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Featured Articles

As a developer, how do you choose a hosting service for a new project? Harry Fairhead relates his experience with Cherry Servers, explaining his decision making, outlining deployment and revealing an unexpected hitch from having been with AWS.

You may never have heard of a Bloom Filter, but this ingenious algorithm is used in Google's BigTable database to avoid wasting time fruitlessly searching for data that isn't there.

Programming News and Views

Published this week, the 2026 Stanford HAI AI Index shows that AI models are achieving breakthrough results in science and complex reasoning. AI’s workforce disruption has now moved from prediction to reality, hitting young workers first.

What you will hear about C++ 26, the latest standard, depends very much on who you ask. Not even committed C++ programmers are happy about everything that has been added, and less than committed C++ programmers are aghast at the extra complexities being added.

The headline of the TIOBE Index for April 2026 is "Rust's rise shows signs of slowing". In the subsequent analysis the suggestion is that this is due to the language being difficult to learn.

Microsoft has released an open-source Agent Governance Toolkit ahead of the forthcoming regulations.

An extension that adds language support for Swift to Visual Studio Code is now available on the Open VSX Registry, the open source registry hosted by the Eclipse Foundation.

GitHub has added Rubber Duck support to Copilot CLI. The support is in experimental mode. Rubber Duck uses a second model from a different AI family to act as an independent reviewer, assessing the agent’s plans and work at the moments where feedback matters most.

Co-founder and CTO of Databricks, Matei Zaharia, is the recipient of the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing for his "visionary development of distributed data systems and computing infrastructure, which has enabled large-scale machine learning, analytic, and AI at global scale."

In a move that shows it does take notice of community feedback, Stack Overflow is "retiring" the beta site it launched at the end of February in face of an overwhelmingly negative response.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Coolest Projects 2026 competition is now to entrants under 18 worldwide. According to the Foundation, Coolest Projects is a place where young creators share the brilliant things they've made using digital technology, from first-ever Scratch projects and coding for fun experiments to ambitious robotics builds.

Amazon has released S3 Files, which makes S3 buckets accessible as file systems. S3 Files provides a shared file system that connects any AWS compute resource directly with your data in Amazon S3.

The release of JDK 26 marks a significant milestone in the Java ecosystem, introducing ten JDK Enhancement Proposals that prioritize performance, security, and modernization. Key technical updates include the introduction of HTTP/3 support, significant throughput improvements for the G1 Garbage Collector, and the final removal of the long-deprecated Applet API.

Book Watch

Subtitled "How to get reliable results with React, Next.js, and Vercel",  this book provides step-by-step guides showing how to build sites and applications that take advantage of large language models (LLMs) like GPT, Claude, and Llama. Written especially for web developers comfortable with React or Next.js, in this book Theo Despoudis introduces the tools and techniques needed to add sophisticated AI features like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), document summarization, and chatbots to your web-based projects.

This book is a practical guide to Ghidra, the tool developed through more than a decade of research within the NSA. Kara Nance and Chris Eagle explain how Ghidra was created to address some of the most challenging reverse engineering problems faced by the US government. With its open source release, this formerly restricted tool suite is now freely available to cybersecurity practitioners, researchers, and students worldwide. In addition to introducing core reverse engineering techniques for software and malware analysis, the book explains Ghidra’s key components, features, and support for extensibility and collaborative analysis. Beginning with the fundamentals and progressing to more advanced workflows, you’ll learn how to use Ghidra effectively and adapt it to new challenges.

This book looks at 'serious games', everything from educational, therapeutic, and rehabilitative games to games for social, scientific, and cultural impact. While the field is flourishing, the practice of actually designing such games is not readily understood. Filling this gap, the book provides a comprehensive guide to the design and development process of this unique interdisciplinary field.

Magy Seif El-Nasr, Elin Carstensdottir, and Michael John guide readers through a user-centric design process that includes methods to define the game’s goal, understand its target audience, design accordingly, and evaluate outcomes. Featuring diverse case studies, actionable advice, and interviews with  game practitioners and industry leaders.

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