In the news this week Nikos Vaggalis reminds us that Advent of Code is now underway and that Hour of Code, now renamed Hour of AI to reflect the zeitgeist, is about to start. We also have news from re:Invent and there's a new release of Kotlin. 

A pilot scheme supported by Horizon Europe is investigating the use of AI and robot dogs to detect and mitigate wildfires. 

Apache NetBeans 28 has been released with improvements to Gradle 9 support, better handling of the Maven UI, and expanded JUnit integration.

Codacy has launched two new products to help control genAI coding.  AI Risk Hub and AI Reviewer form a code compliance suite that organizations can use for governance of AI-generated code and smart, context-aware code reviews. 

Microsoft is adding a "semantic intelligence layer" to Fabric to add  that elevates Fabric from a unified data platform to a unified intelligence platform. The announcement says the extra layer will turn an organization's data into "a live, structured, connected model of how your business operates". 

Hour Of Code has been renamed. This year and from now on it will be called "Hour Of AI", giving in to this AI-dictated era. Another indication that coding has shifted from a task of manual labor to one of automated generation. Code.org is a trend setter and crucial to kids' education relating to Computer Science, so the rebranding is highly significant.

This week in Las Vegas, Amazon has made several announcements at its annual user conference, re:Invent, including updates to AWS Transform, and the introduction of Lambda managed instances.

Google has launched a new Google Colab extension for Visual Studio Code. Colab is Google's platform for AI/ML development. 

Microsoft has announced support for more languages in Aspire. The .NET part of its name has also been dropped, and there's a new website rather than just the GitHub repository.

There's a  drop-in upgrade to Vite with additional features. The developers say Vite+ is a command-line developer tool you can install from npm, just like Vite itself.

It's Advent, the time of year when we countdown the days to Christmas having fun doing daily coding challenges. Advents, in the programming sense, are events hosting programming puzzles announced every day till Christmas, aimed at a variety of skill levels.

For its Octoverse event, GitHub recorded an interview with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. From it we learn about the origins of Python and its name and its role in the age of AI.

This week has been dominated by Black Friday - and the deals continue until Cyber Monday. So there's still time to take advantage of Scrimba's 35% for those upgrading to Pro, Coursera's 40% on annual subscriptions to Coursera Plus and Udacity's 55% off All AI & Tech Courses. Follow these links, those in I Programmer's articles and our display adverts so that we earn fees.

Fundación Biodiversa in Colombia has become the first pilot of Microsoft's Project SPARROW. SPARROW, developed by Microsoft's AI for Good Lab, is an AI-powered edge computing solution designed to monitor and protect wildlife in the most remote regions of the world.

A new course, thanks to Andrew Ng and his partnership with Box, that shows how you can leverage MCP servers to offload otherwise laborious and custom-made work.

Kotlin 2.3 is available now as a release candidate. The new version adds a new checker for unused return values, and changes to context-sensitive resolution. The release candidate adds support for Java 25, and improved interop through Swift export. 

Google has announced the public preview of BigQuery-managed AI functions. The three new functions let developers use generative AI for common analytical tasks directly within their SQL queries. 

It could have been good news that Qualcomm had taken over Arduino. Adding its financial muscle and processor resources to the very popular development environment could have, and still could, produce something rewarding for everyone. But Arduinophiles are panicking over some changes to the licensing.