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Featured Articles

The Uno Q has a full SPI controller but the Arduino Core doesn't let you use many of its facilities. The solution is to use Zephyr functions  and Harry Fairhead shows you how.  This is an extract from his hot-off-the press book on the Arduino Uno Q.

Multicast delegates are useful in their own right but they also form the basis on which the C# event system is built. We take a close look at how they work and how to use them. For example, did you know you could add and subtract delegates? Find out more in this extract from my book, Deep C#: Dive Into Modern C# .

Programming News and Views

YouTube was founded 21 years ago and we apparently couldn't live without it. There are many news items and blog posts celebrating its history, but they are social histories that examine how it came to be so dominant. What about the technical history?

Octopus Deploy has released the 2026 AI Pulse Report, looking at how AI adoption is actually impacting developer workflows. The findings reveal the drawbacks of AI-generated code and that a serious talent shortage could be on the horizon.

We look at a  hand-on and free course that teaches you how to use Claude Code by doing real work.

The Deno team has introduced two new tools; Deno Deploy, a platform for deploying JavaScript and TypeScript applications, is now generally available. The team has also released a preview version of Deno Sandbox, a tool providing lightweight Linux microVMs running in the Deno Deploy cloud, on which developers can run untrusted code securely.

The first beta of TypeScript 6.0 has been released by Microsoft. This is the last release based on the current JavaScript codebase. TypeScript 7.0 will move to a compiler and language service written in Go to provide better performance and scalability.

Visual Studio Code 1.109 has been released with improvements to its support and management of AI agents, allowing you to  run Claude and Codex agents directly alongside GitHub Copilot.

After 27 years, UC Berkeley has announced the ending of its SETI @ home project, a distributed computing initiative in which over 2 million volunteers participated in looking for signals from space that might indicate the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life.

Microsoft researchers have been testing an open-source simulation environment for exploring the possibilities of agentic markets and their societal implications at scale. They reported that AI agents are, like their human equivalents, vulnerable to manipulation and prone to make biased choices in their preferences, based on where businesses appeared in search results. Who would have thought so?

The Shaw Prize Foundation is adding a new prize for Computer Science. The new prize category will honor pioneering breakthroughs in the field.

Skip is a development tool that allows engineers to create native iOS and Android applications from a single Swift and SwiftUI codebase. The news is that it has now gone open source and free-for-use, even in commercial projects.

Google has announced the public preview of a Developer Knowledge API and its associated Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. The tools are designed to provide a machine-readable gateway to Google’s official developer documentation.

Book Watch

The Arduino Uno Q is an exciting device, essentially consisting of two distinct computing environments living on the same PCB. Its dual-processor design provides the power of a quad-core ARM A55, for high-level processing and networking, along with the IoT abilities of an STM32 for real-time I/O, sensors and motor control. It can be programmed using the familiar Arduino Core functions, making it both powerful and easy to use. The ARM A55 runs Linux, while the STM32 runs the Arduino core under the Zephyr operating system - a sophisticated arrangement that offers unique advantages. For this reason, Harry Fairhead focuses on programming the STM32 using the Arduino Core and Zephyr in C. In the final chapter he explore interfacing the two processors using the Uno Q’s Bridge software, utilizing Python for the ARM A55 side.

This book sets out to tackle the challenge of apps becoming complex and hard to maintain and extend. Vladimir Dementyev guides the reader toward a more scalable and maintainable architecture. This updated edition introduces new topics that reflect today’s development challenges. Readers will dive deeper into state machines and workflows, learning how to identify, embed, and eventually isolate them for clarity and resilience. They’ll also explore the exciting frontier of abstractions in the AI era, treating LLMs as APIs, structuring agent layers, and integrating third-party libraries to keep  AI features organized and testable.

This book, subtitled "The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind", explores how we use mathematics to describe the ways we think, from its origins three hundred years ago to the ideas behind modern AI systems and the ways in which they still differ from human minds. Tom Griffiths, head of Princeton’s AI Lab, explains the three major approaches to formalizing thought―rules and symbols, neural networks, and probability and statistics―introducing each idea through the stories of the people behind it.

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