Articles by David Bolton

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  A Developer's Look at Kotlin

  Named after an island near St. Petersburg, Russia (take a gander at its spectacular sunset, above), Kotlin is a statically typed open-source programming language that runs on the JVM, just like J…
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  5 Reasons You Should Know NumPy

  If you’re a Python programmer who hasn’t encountered NumPy, you’re potentially missing out. NumPy is an open-source Python library for scientific and numeric computing that lets you work with mul…
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  Building Apps with Xamarin Forms

  Xamarin is both a company and a cross-platform development system for creating mobile apps in C#. Co-founded by Miguel de Icaza, a developer who founded the Linux GNOME project as well as Mono (t…
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  A Closer Look at LLVM

  The Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) is a set of open-source compiler technologies, combined with related toolchain libraries, that is surpassing GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) in popularity. LLVM…
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  Exploring Intel's Distribution for Python

  For years, Intel has focused on two programming languages: C++ and Fortran. Now they have released a third language implementation: Python. The release includes a number of packages used in high-…
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  A Look Inside Windows Containers

  Containers are a clever idea that originated in the Linux arena around 16 years ago. They gained traction at a very slow pace until three years ago, when an open-source project called Docker came…
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  A Case Study in Dealing with Ransomware

  A particularly insidious type of malware is ransomware, which is secretly installed on your PC and locks the system down. That lockdown is inevitably accompanied by a message demanding payment if…
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  Learning About Data Structures in Swift

  Swift is an increasingly popular language for programming iOS devices, supported on Linux in addition to Mac OS X. A few months ago, Apple decided to make Swift open-source; the language’s next m…
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  Python Developers: PyPI Makes Life Easier

  Python’s major strength lies in its ecosystem. There’s the community, the quality of documentation, the PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals, or white papers that suggest improvements), and PyPI, o…
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  The State of Linux in 2016

  As side projects go, few have succeeded quite as spectacularly as Linus Torvald’s attempt to create a new, free operating system. In 1991, he termed his project kernel “Freax,” a name soon eclips…