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Featured Articles

The Uno Q has a full I2C controller, but the Arduino Core doesn't let you use many of its facilities. The solution is to use Zephyr functions  and Harry Fairhead shows you how.  This is an extract from his recent book on the Arduino Uno Q.

Many programmers are confused by the range of variations there are on the humble variable - mainly because the idea is so basic that we just "pick it up" as we go along. This explanation doesn't cover all the possibilities, but enough of them for you to understand the rest.

Programming News and Views

C# used to be my favourite language - it's a logical and safe object-oriented language, but this isn't stopping Microsoft from presenting ways of making it safer. Wasn't it was safe by design?

Not long ago, a Computer Science degree was a golden ticket granting admission to a secure and interesting career. Recently the drop in tech hiring and rising graduate unemployment have raised doubts as to the continuing value of a university education in Computer Science.

The full materials of the recent Stanford CME296 lecture series, which constitutes a comprehensive technical deep dive into generative modeling, are now available to all and for free.

The Lemonade SDK has been updated to add support for Nvidia CUDA.  The new release adds CUDA support for Windows and Linux, along with Vulkan support for Windows and Linux. It also adds a native Prometheus endpoint for real time stats monitoring.

Vercel has launched Deepsec, an open-source security tool designed to find complex vulnerabilities in large codebases using autonomous AI agents.

Aspire 13.4 has been released with general availability of the TypeScript AppHost, and improvements to the Resource commands.

Be amazed by the range of novel movements made by Atari Lab's humanoid robot resulting from use of MotionDisco, a framework that uses LLMs to "discover" movements required to perform specific tasks rather than rely on teleoperation or mimicking human demonstrations.

A new research paper from Google has some very interesting ideas about using AI effectively in software development based on experiences by the author, Dave Rensin, Distinguished Engineer at Google.

The Rust Leadership Council has launched the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund with all proceeds to be directly used to support Rust Project maintainers, through existing programs and a new Maintainer in Residence program.

Aurora DSQL is Amazon's serverless, fully managed, distributed relational database service optimized for transactional (OLTP) workloads.  A significant new capability is the Change Data Capture (CDC) preview, which streams real-time database modifications directly to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.

A preview release version of GitHub Enterprise Local has been announced. The GitHub team says it provides devops for sovereign and private cloud environments. It consists of GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) running on Azure Local infrastructure.

Book Watch

The ESP family of single board computers from Chinese manufacturer Espressif combine low-cost with strong performance making them ideal candiates for IoT projects, both prototying and full scale production. This book covers the C2, C3, C5, C6 and the H2, all of which are based on RISC-V architecture and sets out to reveal what you can do with the Expressif's ESP32's GPIO lines together with widely used sensors, servos and motors and ADCs. Harry Fairhead and Mike James show how the ESP32 RISC V family all have many different subsystems that make them more powerful than you might at first think. You can use them for simple applications because they are cheap, but you can also use them for more sophisticated applications because they are capable.

Wolfram Language takes a fundamentally different approach to computation than most programming languages. This book of lecture notes—based on a series of lectures field-tested with students and professionals at universities, commercial organizations and government institutions—cuts straight to the conceptual core of the functional programming paradigm.

Richard Gaylord's notes build through the language's most powerful features: unified expression structure; the term-rewriting evaluation model; the full pattern-matching system; and higher-order functions like Apply, Map, Nest and Fold. Every concept is grounded in carefully chosen, working code examples. The book closes with four distinct implementations of Conway's Game of Life, each illuminating a different dimension of the language's expressive power.

In 1985, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer, walked out of his company's headquarters, driven from the very corporation he had created. For twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, Jobs wandered the business wilderness with his new venture, NeXT. It was a period of spectacular failures, near-bankruptcy, and brutal humiliation. But out of this crucible of defeat emerged the man who would go on to oversee the creation of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming Apple into the most valuable company on earth.

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