Post-pandemic the demand for programming skills is higher than ever. The pandemic has also had a lasting impact on how and where developers are expected to work, which should please the majority of existing employees as well as new recruits. 

The developers of AngularJS have announced that it has officially reached the end of its life, at least in terms of support and updates. The advice for current users is to upgrade applications that use it to the AngularJS successor, Angular.

Legs or wheels - four or two? These are fundamental design choices if you are building a robot. For drones there are other issues starting with the problem of staying airborne. There is however scope for clever design to promote versatility. Anyone interested in re-inventing the wheel?

Get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer with our weekly digest. It summarizes the week's news together with links to the week's book review and our additions to Book Watch. This week's features are a detailed look at GraalVM from Nikos Vaggalis and an exploration of PHP inner functions and anonymous functions by Mike James.

Amazon has called time for Alexa.com, the resource that has ranked websites in terms of their popularity based on global web traffic for over 25 years. Will we miss it or was it really past its sell-by date?

IBM has announced improvements to CodeFlare, its serverless framework that aims to reduce the time and effort developers spend training and preparing AI and machine learning models for deployment in hybrid cloud environments. CodeFlare has also now been made open source.

The developer of two popular JavaScript libraries has sabotaged them, apparently as a protest for not getting financial recompense from corporates for his work. GitHub temporarily suspended his account in what many would regard as an unwarranted intervention. 

Google has released Prediction Framework, which the developers describe as a time saver for data science prediction projects. The framework provides a way to put together a reusable project that includes all the steps of a prediction project: data extraction, preparation, filtering, prediction and post-processing.

... and it learns faster than an artificial neural network. It is arguable that none of the approaches we take to general AI will ever lead to general AI. The reason is that we understand them too well. We might need some wet stuff to make it all work.

Apple has divulged that developers have generated more than $260 billion in revenue since the App Store launched in 2008 with 2021 setting a new yearly record for developer earnings of about $60 billion. This is good, but it's also bad.

After 5 years in which it has doubled its user base year on year, Brave, the ad-blocking browser pioneered by Mozilla co-founder and JavaScript inventor Brendan Eich, now claims over 50 million users. Can it carry on its exponential increase?

The latest preview of Visual Studio has been released with improvements to the support for Git along with better code cleanup. The preview is of the full desktop IDE, as opposed to Microsoft's similarly-named Visual Studio Code.

The Flutter team have released a new tool. Mix is described as providing a way to build Flutter design systems expressively and effortlessly.

The latest preview of.NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) is now available with .NET 6 and the new Visual Studio 2022 17.1 Preview 2. Among the improvements to the new release are the first batch of Fluent UI control styling, multi-window implementations, control features, and another set of iOS type alignment.

Anouk Wipprecht's latest 3D-printed dress, designed in collaboration with crystal-maker Swarovski, monitors the wearer's heartbeat and displays its vital rhythms in a central pendant, which can also be worn around the neck.

As we transition to the new year, here is the first weekly digest of 2022 which, as well as current news, includes four items from 2021 that are worth a second look. The week's features are an extract from Harry Fairhead's book on using C in an IoT context and an explanation of how the block chain used for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency works. 

If your New Year's resolutions include gaining new skills or obtaining credentials to further your career, having a $100 discount on an annual Coursera Plus subscription sounds like a really good deal. It gives you unlimited access to the majority of Coursera's content - that's over 7,000 courses from world-class universities and companies.

GitLab has been updated with improvements including a simplified Geo configuration, along with an activity list for GitLab's Agent that logs real-time events such as connection and token status, and various SAST improvements including SAST execution policies and support for .NET 6.