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Learning to code is becoming the key skill for anyone who wants to launch a tech startup, or even just get a job working at a hot tech company. That may seem intimidating, but programming is not some monumental skill that only specially gifted people can learn. Really, it it isn't all that different from learning to speak another language. If you can pick up the rudiments of Spanish or French in a couple of weeks, how hard could it be to get started with Ruby On Rails? The Developer Bootcamp is designed to help anyone get started coding - and they might even get a job at a startup or tech heavyweight out of it as well.

The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012.

For those of you who are addicted to merge new technologies to interface-archeology here is a new 'Tworsekey'.  A vintage looking tweeting device which takes input in the form of morse code and tweets the output. It features arduino and the ethernet shield.  The sketch can be downloaded from here.  Needless to say that the design is open sourced.

Google has released a new software framework that aims to give programmers the ability to create interactive experiences in physical spaces. It could potentially be used to build interactive art installations or games that involve physical interaction.

"Security researchers warn that cybercriminals have started using Java exploits signed with digital certificates to trick users into allowing the malicious code to run inside browsers. A signed Java exploit was discovered Monday on a website belonging to the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany that was infected with a Web exploit toolkit called g01pack, security researcher Eric Romang said Tuesday in a blog post. "

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Our digital age is all about bits, those precise ones and zeros that are the stuff of modern computer code. But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between - all at the same time.

As organizations like Code for America encourage government transparency and the concept of Open Data at multiple levels of government in the US, I think it's useful for us to take a look at how Open Data is handled in other countries. Given my non-existent skills in other languages and my distrust of Google Translate, I'll focus on English-speaking countries first.

We're making the TextYard college bookstore scrapers open source.  Any college student with rudimentary coding skills will now be able to take on their local bookstore.

Berlin, February 14, 2012 - The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5, the third major release of "the best free office suite ever", which shows to end users the improvements derived from the development strategy adopted since September 2010. LibreOffice 3.5 derives from the combined effort of full time hackers - the largest group of experienced OOo code developers - and volunteer hackers, coordinated by the Engineering Steering Committee.

As a child, I always looked up at the stars and wondered how I could make it into space. Hopefully, I will live to see that day, but for now, a homemade satellite will have to do. The Nanosatisfi team has made it their mission "to provide affordable space exploration for everyone!," and with ArduSat, they move one step closer to reality. ArduSat is a Arduino-controlled miniature 10cm cubic satellite, weighing 1 kg, which is roughly equivalent to half a store bought loaf of bread. Its size might not be impressive, but it packs over 25 sensors including: Myspectral's open source spectrometer, inertial measurement unit, magnetometer, along the standard set, and many others. This impressive little machine boasts a camera to take photographs, it could send messages back to earth, or it can run your space experiments. With the ability to upload code directly to the ArduSat while in space, the possibilities are virtually limitless.

Robert Harvey asks: Occasionally I see questions about edge cases on Stack Overflow that are easily answered by the likes of Jon Skeet or Eric Lippert-experts who demonstrate a deep knowledge of a particular language and its many intricacies. Here's an example of this from Lippert's MSDN blog: You might think that in order to use a foreach loop, the collection you are iterating over must implement IEnumerable or IEnumerable. But as it turns out, that is not actually a requirement. What is required is that the type of the collection must have a public method called GetEnumerator, and that must return some type that has a public property getter called Current and a public method MoveNext that returns a bool. If the compiler can determine that all of those requirements are met then the code is generated to use those methods. Only if those requirements are not met do we check to see if the object implements IEnumerable or IEnumerable. This is cool stuff to know. I can understand why Eric knows this; he's on the compiler team, so it's explicitly in his job description to know. But how do mere mortals, those of us on the outside, find out about stuff like this?

Sergei Skorobogatov, a postdoc in the Security Group at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge has written up claims that reprogammable microchips from China contained secret back-doors that can be used to covertly insert code:

Two years ago this week, ThinkUp was born. Our first year we moved from alpha into beta, and our second year we graduated out of beta to great response. Today I'm thrilled to report that over 15,000 social media accounts are registered on over 5,000 ThinkUp installations around the web. ThinkUp's most well-known users include the White House, Martha Stewart, Steve Martin, Disney, and Pixar. Our birthday is as good a time as any to do an honest assessment of where the ThinkUp product, community, and code currently stands. Here's where we are.

You want to start your own blog but you don't want to look tacky by using an existing design. Creating your own theme can be daunting, but with some assistance you can have a unique design for your blog in no time. This post will help you put it all together using WordPress, the most popular (and free) blogging software available.

I went to the GLUE conference to get in over my head. That was my entire goal. I wanted to learn about the technology that helps to stitch together the various parts of the Internet, but I also wanted to spend some time getting to know the people who made that technology do what it does. Over the course of 2 days I met people who made me feel dumb, saw thousands of lines of code and left with a new appreciation for how technology works.

Malware researchers investigating a Trojan linked in a gaming forum as a how-to video for Diablo III got a surprise when the hacker started chatting with them-through a feature in the malware. Franklin Zhao & Jason Zhou of antivirus company AVG were looking for keylogging code in the malware with a debugger after downloading it to a virtual machine when a chat box popped up. The hacker asked, in Chinese, "What are you doing? Why are you researching my Trojan?"

From disrupting the peer-reviewed journal publishing tradition to utilizing a dispersed model to test code, the academy has been trying out new ways of innovating an overburdened scholarly apparatus using technology. One of the latest areas to see this sort of experimentation is that of IP, or intellectual property. Marblar, a startup launched by three British PhD students, is hoping to successfully crowdsource the resurrection of "dormant" IP, to flatten and widen the process of tech transfer. A major British venture capital firm, IP Group, has invested about $600,000 in the startup.

Beyond any shadow of a doubt, a shit storm of epic proportions has just gone down. Something which had the potential to affect practically every coder. (Top four stories on HackerNews all related to this crisis).    Every GitHub repository was vulnerable to attack and absolutely nothing was safe.  If you are one of those strange coders that don't use GitHub and think you are in the clear because you use SVN, well the potential damage from the ripples of this vulnerability would of eventually reached you. When the large portion of the technical world all depends on a single service, and that service is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, that makes *anyone* who consumes these services also vulnerable.