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Featured Articles

It's a right of passage - you have to draw a 3D cube to prove you can! It also needs a deep understanding of WebGL.  This extract from Ian Elliot's book on JavaScript Graphics looks at how to use typed arrays to access graphic data.

Have you ever wanted to open a Windows console in the middle of an application that doesn't usually support one? This article explains exactly how to master the console.

Programming News and Views

Steve Klabnik, longtime contributor to the Rust language, is working on his own language, called Rue. This is a hobby project being done for fun and to speed up development Steve's co-worker is Claude, Anthropic's AI Assistant.

A very nice analysis of Linux commits reveals some interesting things about bugs - and how long they take to fix isn't the most interesting.

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.

Book Watch

Subtitled "Master data science competitions with machine learning, GenAI, and LLMs", this book brings together tips and techniques for excelling in Kaggle competitions and data science projects. Three Kaggle Grandmasters, Luca Massaron, Bojan Tunguz and Konrad Banachewicz,  guide the reader through modeling strategies and share hard-earned insights accumulated over years of competition. This new edition includes fresh content and new chapters on Kaggle Models, time series, and Generative AI competitions.

This book shows how to use advanced functional programming principles, practical domain-driven design techniques, and production-ready Elixir code to build scalable, complex systems from simple, reusable components. Joseph Koski explains how to combine advanced functional programming concepts with production-ready Elixir and proven domain-driven design techniques to write cleaner, more thoughtful software.

In this book Alan Simpson shows with simple explanations of how you can use Python to automatically wrangle data files, manage media files, create shortcuts, find and organize web data, and even analyze social media for trends. Readers will improve their skills, expand their productivity, and speed up the process of generating data-driven insights. They'll also learn to enhance their Python automations with AI, for workflows that are faster and smarter.

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