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.

Our top feature this week is a bonus chapter for the highly regarded "Programmer's Guide To Theory", a book in which Mike James sets out to present the fundamental ideas of computer science in an informal, and yet informative, way. Next up we have Ian Elliot explaining the notion of a "First Class Function". Plus the week's news and additions to Book Watch.

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.

For me 2025 was the year of the Espressif ESP32 - well it extended back into 2024. By the end of the year I was convinced that for the sort of IoT projects that I want to do around my own home the ESP32 S3 is the single board microcontroller of choice and I heartily recommend it to any programmer wanting to get into the IoT scene.  

Apple can't seem to catch a break at the moment. It keeps appealing and it keeps losing. Now its appeal against an injunction that called for it to reduce fees for external in app purchases has been rejected.

In cooperation with the Nebius AI cloud platform, JetBrains has launched a set of ten free courses for developers that demonstrate how to incorporate AI in their workflow to become 10X productive.

Docker has announced an upgrade to Docker Desktop with improvements including a new Dynamic MCP feature. 

Linux maintainers attending the Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit have said that Rust in the Linux kernel should no longer be treated as experimental, but rather as a core part of the kernel.

The concept of hardened images has been picking up lately. The logic behind them is to address the issues arising from running container images.

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.