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Insider's Guide to the Java Web Developer Nanodegree - 2
Nikos Vaggalis

I Programmer team member Nikos Vaggalis enrolled in the inaugural sessions of Udacity's new Java Web Developer Nanodegree program and is charting his progress through this adventure of coding and learning. This second installment is on Spring Boot Basics.

Desktop computer users take the mouse for granted. But where did it come from and how does it work?

News and Comment

Mozilla Layoffs and Change of Focus
12 Aug | Sue Gee

Blaming the impact of COVID-19, CEO Mitchell Baker announced yesterday that Mozilla is laying off 250 employees, a quarter of its workforce, and shuttering operations in Taiwan. Another 60 Mozillians are changing roles.

Microsoft Research Improves AI In Gaming

12 Aug | Kay Ewbank

Microsoft Research has announced several improvements to the use of reinforcement learning in gaming. The improvements include the development of  game agents that learn how to collaborate in teams with human players. 

Edge Gains Browser Market Share While Firefox Flounders
11 Aug | Sue Gee

Edge now has over eight percent of the desktop browser market, gaining half a percentage point between March and July 2020. Chrome, however,has fared even better with over a three and a half percentage increase, giving it a share of over 70%. 

Project ACRN has released version 2 of its IoT hypervisor. Supported by the Linux Foundation, ACRN is an open-source, lightweight hypervisor that supports IoT functions including graphics, imaging, and audio in less under 40K lines of code. 

Microsoft has announced Open Service Mesh (OSM) an open-source lightweight and extensible cloud-native service mesh that runs on Kubernetes. A proposal to donate OSM to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has already been submitted.

Julia has been updated with improvements including struct layouts and allocation optimizations, and stabilization of the multithreading API.

More people taking photos all the time than ever before. What is more we all tend to take the same shots whenever we are near something "touristy". A new technique can put these crowdsourced photos together into a single image, capturing the many viewpoints.

More than two dozen human genes have been renamed so that they can be typed into a spreadsheet without being formatted as dates. New guidelines for standardized gene naming explicitly allow for renaming genes to avoid problems with data handling.

The OpenJDK team is getting close to its goal of moving the source code of open source Java to GitHub. The plan is to move the repos from Mercurial to GitHub by early September.

The latest version of Kotlin has reached release candidate status. Version 1.4 has a preview of extra support for Node.JS and improved IDE support.

js1024 is the continuation of the legendary js1k JavaScript golfing competition which ended last year and like its predecessor is planned to be an annual contest. The winners of the first one  have just been announced.