This week's featured article is an extract from Harry Fairhead's newly published Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 IoT In C: Using Linux Drivers and Gpio5. It introduces the open source library written by Harry specifically to let the Pi 5 work directly with GPIO hardware which is based on the Pico SDK for the RP1 microprocessor, the chip that also powers the Pi 5.

Subtitled "Ultimate Guide To Mastering RAG", this is a course for beginners to learn how to build AI apps utilizing Microsoft products and RAG.

Apple's latest attempt to maintain full financial control over the App Store has failed, allowing Fortite to stay in the App Store and Epic to use external methods for in-app purchases.

Google has announced improvements to BigLake and BigQuery, including with the general availability of BigLake Metastore; new high-performance Iceberg-native Cloud Storage; and native support with Dataplex Universal Catalog, providing unified and fine-grained access controls across all supported engines. 

Docker has introduced MCP Catalog, a centralized, trusted registry for discovering, sharing, and running MCP-compatible tools.  An associated toolkit was also launched. 

Could it be that all of that computer graphics you had to learn to implement 3D rendering is obsolete? Is this another example of AI doing just about anything you can think of?

Is concern over high unemployment rates among recently graduated Computer Science Majors justified. If so what are the factors?

CouchDB 3.5 has been released with new support for truly parallel reads independent from writes. The new version also adds a conflict finder plugin to the scanner module. 

Understand a Github repository by using three different
MCP solutions. Github Chat MCP, Git MCP and the official
Github MCP Server.

Amazon has announced the release of Aurora DSQL, a fast serverless distributed SQL database that Amazon says has virtually unlimited scale, the highest availability, and zero infrastructure management. Aurora DSQL was announced last year at Amazon re:Invent.. 

Microsoft Research has published details of a research prototype that provides a different type of interaction between humans and AI tools. Magentic-UI keeps the human in the loop and more in control.  

The world's first Humanoid Robot Kickboxing contest took place on May 25 in Hangzhou, China. While the event aimed to highlight the integration of AI and robotics, the robots weren't acting autonomously, but were being remotely controlled by human operator teams.

Our weekly digest lists the week's news, new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and our latest book review. In this week's  featured articles Harry Fairhead looks at working with threads in C in an IoT context and, in the week that included Java's 30th anniversary, Mike James provides a history and overview of Java.

Ilias Diakonikolas, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is the recipient of the 2024 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work in robust algorithms.

Continuing the series highlighting conferences you may have missed we come right up to date with Spring I/O and KotlinConf, both of which took place during May 2025.

GitLab 18 has been released with extensions to the Duo AI-based assistant. The news was followed by reports that Duo had a security vulnerability that provided a route for attackers. The problem has now been fixed. 

Apache Gravitino v0.9.0-incubating has been released, with optimizations to the fileset catalogs and model catalogs, making it easier for users to manage their unstructured AI data and model data.

You may well know that important conjecture that P! = NP, but of equal theoretical importance is P! = PSPACE, but it hardly gets any of the publicity of its near relation. We seemed to have moved a little closer to proving it.