It may be the depths of winter, but now is the time for Open Source organizations to be preparing their applications for Google Summer of Code. After a record-breaking year in 2025, Google is hoping to attract around 30 new mentoring organizations in 2026.

The latest update of Visual Studio Code has added Agent Skills, which developers can use to provide domain-specific knowledge and teach new skills to the GitHub Copilot coding agent. 

Bun 1.3 has been released with improvements including support for frontend development and increased database support. 

Supabase has released Vector Buckets, specialized storage containers optimized for vector data. This is welcome as it expands your options for storing vectors. 

Announced this week at CES 2026, the SMART Brick is designed to power a new LEGO ecosystem called SMART Play. Will this be user-programmable and provide a replacement for the Mindstorms range of robotics kits that LEGO discontinued?

A contest with a first prize of $50,000 launched on January 7, 2026. It is the second part of the Stanford RNA 3D Folding challenge and has already 102 teams actively participating.

XAML Studio has been made open source thanks to help from the .NET Foundation which has adopted it as a seed project.

Yet another provider jumps on the hardened image bandwagon. But since it's Docker, the main player in the container space, this is very important.

Ruby 4 has been released with new features including a new just-in-time compiler called ZJIT and an experimental sandbox called Ruby Box. The new version also adds features to the experimental parallel execution mechanism, Ractor. As is traditional, Ruby 4.0 was released on December 25th. This also marked its 30th anniversary. 

As we enter the New Year, you can rely on I Programmer to sift through the news to find stories of interest to anyone with an interest in code, data and, of course in 2026, AI and what we can expect of it. 

For the second time in three years, C# has been awarded the accolade TIOBE Programming Language of the Year by virtue of have achieved the largest year-on-year increase in its ranking on the TIOBE Index.

The judges may keep telling the walled gardeners that they have to free things up and throw a few doors open, but they in turn keep finding ways to keep their walls as high as they can get away with.

Coursera is running a  global New Year promotion offering 50% discount on Cousera Plus for new subscribers. For small businesses in the US and Europe there's is a similar 50% discount for "Coursera for Teams". So what better time to discover the latest certifications to boost your resume.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced the release of Kubernetes 1.35, with improvements including vertical scaling via in-place pod resize. Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open source platform for managing containerized workloads and services.

HuggingFace just made the process of fine-tuning open source LLMs much easier through the use of Skills.

A high-severity vulnerability affecting MongoDB Server that was identified last month is now being actively exploited, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Australian Cyber Security Centre.