News

Vision Mobile Reveals Latest Developer Landcape  Wednesday 16 March

There were almost 22,000 respondents to Vision Mobile's latest Developer Economics survey. The 10th Edition of the State of the Developer National, published today, provides the results of what has to be the largest developer survey conducted to date.

WebAssembly Takes A Big Step Towards Being Real  Wednesday 16 March

WebAssembly will be the biggest change in web development since JavaScript was introduced and now we have proof positive that it is moving towards becoming something real. Microsoft, Google and Mozilla have all released compatible previews of WebAssembly and a game you can actually run.

Python 3 Gains Support and Enthusiasm  Wednesday 16 March

Despite the fact that it only has four years until end of life, Python 2.7 continues to cling on, with downloads far in excess of those for the newer Python 3.x branch. Looking at the situation from a different angle a recent survey concludes that by mid-May Python 3 will be better supported than Python 2.

AlphaGo Beats Lee Sedol Final Score 4-1  Tuesday 15 March

After winning the fifth and final game in the Deep Mind Challenge, AlphaGo emerged victorious against Lee Se-dol, a 9-dan human Go player. AlphaGo now has an honorary 9-dan ranking.

MariaDB Enterprise Updated  Tuesday 15 March

The forthcoming MariaDB Enterprise Spring 2016 release will have improved data security and high availability. 

Microsoft Joins Eclipse  Monday 14 March

Microsoft is joining the Eclipse Foundation,  the open source community for developers, as a Solutions member, one rank down from the main Strategic members such as IBM, Google and Oracle. 

(Pizza) Pi Day  Monday 14 March

Pi Day is the 14th of March every year because 3.14 is the start of the infinite sequence of the digits of Pi. This year, to celebrate it, there are some math questions for you set by the famous John H. Conway.

Skillset - Pass Your Certification Exam  Monday 14 March

In an already overcrowded e-learning market, what is being offered by many platforms is more or less the same. Skillset is a platform with a different proposition; that of focusing entirely on preparing candidates for taking an exam in one of the popular certifications. 

AlphaGo Has Lost A Game - Score Stands At 3-1  Sunday 13 March

AlphaGo's human opponent Lee Se-dol has won the fourth game in the Deep Mind Challenge, proving that man can still outwit machine. Here's our updated story on this groundbreaking match.

See Google's Car Crash!  Saturday 12 March

The recent news of the first car crash involving a Google self-driving car was met with understanding - it hit a bus, who hasn't. Now we have a video of the event and it isn't quite as clear cut where the blame lies. 

Google Summer Of Code 2016  Friday 11 March

Google Summer of Code, the global program in which student developers are matched with open sources organisations to spend the summer coding on projects with guidance from a mentor has become a really important part of Open Source. This year sees the introduction of a new website and student applications open on March 14.

Scrape Away From KimonoLabs  Friday 11 March

A recent startup, KimonoLabs, established in 2014,  set out to change the scraping landscape. Its recently announced takeover by Palantir will shut down its data scraping service. Kimono has produced a desktop app into which devs can import its APIs before the end of March.

Android N Developer Preview Is Out  Thursday 10 March

Just as the paint is drying on Android M - for Marshmallow - the developer preview of Android N is available and there are a few radical changes.

Java Guru Quits Oracle  Thursday 10 March

Oracle's Java EE evangelist has quit having lost faith in the way Oracle is dealing with Java developers.

R Tools for Visual Studio  Thursday 10 March

Microsoft has announced R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS), providing support for what is quickly proving to be the most popular statistical/ data analysis language currently in use. A preview version is already available.

The Core

Why AlphaGo Changes Everything  Monday 14 March

We have a breakthrough moment in AI; one that most experts thought would take at least another ten years. An AI system has taught itself to play Go, one of the more subtle and human of games, and it has beaten the human world champion. 

Babbage's Bag

The Fundamentals of Pointers  Thursday 10 March

Despite the fact that pointers have been long regarded as "dangerous" they are still deeply embedded in the way we do things. Much of the difficulty in using them stems from not understanding where they originate from. Pointers are a sophisticated abstraction that wraps some fundamentals of assembly language.