Amazon has provided a free self-paced skill-building course that offers step-by-step guidance on how to build a high-quality Alexa skill from start to finish.It has also announced the expansion of In-Skill Purchasing, making Alexa a more attractive platform from the point of view of any developer wanting to make money.

Python is the "batteries included" language - but is it? A recent heated talk at the Python Language Summit accused Python of having leaking batteries and suddenly the core developers are considering removing things from the standard library. What is the fuss all about?

OpenCV has initiated a Kickstarter to fund the creation of online AI courses, two in computer vision and a third on Deep Learning with PyTorch. The goal of $5,000 was quickly surpassed - and it looks as though it could even go beyond $500,000 before it closes on June 13th.

When Oracle abandoned NetBeans, many thought that the future looked bleak, but now more than two years on it has graduated to being a full Apache project. What does the future hold?

Kotlin is everywhere, well at least for Android. This new Udacity course shows how developing for the platform has radically changed.

Google, following the political line, has revoked Huawei's Android licence. Given Huawei has plans to be the biggest phone maker in the world, what does this mean for the Android community?

Endless is a Linux distribution that comes with all the usual office and entertainment apps. It also includes a range of games involving visual coding with blocks or JavaScript, designed to kick-start kids into coding.

In the spirit of sharing interesting items that we stumble across, here is a video of a lecture delivered by Peter Norvig as the latest Microsoft Research Distinguished Lectures Series.

Not everyone is going to be able to afford a Spot Mini when it becomes available, but a Stanford Doggo is much more within reach. The only snag is that "some assembly is required". See Doggo in action!

If you want to get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer, our weekly digest summarizes the articles, book reviews,and news written each day by programmers, for programmers. This week, for fun, we also have a coding puzzle.

Google has added three new free courses on machine learning topics aimed at researchers, developers and students.They are on Clustering, Recommendation Systems and Testing and Debugging and take learners beyond the Machine Learning Crash Course.

A Reverse Engineering workshop for absolute beginners comes from cybercrime researcher Ophir Harpaz. It is available, for free, online.

Microsoft Graph data connect is now generally available. The announcement was made at this year's Build conference. Graph is a unified programmability model and APIs that can be used to access data within Office 365, Dynamics 365, Enterprise Mobility and Security, Windows 10, and Azure Active Directory.

GitHub has announced GitHub Package Registry, a software package hosting service that allows you to host your packages and code in one place. Currently in limited private beta, it lets you host software packages privately or publicly and use them as dependencies in your projects. 

In October of last year we reported on Apple's appeal to the Supreme Court Of The United States to dismiss a lawsuit claiming that the App Store is a monopoly. SCOTUS has now granted permission for the suit to proceed and Apple is almost sure to lose. This could be the end of the era of the walled garden of app stores.

Despite long talks, Oracle has imposed requirements on the Eclipse Foundation that mean even the Java trademarks in the open source version won't be feasible.

At Build last week, Microsoft  announced a new open-source project for React Native developers wanting to target Windows and Windows developers wanting to climb aboard the React Native bandwagon. React Native for Windows is on GitHub under a MIT License.

You can't expect a clear statement from Microsoft on discontinuing any software, but it looks as if the push to make us all move to UWP apps is over. The desktop future is classic Win32 and .NET.