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Featured Articles

As an applications programmer, you may have dismissed or overlooked containerization as not being relevant. Wrong. Containers are useful in every programming environment. The problem is becoming familiar with their quirks and idiosyncrasies. Help is at hand.

There has been a long tendency in the development of programming to try to turn it into something else— mathematics, logic, engineering, anything as long as we can get away from programming. Why, when what makes software different from all of the above is clearly its strength and not its weakness? In this era of vibe coding, this is even more apparent, and we cannot judge software projects like other projects.

Programming News and Views

Students are abandoning traditional computer science courses, choosing instead dedicated AI tracks and core engineering fields. We look at why this is happening and what it actually means.

The Eclipse Foundation, along with 17 other organizations, has launched the Sovereign AI Foundation. The new foundation is a vendor-neutral initiative designed to help member organizations navigate AI dependencies and make more informed decisions about the technologies on which they rely. It is one of the first bodies to consider the importance of digital sovereignty to both enterprises and nation [ ... ]

We look at a Microsoft Learn course that provides a comprehensive introduction to artificial intelligence using Azure and the Foundry platform.

Today LangGrant, formerly known as Windocks, is launching the Enterprise Reasoning Initiative, a fully open source project to create a safety mechanism for Enterprise AI.

Amazon Aurora DSQL now lets you add foreign key constraints to new and existing tables. Aurora DSQL is a serverless, distributed SQL database with PostgreSQL compatibility and active-active multi-Region availability.

The latest edition of Visual Studio Code is available with more support to keep agents working in your project's development environment, more flexibility for Codex sessions, and assistance on keeping completed sessions organized.

Chinese robot manufacturer UBTECH has officially commissioned its Industrial Humanoid Robot Super Smart Factory in Liuzhou, Guangxi. Covering 14,000 square meters, the  plant is designed to operate at an unprecedented scale, rolling off a completed industrial humanoid once every 10 minutes, a rate made possible by a highly automated process.

Robotic Rabbits are being used to fight back against invasive Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades. The robotic rabbits are used to attract the pythons, which can then be removed by specialist python hunters.

We take a look at an independent conference that checks the state of software engineering, computer science education and industry culture amidst the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.

MariaDB has announced the general availability of MariaDB Community Server 13.0. The company says this version pushes further into Oracle compatibility, gives developers a new way to retrieve data from UPDATE statements, and gives DBAs finer-grained tools for observability, query tuning, and backup and recovery.

XAML.io has been updated with the addition of a full coding agent, giving it the ability to turn a text prompt into a complete C#/XAML application.

Book Watch

This book invites you to step off the beaten path and explore interesting, unfamiliar, and even exotic algorithms that will challenge your perspective and elevate your code. Language designer Eric Lippert, who has been on the design and/or implementation and/or specification teams for Visual Basic, JavaScript, VBScript, C#, Hack, and Bean Machine, guides the reader with a conversational approach, providing beautifully practical examples that highlight the recurring patterns behind stubborn coding problems.

In this book, Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi examine the illusions that plague every software organization. Using tools from statistical process control, systems thinking, and economic theory, they show how to identify real problems and find the levers that create lasting change. Each chapter delivers practical techniques. Learn to spot critical illusions that derail delivery, build causal diagrams that reveal system dynamics, and uncover hidden connections that make obvious solutions backfire. See how to separate signal from noise, frame problems as testable hypotheses, visualize trade-offs as continuums, build cultures that learn instead of repeating mistakes, and ultimately choose the right path forward given your context. Plus, “Better in 30 Minutes” exercises let you practice immediately.

In this book, Ahmed Siddiqui takes you inside the payments revolution happening quietly underneath every tap, click, and card-not-present transaction you make. Billed as Part Two of the Anatomy of the Swipe series, this standalone book covers device tokenization, merchant loyalty, buy now pay later, earned wage access, crypto cards, agentic banking, and the one card that can do the work of many.

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