Claude Scientific Skills give Claude super powers, not just on coding, but about any science. We try them out to see what's on offer.

The Android developer team has announced that Android Studio Otter 2 Feature Drop is stable. Feature Drop is the term used for updates that are built on top of the IntelliJ platform updates, and follow soon after each new "animal" release - in this case Otter.

For me 2025 was the year of the Espressif ESP32 - well it extended back into 2024. By the end of the year I was convinced that for the sort of IoT projects that I want to do around my own home the ESP32 S3 is the single board microcontroller of choice and I heartily recommend it to any programmer wanting to get into the IoT scene.  

Apple can't seem to catch a break at the moment. It keeps appealing and it keeps losing. Now its appeal against an injunction that called for it to reduce fees for external in app purchases has been rejected.

In cooperation with the Nebius AI cloud platform, JetBrains has launched a set of ten free courses for developers that demonstrate how to incorporate AI in their workflow to become 10X productive.

Docker has announced an upgrade to Docker Desktop with improvements including a new Dynamic MCP feature. 

Linux maintainers attending the Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit have said that Rust in the Linux kernel should no longer be treated as experimental, but rather as a core part of the kernel.

The concept of hardened images has been picking up lately. The logic behind them is to address the issues arising from running container images.

Time Magazine has named the Architects of AI as its 2025 Person of the Year, depicting on its cover eight individuals who are seen to have driven the rapid and consequential development of artificial intelligence.

This week saw the publication of Master The ESP32: WiFi, by Harry Fairhead and Mike James. Our chosen first extract is from its final chapter and is about ESP Now, a facility for flexible peer-to-peer networking mode available for use with all ESP32 devices. We also introduce a new News section - Viewpoint. In the inaugural item, Mike James asks "How Can You Not Be Impressed By AI"?

PHP 8.5 has been released with an extension supporting secure URI and URL parsing, a new a pipe operator and persistent cURL handles. 

The holiday season is a good time to learn about computers - you have the time. But where to start? Our advice is to ignore the pudding and go for a Pi.

Shuttle has launched Neptune, a universal AI platform engineer that understands code, generates a deterministic infrastructure spec, provisions cloud resources, and integrates with AI coding tools and IDEs. 

Amazon has released Nova Forge, a new service that developers can use to build their own frontier models using Nova. Nova Forge customers can start their development from early model checkpoints, blend their datasets with Amazon Nova-curated training data, and host their custom models securely on AWS. 

There is a big backlash against AI at the moment and given the threat it poses to jobs. this can hardly be an unexpected response. However, much of the backlash focuses on how useless and unimpressive it is. This is crazy. AI has achieved so much of its goal in such a short time, this is an entirely untenable position.

A new Advent calendar had joined those for Java, Kotlin and Rust. We now have  Advent of AI, a series of AI engineering challenges from Goose, that is already underway.

LangGrant has announced its LEDGE MCP server that enables LLMs to reason across multiple enterprise databases and generate multi-step analytics plans without transmitting raw data to the model. The system works entirely with metadata and schema context.

Today, December 9th 2025, is the 119th anniversary of the birth of Grace Hopper. Her concern for teaching young people is why Computer Science Education Week and the Hour of Code, now the Hour of AI, are timed to coincide with her birthday. Her legacy also extends into other areas.