Amazon has announced the results of a recent Alexa Skills Challenge, run on Devpost, with the theme "Tech for Good". Even if you didn't compete it is instructive to see the projects that were selected as winners.

The eagerly awaited Raspberry Pi 3A+ is now on sale in time for the holidays. It has a smaller form factor than the 3B+, which is priced at $35. These two Model 3+ Raspberry Pis are the last ever of the "classic" Raspberry Pi range.

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 two full length articles - an in-depth look at PHP Control Structures 1 - if and else and the first extract, on Condition Variables, from Harry Fairhead's soon-to-be-published book on C.

A new release of Scylla DB has been released with support for Hybrid Transactional / Analytical Processing (HTAP) via concurrent OLTP and OLAP. The open source NoSQL database also now has feature parity with Apache Cassandra. 

Coursera and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have joined forces to provide a course that introduces the core services and infrastructure of ASW. Through demonstrations participants will learn how to use and configure AWS services to deploy and host a cloud-native application.

Developers using Visual Studio Code to write in Java can now make use of Microsoft's AI-assisted IntelliSense extension. The extension has until now been limited to use with Python and C#.

Tell the Firefox DevTools team about your biggest CSS and web design issues by taking part in its Design Tools survey. Mozilla wants to hear from both web developers and designers, and not just Firefox users; devs who use Chrome, Safari, Edge, and IE users are encouraged to join in.

With the Android Dev Summit just over it is a good time to reconsider where we are in the light of what was, and was not, announced.

There's a new facility on Complexity Explorer that lets you browse over 700 Complex Systems Science Resources. This will help anyone wanting to learn more locate relevant courses, tutorials, videos and web content at levels from beginner to technically advanced.

There's a new version of Dremio, an open-source project designed to give business analysts and data scientists a way to explore and analyze data no matter what its structure or size. New in this release are a data catalog, prioritized workload management, and Kubernetes support.

Mobile app developers need to react quickly to reviews that reflect dissatisfaction. Statisticians at Cornell have found a faster way for developers to respond, with a new text-mining method that aggregates and parses customer reviews in one step.

The Free Software Foundation has added the Commons Clause to its list of non-free licenses among a number of recent updates to its licensing materials. Other changes clarify the GNU GPL position on translating code into another language and how to handle projects that combine code under multiple licenses.  

Microsoft has added new features to the Python extension for Visual Studio Code that can be used to work with data interactively in Visual Studio Code. The feature can be used to explore data sets or to incorporate machine learning models into applications.

Facebook has had a huge impact on the lives of its users, connecting individuals to their family and friends as never before. As time passes so do people, and there will come a point when more Facebook profiles will belong to deceased users than to living ones.

Two AI avatars that can read news in English and Mandarin were unveiled last week. This adds TV News Anchor to the long list of jobs in which machines will soon replace humans.

Every day I Programmer has new material - book reviews, articles and news - written by programmers, for programmers. Each week our digest gives a handy summary of the latest content. While you are here there's plenty more to explore, whatever topics  you are interested in.

The UK Government's Department for Education has announced an investment of £84 million to improve the teaching of computing and drive pupil participation in computer science with the launch of the National Centre for Computing Education.

There's an updated version of the Ring UI controls for use when building web applications in JetBrains. The updated version handles light and dark environments as well as supporting CSS properties and modules.