Lambda School is partnering with Y-Combinator founder Jessica Livingston to help more women in the US learn how to program, and ultimately to increase the number of women startup founders.

To celebrate the 334th anniversary of the birth of Johann Sebastian Bach, Google produced an interactive doodle that lets you write a short melody and have it harmonized in the style of Bach.  

Week-by-week I Programmer has new articles and book reviews, written by programmers, for programmers. We also cover breaking news stories and recently published books. In this week's articles Harry Fairhead looks at Shifts and Rotates in C and, to mark Pi Day, Mike James explores Non-Computable And Other Numbers.

The results for Google Code-in (GCI) are in, with the judges reporting big increases in entrants from Austria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Taiwan. Code-in is Google's competition for 13-17 year olds for writing open source software, used by some as a stepping stone to Google Summer of Code.

Attention was drawn yesterday to the mess that Microsoft is making migrating the MSDN blogs to their new platform, when Eric Lippert tweeted that his blog had been taken down. Although his blog has now been restored, much of what was a rich archive is still missing and what remains difficult to navigate.

NVIDIA is making its Real-time Ray Tracing available on existing GTX graphics cards, including some older models. NVIDIA is also introducing GameWorks RTX, a set of tools and rendering techniques that help game developers add ray tracing to games.

Ecma TC39, the JavaScript Standards Committee, has launched a website for following updates to the JavaScript specification. The idea is to make it easier to find info and documentation on updates to the JavaScript spec.

Rust is one of the more remarkable new languages that has a reasonably large following. Oxide, an experimental formalized programming language close to source-level Rust, but with fully-annotated types, highlights its special approach to variables and assignment. 

Google's Stadia, its subscription-based cloud gaming service, was formally announced during Google's keynote at the 2019  Game Developers Conference. Stadia will deliver access to games on any screen - TV, PC, laptop, tablet and phone - via the Chrome browser and requires no additional hardware, although Google has developed its own controller.

An interactive course on Educative's platform exploring the underlying principles of FP in Javascript with aid of the small RambdaJS library.

The Linux Foundation has launched a new project aimed at incubating open source cybersecurity tools. The Red Team Project's main goal is to make open source software safer to use. 

Startups characterized as being concerned with AI attract 15% to 50% more funding than other technology firms. However, some 40% of firms classified AI startups in Europe lacked evidence of using AI.

A network for Go developers has been launched by a combination of the Go community leaders at GoBridge and Google. The Go Developer Network (GDN) is designed to provide a single place for information on Go.

The AI Driving Olympics (AI-DO) is a competition focused around AI for self-driving cars. It made its debut in December 2018, at the machine learning conference NeurIPS and now teams are preparing for the second edition to be held at ICRA 2019 in May. As before it will be run using the Duckietown platform.

More than 800 million devices are now running Windows 10. This milestone wasn't announced with a fanfare but was included on Microsoft's “By the Numbers” site, a link that was then tweeted by Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's Corporate VP for Modern Life and Devices.

This digest gives links to all our news coverage, the week's Book Review and additions to Book Watch. We start with the feature articles - an extract from Android Programming in Kotlin: Starting With An App in which Mike James considers State Managment, and, from Ian Elliot, the answer to the question What Exactly Is A First Class Function - And Why You Should Care?

.. but not necessarily the one you were expecting. In a continued embrace of open source Microsoft has placed the code for Windows Calc on GitHub - the UWP version that is.

The GraphQL Foundation has announced a collaboration with the Joint Development Foundation, and new members including Neo4j have joined.