Take a break and catch up with the latest articles, book reviews and news posted on this site. This week we have an extract from  Harry Fairhead's book on programming the ESP32 using C and the Arduino library. From our history section we have an account of the Harvard Mark I to coincide with the date in 1938 of the memorandum formalizing IBM's development of this iconic machine.

2025 will be the  21st consecutive year of Google Summer of Code and the 4th year in which it will accept anybody aged 18 years and over who is a newcomer to open source software. As usual, GSoC is looking to recruit between 20 and 30 new open source mentoring organisations this year.

The recorded lectures and webinars of the Robot Learning lecture series run by Professor Jitendra Malik at the University of  California, Berkeley have been released as a YouTube playlist.

Zasper is a supercharged IDE written in Go that allows you to run data science workloads locally and efficiently.

DryRun Security is introducing Natural Language Code Policies  to provide AppSec teams with an automated way to build and maintain security policy rules. 

Google computer scientists have given details of the way in which Google is using AI to dramatically reduce the time required for code migrations. In the case of a switch between two Java time libraries, there was an estimated time saving of 89 percent compared to doing the job manually.

The nematode worm, C. elegans, is a hero of AI and now it can live on your desktop machine. The worm in the machine is too good a headline to pass up!

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.