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Featured Articles

Public key cryptography is the glamour but symmetric encryption does most of the work. Find out how to use AES and more. This is an extract from our latest book on the ESP in C.

In the field of business computing one man can be credited with inventing automatic data processing, but these days his name is hardly known. You might even call Herman Hollerith, the forgotten giant of computing.

Programming News and Views

The Rust Foundation conducted its 10th annual survey between November 17th and December 17th, 2025. It collected 7,156 completed responses, a slight decrease from the previous year's 7,310 and the results are a close match to those in 2024.

If there is one thing I hate about Python, it is the mess that is enviroment control. As far as possible, I try to ignore it until it cannot be ignored any longer and then I wish I could continue to ignore it instead of playing a game of where is pip. The good news it that Microsoft might have the solution.

JetBrains, creators and major supporters of Kotlin, has released an extension for Visual Studio Code that can be used to convert Java code to Kotlin. The extension uses LLMs to provide "idiomatic conversion" suggestions to help Java developers migrate to Kotlin.

SQL, yes that old horse, is still going. SQL has been the data access standard for decades. It levels the playing field, easily integrates with other systems and accelerates delivery. Here's a  beginner-friendly course on SQL for data engineering.

Apache has released Geode 2.0, which the developers describe as one of the most significant modernization efforts in the Apache Geode project’s history, delivering comprehensive upgrades across the Java platform, build system, enterprise APIs, and core framework integrations.

The first beta of Android 17 has been released with improvements to camera and media capabilities, new tools for optimizing connectivity, and expanded profiles for companion devices. This release is also the first in Google's move away from the traditional Developer Preview model to the "Android Canary program".

Herman Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York on February 29th, 1860. So today is the closest we come to the 166th anniversary of his birth. An engineer and inventor, he devised a highly efficient punch card tabulator and formed a company that is still in existence today as IBM.

Supporters and long-term contributors to MySQL have written an open letter to Oracle setting out their concerns over the future of the open source database, and suggesting that the way forward is to establish a non-profit Foundation to support the MySQL community.

It has been claimed many times that modern CSS is Turing complete - that is, it is a full programming language that you can use to do anything. Now we have more proof - a web page with nothing but CSS that runs x86 assembler.

PlanetScale has launched a hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that connects its database platform directly to AI development tools like Claude and Cursor.
So what can you do with it?

XAML.io has been updated to add support for Nuget packages directly in the browser, along with code sharing via URL. XAML.io is a free, browser-based XAML designer and C# editor built on top of the open-source OpenSilver framework.

Book Watch

This book is a practical, no-nonsense guide to Rust for developers who want to write fast, modern systems code. Following the In Easy Steps colorful format, Richard Urwin starts by showing how to install and configure Rust and VSCode, then explains the language through working examples. The book focuses on clarity and correctness, making it ideal for practicing programmers who want to adopt Rust with confidence.

In this book Chisom Nwokwu delivers a beginner-friendly handbook for everyone interested in the fundamentals of data engineering. It offers a roadmap on a seemingly complicated and intimidating subject, and addresses the topics most likely to cause a beginning data engineer to stumble, clearly explaining key concepts in an accessible way.

In this book Raiford Guins examines the history of PONG, one of the longest- and most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as Android or iOS app, hosted at freepong.org and the Internet Archive, and even released as A Tiny Game of Pong for the Apple Watch.

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