Our weekly digest lists the week's news, new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and our weekly book review. This week's first featured article comes from Fundamental C: Getting Closer to the Machine and looks at Strings. The other is "The Bloom Filter" in which Mike James introduces an ingenious algorithm for avoiding wasting time by searching for data that isn't there.

Amazon has announced the fifth instance of the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge, which still has $1 Million on offer. New this year is that university teams will not only compete for prizes related to overall performance, but also for a separate award for scientific invention and innovation.

There's a new alternative license for ECMAScript that is designed to be permissive regarding derivative works of a standard. It is largely based on the W3C’s Document and Software License, and one of its aims is to be better aligned with the work of the W3C.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is an amazing device that seems to have sold 2 Million since it launched last year. But until now it had one big drawback  - no WiFi. Now the newly announced Pico W gives you WiFi, and potentially BlueTooth, for $6. This breakthrough is the start of something new and important.

Apache Doris has achieved Top-Level Project status at Apache. The open source realtime analytical database is massively parallel processing (MPP) based, is an MPP-based and provides interactive SQL data warehousing for reporting and analysis.

To the innocent it sounds like this might be a serious problem, but to the initiated it sounds like a serious opportunity. The Rust of which we speak is, of course, the language, not the result of corrosion, and it could be the biggest change in programming for some time.

Today is June 28 or 6.28. Is that a familiar number? Probably not. It's called tau and it is twice a number that is remembered - 3.14, called pi, which we've got used to celebrating on Pi Day - March 14. The good news is that as tau is two times pi it gives us a great excuse to eat a double helping.

Amazon has announced CodeWhisperer, a programming tool powered by machine learning that provides similar functionality to GitHub's Copilot. CodeWhisperer, which was announced at Amazon's re:Mars conference, generates code recommendations based on users comments in natural language and code.

Google has announced it is making Google Earth Engine available to businesses and governments worldwide as an enterprise-grade service through Google Cloud.

Apache AGE, "A Graph Extension" was recently announced as an Apache Software Foundation Top-Level Project (TLP). What is the importance of that?

GitHub CoPilot has been officially released with a free option for use for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects. Other developers will be charged $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year. GitHub describes Copilot as an AI pair programmer that suggests code in your editor.

A team of graduate students at the University of Glasgow has emerged as winners of Amazon's inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge with GRILLBot, a “multi-modal task-oriented digital assistant to guide users through complex real-world tasks”. 

Every day I Programmer has new material written by programmers, for programmers. This digest gives a summary of the latest content, which this week includes an extract from Harry Fairhead's Raspberry Pi IoT in C explaining Pulse Width Modulation and one from Ian Elliot's Just jQuery on modifying DOM objects. 

The 2022 ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award has been awarded to Mark Horowitz who pioneered the DRAM Interface and whose insights at the intersection of architecture and circuits have had a profound influence.

GitHub has just launched Github Skills, a new learning platform
that replaces the current Learning Labs. This is a change for the better.

Meta is expanding its training offering on Coursera with five new professional certificates for those wanting to embark on a programming career - for the web, for mobile or as a database engineer. Pre-enroll before the starting date to enjoy your first 30 days free.

Apache has announced InLong is now a top level project. InLong is a one-stop integration framework for massive data that provides automatic, secure, and reliable data transmission capabilities.

The Open Source Jobs Report 2022, published today, reinforces the message that gaining certification is very worthwhile for developers. Meanwhile the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022, also published today, reveals that over half of developers engage with the video-based online courses that lead to certification.