The developers of MariaDB have released a connector for Node.js for the database, giving developers a way to build build Node.js applications on top of MariaDB’s relational database.

Git 2.2 has been released with improvements to cloning, fetching, and grepping, all designed to improve usability and performance.

Last week concern was raised over "too many swear words" in  the source code for OpenJDK. Within three days the issue was resolved after a courteous exchange of views.

TigerGraph has released a cloud version of its graph database. TigerGraph Cloud supports AI and machine learning applications, and was announced at the annual Amazon Web Services Re:Invent conference. It follows a recent update of TigerGraph DB.

Yes, it's not a misprint. In these days of solid state computers, and perhaps even one day quantum computers, it seems strange that you can use liquids to do the same jobs - and more.

Launched a couple of months ago, Anki's Vector Robot is a voice-activated desktop robot that can answer questions, show you the weather, provide a countdown timer, take photos for you and more. It now comes with Amazon Alexa built-in, greatly expanding its range of behaviors and its usefulness.  

Catch up with everything that appeared on I Programmer last week. Our digest gives links to news coverage plus the week's book reviews and additions to Book Watch. The list finishes with an extract, Inside Class, from Mike James' recently published book, Programmer's Python and, from our History section, Grace Hopper - The Mother of Cobol.

Udacity has passed another milestone - its 50,000th Nanodegree program graduate. Udacity also revealed that  gaining a nanodegree leads to an average salary increase around the globe and 33% more in the US and Canada. 

Three open source projects for use with Apache Cassandra have been released by Instaclustr. The projects are designed to make it easier to work with Cassandra alongside Kubernetes, LDAP and Kerberos.

Rust 2018 has now been released. This is the first major release since Rust 1.0 in 2015, and alongside new language features, it includes IDE support, updated libraries, new documentation, domain working groups, and a new website.

An updated version of Three.js has been released with improvements to its rendering facilities for Canvas 2D, SVG, CSS3D, and WebGL.

AlphaGo learned to play Go at grand-master level. AlphaFold has used similar methods to learn to predict protein folding and this is far more important.

A new survey by HackerRank shows a worrying divide between the programming languages students are taught and those in demand by employers.

The Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (Microsoft SEAL) homomorphic encryption library has been made is open source on GitHub under an MIT License for free use. The library was developed by researchers in the Cryptography Research group at Microsoft.

The holiday season is a good time to learn about computers - you have the time. But where to start? Our advice is to ignore the pudding and go for a Pi.

It is 50 years since Douglas Engelbart presented a talk that came to be known as the  "Mother of All Demos".  The landmark event introduced many aspects of interactive computing, including the mouse. These ideas, now commonplace, were visionary in 1968 and must have stunned many in the audience.

Nvidia has released a new version of its physics engine, PhysX, and has made it open source. The developers say the engine has been upgraded to provide industrial grade simulation quality at game simulation performance.

Today, December 9th 2018, is the 112th anniversary of the birth of Grace Hopper. Her continuing legacy has been to inspire efforts to enhance the career interests of women in computing. Her concern for teaching young people is why Computer Science Education Week and the Hour of Code are timed to coincide with her birthday.