MuseumSCAT is a new Kaggle challenge designed to categorise Danish Dung beetles - or at least their handwritten labels. The challenge is to develop machine learning models that can accurately transcribe handwritten and machine written collection date and locality information from historical natural history specimen labels.

AI-fokus, a spin off of Jfokus, is a conference focusing
on the evolution of agentic AI and its practical implementation in software development.

Apache has released the latest version of the NetBeans cross-platform IDE. Version 30 updates the minimum Java version required to build, test, and run the IDE to JDK 21. There are also updated build tools and enhanced language support. 

Deno 2.9 has been released with a new way to build native desktop applications from the standard web stack, with no Electron boilerplate and a single binary at the end. 

Google's Intensive Vibe Coding Course is now available on Kaggle as a self-paced Learn Guide. Originally held as a live program from June 15 - 19, 2026, all the materials can now be accessed, for free, by anyone interested in exploring the foundations, architecture, and practical development of AI agents. 

Kotlin 2.4.0 has been released with improvements including stable context parameters, explicit backing fields, and multiple features for annotation use-site targets. Other updates include support for Java 26, and the enabling by default of annotations in metadata. 

The Apache Ant team has released Apache Props Antlib, a library of supplemental handlers for Apache Ant properties resolution. The release follows the recent release of Ant 1.10.17. 

Udacity has a new Nanodegree. Responsible AI is a 4-month program at Intermediate level that teaches you how to turn responsible AI principles into technical implementation where governance, ethics, data, and compliance are working together.  Enrol today to take advantage of a saving of 50%.

We look at a Github repository that provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide for constructing a modern Large Language Model from the ground by up using Python and PyTorch.

GitHub has made it more difficult to checkout unreviewed pull requests. The change has been made to reduce pwn requests, where attacker-controlled code execute with the workflow’s full privileges. Pwn requests have been the root cause of multiple attacks, and GitHub is keen to prevent them.  

Researchers have successfully recovered all the surviving text from one of the Herculaneum Scrolls, part of a collection of papyri burnt by fire and then buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. They have also recovered the title and author-attribution of another scroll.

This week saw the publication of Programming The ESP32 RISC V in MicroPython in which Harry Fairhead and Mike James provides a deep dive into programming members of the ESP32 RISC family - the C2, C3, C5, C6 and H2 - and we have our first exclusive extract. News topics include Linux, Typescript and XCode - so something for everyone. 

JNation Conference is a software development event held annually in Coimbra, Portugal, that covers various topics relevant to the software development industry.

The 2026 ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award has been has been conferred on Srinivas Devadas, a Professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for his pioneering contributions to secure architectures with broad industrial and academic impact.

Project Valhalla, the OpenJDK project designed to "explore and incubate" advanced Java VM and language feature candidates such as value types and generic specialization, is making its first appearance into OpenJDK. The news was announced on the OpenJDK mailing list. 

TestSprite has released an open source command-line tool that lets AI coding agents autonomously verify their own work across both frontend and backend before declaring a task complete. To test the new tool, TestSprite ran a public competition in which AI coding agents were built and deployed while being refereed by TestSprite. 

After six years of work, Linux has finally been freed of the dreaded strncpy. Was it really so bad? And was it worth the work?

Microsoft has announced the availability of the release candidate of TypeScript 7. This release is significant because it has been rewritten in native code, so is built on a completely new foundation. The developers say it is often about ten times faster than TypeScript 6.0, which will be the last version of the JavaScript-based version.