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Featured Articles

We all know about the problems with the goto instruction, but after we learned it was harmful what exactly did we do about it? This is an extract from my book Trick of the Mind, which explores what it is to be a programmer.

MIT App Inventor is the ideal way to get started with programming, but getting started with App Inventor has some small problems all of its own. In this guide we find out the best way to write and run a simple program.

Programming News and Views

Its Xmas and Xmas means  Donald Knuth putting on his flamboyant Xmas top and talking to us about something that most of us know nothing about? Of course not. This year it's all about the Knight's Tour which is more interesting than anything a salesman could get up to.

The annual Santa tech-fest is well under way, with Santa trackers from both Google and NORAD counting down to the big day to see how Santa is doing on sorting out who's been naughty and who's been nice.

Google has "dropped", in the new sense of the term which means "launched", Gemini 3 Flash, the latest Google model. The Gemini team says Gemini 3 offers frontier intelligence and is built for speed at a fraction of the cost.

The Apache Pulsar team has announced the release of Apache Pulsar Client C++ version 4.0.0. Improvements include support for getting the encryption context on a message, and for getting the producer name of a message. The supported C++ standard has also been upgraded to version 17.

Agentic AI and MPC are coming on strong in the database market. After the likes of Postgres and Oracle, now it's MongoDB's turn to incorporate MCP.

Microsoft has deprecated IntelliCode extensions for VS Code in favor of GitHub Copilot Chat. While this also provides advanced suggestions and inline completions, its free tier is limited to 2,000 suggestions per month, and as Copilot provides a suggestion with every input, this doesn't last long.

It is official - Xmas is NP hard. See exactly how and appreciate the value of holiday algorithms.

We're fast approaching Panic Weekend, when those of us who've been trying to forget about the upcoming holidays face up to the reality that the present giving season is happening whether we're ready or not. So if you're still in need of some festive ideas, we've come up with a few that might rescue you.

NODES is the biggest graph community gathering dedicated to applications, data intelligence, knowledge graphs, and AI.
Let's find out what happened this year.

Claude Scientific Skills give Claude super powers, not just on coding, but about any science. We try them out to see what's on offer.

The Android developer team has announced that Android Studio Otter 2 Feature Drop is stable. Feature Drop is the term used for updates that are built on top of the IntelliJ platform updates, and follow soon after each new "animal" release - in this case Otter.

Book Watch

This book is the tale of the oldest active hacking group in the USA. Joseph Menn explores the Cult of the Dead Cow from its origins back in the 80s, and looks at its oddball characters—activists, artists, and musicians—some of whom went on to advise presidents, cabinet members, and CEOs, and who now walk the corridors of power in Washington and Silicon Valley. Featuring a new afterword with updates on the collective, Cult of the Dead Cow describes how, at a time when governments, corporations, and criminals hold immense power, a small band of tech iconoclasts is on our side fighting back.

This book looks at latency from first principles to production-ready code, and shows how to make your software faster at every layer of the stack. Pekka Enberg explains what latency really is, how it differs from bandwidth, and why it matters for user experience.  Using practical examples, later chapters show how to apply Little’s Law, design lock-free algorithms, and design caching systems that scale. Enberg explains how code runs differently on distributed systems, databases, and operating systems, and how to understand the common latency-causing issues in each situation.

In this book Victoria Rosenthal takes the reader on a journey once more through the expanded and rich culinary world of Etheirys from the Final Fantasy XIV game, traveling beyond Eorzea to the realms introduced in the Shadowbringers, Endwalker, and Dawntrail expansions. Now your favorite Namazu and moogle cooks, Gyohan and Mogria, are cheering you on in your culinarian adventures with a cute, themed cookbook stand inside this set!

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