There are no shortages of productivity software solutions, services and apps on the market today. No matter what platform you use, you’re bound to find a ton of options to choose from. It all comes down to personal preference, and the latest personal preference that has come into play is whether or not you feel like paying for your productivity solution or not. The pricing model for any productivity solution is going to be determined by several factors, not the least of which is what the developer’s goals are....

Professional social networkViadeomay bebigin parts of the world that LinkedIn isn’t, but that doesn’t mean it can’t occasionally take a leaf out of its rival’s book once in a while. Today, the Paris-based company has launched Smart News – a personalised news service similar to LinkedIn Today, whichlaunchedin March. The service provides up-to-date news which is relevant to each user based on keywords found in their profile. So, a teacher can get education news and a stockbroker can get financial news without them having to set any preferences themselves....

A few weeks ago I joked “Professionalism is for Amateurs” with this tweet: Although I was joking I was also kind of serious. I really do believe that the passionate amateur is often worth a lot more than the indifferent professional. Some examples to illustrate my point: My reluctance to work with so called ‘professionals’ goes so far that whenever someone says “Lets do this the professional way” or “But that doesn’t seems professional” I can’t help but instinctively move in the other direction....

Sometimes major shifts happen virtually unnoticed. On May 5,IBMannounced Project CodeNetto very little media or academic attention. CodeNet is a follow-up toImageNet, a large-scale dataset of images and their descriptions; the images are free for non-commercial uses. ImageNet is now central to theprogress of deep learning computer vision. CodeNet is an attempt to do for Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding what ImageNet did for computer vision: it is a dataset of over 14 million code samples, covering 50 programming languages, intended to solve 4,000 coding problems....

Programming Praxisis a website that publishes a programming puzzle each week to help developers keep their development and problem solving skills sharp. Developers often fall into ruts in their jobs, focusing on a narrow specialty skill set — perhaps its search engineering or front-end JavaScript — and the goal as stated by the site’s owners is to help those programmers maintain their ability to think through and solve programming problems that fall outside their specialty....