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Featured Articles

C is a block-structured language. Find out what this means  in this extract from my book, Deep C Dives .

Something special happened in the UK at the start of the 1980s and it  altered the  face of computing as we know it. You  may  be  of  the opinion that all that ever happened in the past was Apple and IBM, but not so. In the UK there was an explosion of machines unlike any other before or since. To mark the 45th anniversary of the ZX-81 we look again at these remarkable micros.

Programming News and Views

Stack Overflow is undergoing a major overhaul. Not just a new logo and a site-wide redesign, but a new mission. No longer is Stack Overflow "just a "Q&A site", it is re-purposing itself as the "human verification layer" for the AI world.

I really admire Google at the moment in the same way that I admire the best Bond villains. If Google were a person, it would be sitting stroking its cat in a deep bunker laire. Why do I think this?

OpenAI has released Codex for Windows, with native sandbox and PowerShell support. The app can also be configured to run in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

British Computer Scientist and Turing laureate, Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, has died aged 92. His achievements over a long career encompass foundational contributions to  programming languages, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing. But the one that most of us will best recognize is the Quicksort algorithm. Here's the story behind it.

A new parser for the Apache Parquet file format has been released. Hardwood is optimized for minimal dependencies and great performance.

Fulfilling a commitment announced last October, Meta has handed over governance of React, React Native and associated projects like JSX to the React Foundation. Meta has also promised $3 million over 5 years to the Foundation.

It is difficult to believe how far we have come in so short a time. I have to admit that I miss the pleasures of working with such small machines as the ZX81 where 16K was an upgrade on the basic 1K model!

After running concurrently in 2025, Google I/O and Microsoft Build are taking place on well-spaced dates this year, although they are geographically close.

Google has announced the complete list of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organizations. This year there are 185 open source communities on the list ready to mentor a new group of open source contributors. GSoC organizers say that now is the time for prospective contributors to start looking for a community to participate with.

TestSprite has launched TestSprite 2.1, an updated version of its agentic testing tool. The new release has an AI testing engine that's four to five times faster than the previous version. It also has improved test coverage, a new visual Test Modification Interface, and a GitHub integration that automatically enforces quality on every pull request.

Anthropic has recently updated its Claude Code command-line tool in an attempt to simplify its terminal output, sparking significant backlash from the software development community. However, Claude-Devtools provides a solution.

Book Watch

This book shows how to harness the power of Wasm on the application back-end. Danilo Chiarlone shows via practical examples and clear explanations how to gain the benefits of reduced cold start times, improved security and performance, and the freedom of polyglot programming.

This book shows how to level up from writing Python code to designing Python applications. Ronald Mak provides intuitive “before” and “after” examples of improved code, so readers can learn to plan and execute Python applications effectively and avoid bugs associated with unmanaged state, poorly-formed classes, and inflexible functions. The book aims to help readers master the “Pythonic” approach to architectural principles, such as encapsulation, abstraction, and method variation. The examples are in Python, but the techniques will apply to any object-oriented language.

Networking has become an essential part of the modern amateur radio station, and this book by Glen Popiel, KW5GP, shows how to put it to work. This practical, approachable guide includes everything you need to consider, from choosing the right topology to selecting hardware and getting everything configured and on the air. The book introduces TCP/IP and networking concepts in a clear, logical way, and has step-by-step instructions for setting up a VoIP telephone network, supporting video conferencing and instant messaging, enabling remote station control, and experimenting with other networked services.

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