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Featured Articles

X Windows graphics is slowly being replaced by Wayland but there is still a lot to admire about this old system. This extract is from my  book on using C in an IoT context.

Nowadays the McCulloch-Pitts neuron tends to be overlooked in favour of simpler neuronal models, but it was, and still is, important. It proved that something that behaved like a biological neuron was capable of computation and  influenced early computer designers. You could say that this is where it all started.

Programming News and Views

...is entirely justified. While we all go mad for Rust and its steep learning curve, we may have missed the most important thing to happen to C/C++ since they were invented - Fil-C.

How do developers expect their roles and careers to be redefined by AI in 2026? New research reveals that 74% expect to shift from coding to designing technical solutions.

Memgraph has been updated with the addition of two new tools; an AI Graph Toolkit that automates the porting of data into a knowledge graph in Memgraph; and an MCP Client within Memgraph Lab.

Microsoft has added an AI-powered planning mode to Visual Studio as part of GitHub Copilot's Agent mode. The feature is available in public preview as part of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.14.

EuroLLM is a fully open-sourced large language model made in Europe and built to support all twenty-four official EU languages.

GitHub has launched Agent HQ, a tool for managing multiple AI coding agents into a single platform. GitHub says that over the next few months, coding agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cognition, xAI, and more will become available directly within GitHub as part of the paid GitHub Copilot subscription.

Collins has selected Vibe Coding as its Word of the Year 2025, reflecting the current trend towards the use of natural language prompts for code creation.

The AI Champion Ship is now underway, with a month to go before entries close. The organizers describe it as a global competition for builders, dreamers, and tinkerers who want to push AI beyond the ordinary.

Fans nostalgic for the -er- good old days of Windows XP can now commemorate them with specially themed Crocs.

A new major version of Grails has been announced, together with news of its graduation to an Apache top-level project.

Buoyant, the creators of the Linkerd open source and service mesh for the enterprise, have announced the addition of support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Linkerd to extend its core service mesh capabilities to agentic AI traffic.

Book Watch

This book teaches C23 while also building a foundation that strengthens your programming skills regardless of what language you normally program in. Starting with a tour of C, Paul J. Lucas highlights C’s core concepts using example programs to give you the flavor of C. Next, it covers the entire C23 language including topics not often covered elsewhere such as undefined behavior, assertions, atomic variables, lock-free programming, debugging, advanced use of the preprocessor using _Generic, and more. Finally, it gives extended examples of how features common in modern programming languages might be implemented—including lists, maps, dynamic dispatch, and exceptions.

This book aims to show readers how to combine a love of both video games and coding into writing their own games. Aaron Langille starts with the essential ins‑and‑outs of how to work with fonts and text, images and sprites, audio, and animation. The book introduces the MonoGame development framework, and shows how to use Visual Studio and C# to write simple but engaging interactive scenes and games that gradually build up coding skills and confidence.

This book invites the reader to see their business differently. Not as a collection of teams and tasks, but as a complex adaptive system. One that’s constantly shifting, often in ways they can’t see or predict. Kathy Keating, Etienne de Bruin and Scott Graves argue that beneath every team dynamic, delivery delay, or organizational bottleneck is a hidden world shaping outcomes. And unless you can see that world, you’re destined to repeat the same frustrating patterns, over and over again, as you grow.

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