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Featured Articles

Type is such a talking point - languages either love it or ignore it, but how did it all get started and what does it mean for C?

Margaret Hamilton was lead developer for the team that wrote the programs that landed men on the moon and has devoted a career to error detection and recovery. She coined the term "software engineer" to gain recognition for the work done by programmers and became a role model as a woman in a male dominated environment.

Programming News and Views

Microcontrollers are getting more and more like single board computers, but the latest ESP development board is a Swiss Army Knife of IoT development, complete with AI. This makes it a good candidate for so many projects.

The IBM AI Engineering Professional Certificate is a recent addition to the line up of IBM offerings on Coursera. It is designed to make you job-ready in terms the AI engineering skills and hands-on practical experience in less than 4 months.

Today, October 13th, is Ada Lovelace Day with events around the globe taking place to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and math. Although the date, the second Tuesday in October, isn't related to any events in Ada's life, it is a good time to discover, or revisit, her remarkable story.

Apache Pulsar 5.0 has been released, with the addition of scalable topics, which grow and shrink with demand while preserving per-key ordering. The new version also has a new Java client API and Oxia as the recommended metadata store for new clusters.

Python 3.15 has been released with updates including explicit lazy imports, new built-in types, and an upgraded JIT compiler.

Microsoft's open-source Litebox library has been updated. The library is an open-source, Rust-based library operating system for sandboxing and security.  The project is released under the MIT license, and aims to significantly minimize the attack surface by reducing the interfaces to the host system.

More than a decade after "A Man From the Future", the  collaboration between the Pet Shop Boys and biographer Andrew Hodges about Alan Turing, originally debuted, a reworked and reorchestrated version is out on Parlophone Records.

Margaret Hamilton, who developed the software for NASA's Apollo Missions which not only landed men on the moon in 1969 but also averted a crash landing, passed away on September 30, 2026, at the age of 90.

This insightful interview with Tom Lane, a core developer celebrating twenty five years as a committer on the PostgreSQL project, looks at foundational architectural choices that have sustained the open source database over its thirty-year history

Token Meter is an open source, local first dashboard that helps developers monitor and optimize the resource consumption of AI coding agents.

Google has released Spanner Omni, a deploy-anywhere version of Spanner, Google's multi-model database. Spanner Omni adds the ability to run Spanner in a on-premises data centers or on other clouds.

Book Watch

This book is a step-by-step journey through design, development, and deployment of a system of autonomous AI agents. Authors Jungjun Hur and Younghee Song guide the reader concept-by-concept as they build a sophisticated research agent in Python, designed to solve complex, multi-step tasks from the rigorous GAIA (General AI Assistants) benchmark. By covering the construction of the system end to end, the authors explain the underlying mechanics unobstructed by any existing blackbox libraries and frameworks.

This book gathers the broad mix of theoretical and applied reliability knowledge needed for engineers, analysts, and scientists from all fields, with examples reflecting the growing importance of the subject in automotive, public transport, electronics, telecommunications, software, and other industries. Edited by Dr. Hoang Pham, the handbook's chapters have been written by leading reliability experts in academia and industry, providing comprehensive and authoritative coverage under the supervision of a distinguished international advisory and editorial board to ensure clarity and precision throughout.

This book, subtitled "Making digital communication inclusive for everyone", is a  practical, illustrated guide for applying accessibility across social media, meetings, presentations, emails, and AI. Learn inclusive communication through engaging visuals and real-world examples. Nandita Gupta and Rachel Grossman-Kahn aim to make inclusion approachable, practical, and unexpectedly fun, showing how everyday people can make small changes that lead to a big impact.

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