Time Magazine has named the Architects of AI as its 2025 Person of the Year, depicting on its cover eight individuals who are seen to have driven the rapid and consequential development of artificial intelligence.

This week saw the publication of Master The ESP32: WiFi, by Harry Fairhead and Mike James. Our chosen first extract is from its final chapter and is about ESP Now, a facility for flexible peer-to-peer networking mode available for use with all ESP32 devices. We also introduce a new News section - Viewpoint. In the inaugural item, Mike James asks "How Can You Not Be Impressed By AI"?

PHP 8.5 has been released with an extension supporting secure URI and URL parsing, a new a pipe operator and persistent cURL handles. 

The holiday season is a good time to learn about computers - you have the time. But where to start? Our advice is to ignore the pudding and go for a Pi.

Shuttle has launched Neptune, a universal AI platform engineer that understands code, generates a deterministic infrastructure spec, provisions cloud resources, and integrates with AI coding tools and IDEs. 

Amazon has released Nova Forge, a new service that developers can use to build their own frontier models using Nova. Nova Forge customers can start their development from early model checkpoints, blend their datasets with Amazon Nova-curated training data, and host their custom models securely on AWS. 

There is a big backlash against AI at the moment and given the threat it poses to jobs. this can hardly be an unexpected response. However, much of the backlash focuses on how useless and unimpressive it is. This is crazy. AI has achieved so much of its goal in such a short time, this is an entirely untenable position.

A new Advent calendar had joined those for Java, Kotlin and Rust. We now have  Advent of AI, a series of AI engineering challenges from Goose, that is already underway.

LangGrant has announced its LEDGE MCP server that enables LLMs to reason across multiple enterprise databases and generate multi-step analytics plans without transmitting raw data to the model. The system works entirely with metadata and schema context.

Today, December 9th 2025, is the 119th anniversary of the birth of Grace Hopper. Her concern for teaching young people is why Computer Science Education Week and the Hour of Code, now the Hour of AI, are timed to coincide with her birthday. Her legacy also extends into other areas.

Connect to PostgreSQL database instances, run queries, create and manage connections and more, all from inside VSCode. Just announced, the extension simplifies talking to and managing PostgreSQL databases from the ease of the most popular IDE.

Angular 21 has been released with experimental support for Signal Forms, a developer preview of Angular Aria, and the ability to use Angular's MCP Server via AI Agents. 

The holiday season is a good time to acquire a new skill - you have the time and don't want to go outdoors. How about getting into electronics and home automation? My recommendation for this is the Raspberry Pi Pico, specifically the Pico 2W, where W indicates in-built WiFi.

In the news this week Nikos Vaggalis reminds us that Advent of Code is now underway and that Hour of Code, now renamed Hour of AI to reflect the zeitgeist, is about to start. We also have news from re:Invent and there's a new release of Kotlin. 

A pilot scheme supported by Horizon Europe is investigating the use of AI and robot dogs to detect and mitigate wildfires. 

Apache NetBeans 28 has been released with improvements to Gradle 9 support, better handling of the Maven UI, and expanded JUnit integration.

Codacy has launched two new products to help control genAI coding.  AI Risk Hub and AI Reviewer form a code compliance suite that organizations can use for governance of AI-generated code and smart, context-aware code reviews. 

Microsoft is adding a "semantic intelligence layer" to Fabric to add  that elevates Fabric from a unified data platform to a unified intelligence platform. The announcement says the extra layer will turn an organization's data into "a live, structured, connected model of how your business operates".