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Featured Articles

The GPIO driver in Linux used to be GPIO sysfs, but no longer. Now it's the GPIO character driver. Find out how to handle events.

Where you store data is as important to the computer as the data itself, yet the importance of the address is often overlooked. In this introduction to the low-level mechanisms of addressing in assembler, it is surprising how easy it is to recognize familiar high-level abstractions.

Programming News and Views

The latest survey from DevGraphics isn't about JavaScript, or any other aspect of Web Development. Instead it asks  about workplace issues, developers' health, hobbies and relationships, and other topics unrelated to code. New questions in the 2026 survey included ones about job security and mental state.

With the price of single board computers like the Raspberry Pi increasing all the time, news that Espressif's latest low-cost ESP32 can run Linux is to be welcomed. And its official!

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have issued instructions on how to secure K-12 schools in the USA against cyber attacks.

Groovy 6 has been released, with improvements focusing on async workflows, concurrency, and better verification for functional programming.

Aspire 13.6 has been released. It now has persistent dashboards that store resource snapshots and telemetry in SQLite, so you can revisit up to ten completed runs. Other improvements include first-party Java and Rust hosting, and preview Azure Connector Namespace support.

Apache has released the latest version of the NetBeans cross-platform IDE. Version 31 has updated environment support, along with updates for Java development, and increased integration for Maven and Gradle. PHP and JavaFX also have improvements.

A video of humanoid robots flinging themselves, one after another, into a vat of molten steel, has gone viral. It is almost impossible to watch as each of them approaches the end of the diving board and launches itself into the bubbling cauldron beneath. How have we allowed such wanton destruction to happen?

An IEEE Milestone plaque commemorating the Colossus Computers, and their designer Tommy Flowers, has been installed at Bletchley Park, the site of the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) during World War II.

The second Meta VR Start Developer Competition has opened. It was announced at Meta Connect⁠ in September, and runs for eight weeks. Competitors are asked to build new experiences for Meta VR or significantly update something they've already built. There are $1M in total prizes across three genre tracks: entertainment, gaming, and productivity.

Tenable has launched a open exchange for cybersecurity AI agents. Free and open-source it is a vendor-neutral, community-driven directory that allows security teams to discover, share and chain AI agents, skills, MCP servers and playbooks.

The .NET team has contributed a .NET SDK for AG-UI in collaboration with CopilotKit. The AG-UI .NET SDK is now kept in the AG-UI repository alongside the TypeScript and Python SDKs, and means any .NET service can now speak AG-UI directly.

Book Watch

Containers are probably the most useful software development of the decade, but as a software developer you may not yet have tried to create your own. If you have, you may have discovered that practical, developer-focused guidance is difficult to come by. In this book, Mike James sets out to fill that gap and in particular it covers a pair of overlooked resources— the Visual Studio Code Container Tools Extension and its Dev Containers Extension.

This book looks at semantic data layers and how to build them. Dave Wells argues that data management has always been messy. Inconsistent metrics, brittle integrations, data silos, and confusing dashboards persist even after heavy investment in data lakes, warehouses, pipelines, BI tools, metadata catalogs, and modern platforms. At the core, these are not technology problems; they're problems of meaning.

Subtitled "Interviews with 19 programming visionaries who ignited the PC software revolution", this book is being republished to celebrate its 40th anniversary.

It author, Susan Lammers was an early Microsoft employee who became Editor-in-Chief of Microsoft Press in the mid-1980s. While the original 1986 edition was published by Microsoft Press, there was a 1989 reprint by Tempus Books and now a third publisher, 8080 Books, is re-issuing it with, a new preface by Susan Lammers.

The book brings together landmark interviews with nineteen of the most influential software architects who ever lived: Charles Simonyi, who shaped modern productivity software at Microsoft; Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who invented the spreadsheet; Andy Hertzfeld, who conjured the original Macintosh and fifteen more who wrote the code that changed how humanity thinks, works, and creates.

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