Our weekly digest lists the week's news, new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and our latest book review. In this week's first featured article Mike James looks at Python's approach to class and object-orientation. Then David Conrad demystifies HTML's default layout rules.

A new insect-inspired flying robot has been created by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley. The robot can hover, change trajectory and even hit small targets. It is less than 1  centimeter in diameter, weighs only 21 milligrams, and the Berkeley team say it is the world’s smallest wireless robot capable of controlled flight.

Introducing sqlpremierleague,  another sql playground, but with puzzles specific to sports.

The first is in relation to Github Copilot and the second
to PostgreSQL. They enable seamless integration with any tool that supports the protocol.

Microsoft has announced a new Graph API usage report in a beta API version in Microsoft Graph.

Some very interesting research has just been published that throws a lot of light on the crazy belief that undefined behavior is useful, essential even, to certain types of optimization rather than the huge mistake it really is.

Akka has announced new deployment options for its Akka platform, as well as new solutions to tackle the issues with deploying large-scale agentic AI systems for mission-critical applications.

OpenAI has provided a treasure trove of information for spreading knowledge about AI to the general public; understanding what AI is and learning how to leverage it by using tools like ChatGPT.

Azul has announced JVM Inventory, a new feature of Azul Intelligence Cloud aimed at making it easier to migrate away from Oracle Java.

Amazon has improved the CLI agent within the Amazon Q command line interface (CLI) to provide a faster more interactive coding experience. Amazon Q Developer can now use the information in its CLI environment to provide help on reading and writing files locally, querying AWS resources write code, or automatically debugging issues.

Google has shared the agenda for its annual developer conference. This year Google will live stream two days of sessions, starting with the Keynote at 10:00 AM PT on May 20th, followed by the Developer Keynote at 1:30 PM PT.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Travelling Saleman Problem (TSP) is impossible to solve for even reasonably small examples using today's computers. Do we need powerful hardware or a quantum computer? 

Take a break and catch up with the latest articles, book reviews and news posted on this site. This week we have an addition to our History section answering the question who were the original programmers. It tells the story of the ENIAC Programmers, six women who pioneered many of the programming concepts we nowadays take for granted.

The Harvard RoboBee can now make better landings thanks to new legs based on those of a crane-fly.  The researchers who developed the robot say it now no longer needs to crash land, and can instead glide down under control.   

For a few years now, front-end developers have been nibbling with AI to help them streamline repetitive tasks and boost productivity. However, AI is now evolving into more than just an assistance tool, and is slowly starting to take on advanced development tasks.

By using the expressiveness of the SQL language, TailPipe makes querying log files as easy as doing "select * from logs;".