js, addresses security concerns, and brings simplified maintenance.

Rust 1.84 has been released with changes including a move to a new trait solver and a set of Strict Provenance APIs.

JavaScript is the most widely used programming language in the world. Now in its 30th year, JavaScript is firmly established as the language that powers the web. But it has a problem. Oracle owns the trademark to its name and isn't going to give it up without a fight.

Making hardware secure is more difficult than you might think, which is the reason I was confident that Raspberry Pi would have to pay out its $20,000 bounty offered to anyone who could break the security on the RP2350 - the heart of the Pico.

Stack Overflow Jobs, a site run in partnership with Indeed, is now available outside the US, including the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the Netherlands. This should provide a revenue stream to support Stack Overflow at a time when its QA traffic is diminishing.

Prometheus 3 has been released, the first major release in seven years. The new version has a new UI and native support in Remote-Write for new elements.

Apache Struts 7 has been released. This version adds support for JEE 9+, and implements stronger security defaults.

Google has made the Android version of its Home APIs available in public developer beta, with the iOS version to follow in the coming months. 

Robot vacuum cleaners swept the floor at CES 2025 and while this might not seem very exciting, think again. Adding AI to these everyday home helpers has already made them more efficient at what they do. Now they are expanding what they do and getting a foot in the door of homes everywhere.

This week comes news that Python is TIOBE Language of the Year for the sixth time. With a new logo proposed for Perl, we look at what happened to it in 2024. We report on new releases for Ruby and Flutter and look back on 50 years of the Intel 8080 microprocessor. Our book extract from Extending & Embedding Python Using C gives instructions on setting up a Windows toolchain.