Amazon has developed a method that automatically discovers machine learning model errors on particular types of input and provides a way to correct them. Defuse is a tool that the developers say can be used to train more robust models.

Apache Ignite has been updated with improvements including Change Data Capture (CDC), an Index Query API, and several vulnerability fixes. Ignite is a distributed database for high-performance computing with in-memory speed.

After faker.js was deliberately deleted by its owner Marak Squires the project is again available on npm under new management. The new GitHub repo is faker-js/faker and the project has seen a massive amount of activity in its first two weeks and appears to have a promising future ahead of it.

While 2021 was a difficult year due to the pandemic, it was also a year full of advancements in the field of AI. Louis Bouchard has compiled a great list with the best research papers that were published during the year.

IPython has been updated with improvements including code reformatting, ghost suggestions, and better tracebacks which highlight the error node. IPython 8 comes three years after the release of version 7.0

There is now an English version of a guide that goes through the considerations you have to make in order to migrate to PostgreSQL from another Database Management System.

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.