Collins has selected Vibe Coding as its Word of the Year 2025, reflecting the current trend towards the use of natural language prompts for code creation.

 This extended version of the newsletter emailed to subscribers every Wednesday lists the week's news items, additions to Book Watch and the week's two feature articles. This week we have an  extract from Harry Fairhead's book on the Raspberry Pi 5 Computer Module and Mike James introduces Octave, an open source language, mostly compatible with MatLab, that makes doing difficult mat [ ... ]

The AI Champion Ship is now underway, with a month to go before entries close. The organizers describe it as a global competition for builders, dreamers, and tinkerers who want to push AI beyond the ordinary.

Fans nostalgic for the -er- good old days of Windows XP can now commemorate them with specially themed Crocs. 

A new major version of Grails has been announced, together with news of its graduation to an Apache top-level project.

Buoyant, the creators of the Linkerd open source and service mesh for the enterprise, have announced the addition of support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Linkerd to extend its core service mesh capabilities to agentic AI traffic.

That two parties have settled their differences is usually a cause for celebration, but in this case they win and we lose. The details are unclear as yet so perhaps this is too strong a way to put things, but it doesn't look good for the independent Android developer.

Codeacy has launched a free benchmarking survey to help engineering teams measure the risk profile of their AI coding workflows when using tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude and compare it against the industry standard. 

Introducing OpenCode, an opensource, powerful, fully-hackable AI coding agent for the terminal that takes on commercial agents head to head.

The developers of PyTorch have introduced Monarch, a distributed programming framework that can be used to program distributed systems in the same way you’d program a single machine.

Copilot breaks loose from its deep integration with VSCode,
and now embraces the CLI Warriors in offering a terminal-based interface too. At last Copilot gets its own CLI version, bringing it up to par with competitors like Gemini CLI or Claude Code CLI.

Julia 1.12 has been released with a new trim feature, the ability to redefine structs, and the final switch to partitioned semantics. 

Today we celebrate the 210th anniversary of the birth of George Boole who today we credit with being the "forefather of the digital age", thanks to his creation of a method of formal logic in which statements are defined as being either true or false.

If you are an Andriod programmer you may not yet be aware of the threat to your continued livelihood. What Google is proposing  is essentially a closing down of the ability to develop apps for Android without registration. If you don't register, you won't be able to distribute your apps - not even to a private group of users. Read the news, sign the open letter and share the story.

Blockly is moving to a new home. Having originated as a single-person project at Google in 2011, it is now a vibrant open source project which has moved into robotics as well as being at the heart of many block-based languages used to introduce new users to coding. Going forward under the stewardship of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, it will remain open source with an Apache 2.0 licence.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is rolling out a new logo following the release of strategic objectives to support W3C's roadmap and the formation in 2023 of W3C as a non-profit, public-interest organization. 

Microsoft has merged Semantic Kernel and AutoGen to create the Agent Framework, stirring the AI Agent waters.

Zephyr, a real time operating system and Rust, a memory safe language, are both hot topics at the  moment and Raspberry Pi has decided they are hot enough to support in its extension for VS Code.