Amazon’s open programming jobs have dropped to a paltry 299, down from 32,692 in May of 2022.
Amazon has been freezing hiring over the last couple of months and is laying off some 18,000 employees. As a tech company, Amazon might be expected to still have a plethora of software development jobs open but, as pointed out by a Slashdot reader, that number has dropped by more than 32,000 in the last seven months.
Amazon’s software development jobs page still touts the exciting career opportunities available with the company…there’s just a lot less of them.
We’re looking for software engineers who want to invent, build, and sometimes break things to make them easier, faster, better, and more cost-effective. To those who thrive at solving highly complex problems, and who aspire to impact billions of lives on a global scale: come build the future with us.
IBM is using its 2021 Think Conference to tout its advances in artificial intelligence (AI), including Project CodeNet.
One of the biggest challenges many companies face is translating existing codebases into another language. Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to help alleviate that problem, but requires extensive training to properly translate from one programming language to another.
IBM Research has released Project CodeNet, a dataset aimed at training AIs in source-to-source translation.
A large dataset aimed at teaching AI to code, it consists of some 14M code samples and about 500M lines of code in more than 55 different programming languages, from modern ones like C++, Java, Python, and Go to legacy languages like COBOL, Pascal, and FORTRAN.
IBM says Project CodeNet is “the largest, most differentiated dataset in its class and addresses three main use cases in coding today: code search (automatically translating one code into another, including legacy languages like COBOL); code similarity (identifying overlaps and similarities among different codes); and code constraints (customizing constraints based on a developer’s specific needs and parameters).”
The company believes Project CodeNet will help revolutionize source-to-source language translation, and could be a vital resource for companies that need to move legacy codebases to modern languages.
Microsoft has updated Visual Studio Code, adding support for Apple’s new Macs running on its M1 custom silicon.
Visual Studio Code is a free, open source programming text editor available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s based on Electron and supports a variety of programming languages, including Java, Python, C++, C#, Ruby, Go, Dart, JavaScript and more. In fact, Microsoft says Visual Studio Code supports virtually every major programming language.
The latest release, version 1.54 adds support for Apple’s new custom silicon.
We are happy to announce our first release of stable Apple Silicon builds this iteration. Users on Macs with M1 chips can now use VS Code without emulation with Rosetta, and will notice better performance and longer battery life when running VS Code. Thanks to the community for self-hosting with the Insiders build and reporting issues early in the iteration.
The default download of VS Code for macOS is now a Universal build that runs natively on all Macs. On the Downloads page, you can find more links to architecture-specific builds for Intel or Apple Silicon, which are smaller downloads compared to the Universal package.
Visual Studio Code is already a popular option for developers. This latest update will will be a welcome improvement for developers running Apple’s newest machines.
One of the most widely used programming languages is nearing the end of its life, as Microsoft starts winding down Visual Basic.
In a developer blog, the .Net team says that Visual Basic support is planned for .Net 5.0. The group is working “to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want to migrate their applications to .NET Core. This allows Visual Basic customers to take advantage of new platform features like side-by-side deployment, cross platform support, performance and new API improvements.”
In spite of that however, the post makes it clear that Visual Basic’s future does not include growing beyond its current abilities and status.
“Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language. This supports language stability and maintains compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic. Future features of .NET Core that require language changes may not be supported in Visual Basic. Due to differences in the platform, there will be some differences between Visual Basic on .NET Framework and .NET Core.”
While Visual Basic has been a pivotal part of Microsoft’s development history, the writing is on the wall: the language seems destined to fade into the background, replaced by newer, more robust options.
GitHub is using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to recommend open software issues to address first, according to a blog post.
GitHub is a company that offers a version control hosting platform for software projects. The company was looking for a way to make it easier for new users and programmers to be able to contribute to projects. In May 2019, they rolled out their “good first issues” feature, which made recommendations for easy, low-hanging-fruit issues.
The first iteration of the feature relied on project maintainers to label issues. This “led to a list of about 300 label names used by popular open source repositories—all synonyms for either ‘good first issue’ or ‘documentation.’” Ultimately, this could lead to more work, leaving “maintainers with the burden of triaging and labeling issues. Instead of relying on maintainers to manually label their issues, we wanted to use machine learning to broaden the set of issues we could surface.”
As a result, GitHub has introduced a second iteration of the feature, with ML-based, as well as the original label-based, issue recommendations. The end result is that the system now surfaces “good first issues” in approximately 70% of repositories, as opposed to 40% with the first iteration.
GitHub plans on expanding this feature to add “ better signals to our repository recommendations to help users find and get involved with the best projects related to their interests. We also plan to add a mechanism for maintainers and triagers to approve or remove ML-based recommendations in their repositories. Finally, we plan on extending issue recommendations to offer personalized suggestions on next issues to tackle for anyone who has already made contributions to a project.”
The entire blog post is a fascinating read about how AI and ML can be used to transform even mundane tasks.
Google is in the middle of its annual Code-In contest and it’s more popular than ever with 930 teenagers from 60 countries completing 3,503 tasks with 17 open source organizations. “The number of students successfully completing tasks has almost met the total number of students from the 2015 contest already,” said Stephanie Taylor, Google Code-in Program Manager in a blog post on the Google Open Source Blog. This is the 7th year of Google Code-in.
Tasks that the students have completed include:
writing test suites
improving mobile UI
writing documentation and creating videos to help new users
working on internationalization efforts
fixing and finding bugs in the organization’s’ software
Google Code-in is a way for Google to inspire young students to enter the field of software development. “Don’t wait until they are university students,” said Taylor in a talk at GSoC (Google Summer of Code) earlier this year in Singapore. “Let’s get them excited about open source when they are 13, 14, 15 years old. So Google Code-in was born.”
Google Code-in is an online global contest for 13-17 year old students around the world.
There’s Still Time to Get Started!
“Students, there is still plenty of time to get started with Google Code-in,” said Taylor. “New tasks are being added daily to the contest site — there are over 1,500 tasks available for students to choose from right now! If you don’t see something that interests you today, check back again every couple of days for new tasks.”
She says that the last day to register for the contest and claim a task is Friday, January 13, 2017 with all work being due on Monday, January 16, 2017 at 9:00 am PT.
Google announced that its mobile adds now fully support Swift, the iOS programming language Apple launched in 2014 and open sourced last last year.
Google says it has seen an increase in requests from publishers to fully support Swift in the Google Mobile Ads SDK, and has responded by releasing example apps built in Swift, adding code snippets throughout its developer docs, and adding Swift API reference docs to its developer sites.
“The Google Mobile Ads SDK team is committed to supporting Swift, and we’ll continue to update our SDK, developer docs, and example apps to ensure we provide publishers with full support for the latest version of Swift,” says Tristan Emrich with Google Mobile Ads developer relations. “Whether you currently develop your iOS apps in Swift, or have plans to do so in the future, we hope the actions we’ve taken to support Swift in our SDK will help make your experience with Swift more enjoyable and your transition to Swift a whole lot easier.”
Emrich notes that Google’s GitHub repo now has Swift example apps for banners, interstitials, and native ads for AdMob and DFP. They’ve also added a Swift version to their API demo app.
“The API Demo app demonstrates features of the Google Mobile Ads SDK, such as new ways to customize ad requests, experiment with multiple ad sizes, and compare AdMob and DFP technologies, to help you improve the user experience and maximize ad revenue,” says Emrich.
They’ve also added Swift code snippets to the AdMob, DFP, and AdX developer docs and Swift API reference docs to the AdMob and DFP developer sites.
Despite having shown signs of decline, the C programming language family continues to hold some of the most popular languages. C continues to hold the top spot, followed by Java, then Objective-C, C++, and C#.
Out of these top five languages (according to TIOBE Index for this month), C++ is the only one that’s seen a positive change.
As TIOBE.com says, “The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.”
C++ has been around since 1983, and while it’s still the fourth most popular language, its validity continues to be a contentious subject. From Slashdot:
Perhaps the most famous rant against C++ came from none other than Linus Torvalds in 2007. “C++ is a horrible language,” he wrote, for starters. “It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.” He’s not alone: A lot of developers dislike how much C++ can do “behind the scenes” with STL and Boost, leading to potential instability and inefficiency. And yet there’s still demand for C++ out there. Over at Dice, Jeff Cogswell argues that C++ doesn’t deserve the hatred. “I’ve witnessed a lot of ‘over-engineering’ in my life, wherein people would write reusable classes with several layers of inheritance, even though the reusable class wasn’t actually used more than once,” he wrote. “But I would argue that’s the exception, not the norm; when done right, generic programming and other high-level aspects of C++ can provide enormous benefits.” Was Linus going overboard?
This sparked a big discussion on the site. The top comment suggests the main problem with C++ is that it’s too easy to write write-only code, and then everyone programs in different dialects, and has a hard time figuring out other people’s code.
There are a lot of interesting points made throughout the discussion, so be sure to peruse that.
While we’re a few months early, 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of ColdFusion. The first version was released on July 2, 1995.
The platform, which spawned the CFML programming language, was invented by Jeremy and JJ Allaire. It was originally designed to make connecting HTML pages to databases easier, but went on to become a full platform including an integrated development environment and full scripting language by the second version, which came out the following year.
Allaire corporation, which was founded by the two, was acquired by Macromedia in 2001. Macromedia itself was then acquired by Adobe four years later.
While it’s 20 years old, ColdFusion has seen twice that number of released, including updates, and while you may not hear much about it these days, Adobe continues to push out updates for multiple releases.
This month alone, Adobe has already pushed out update 16 and a a prerelease build refresh for ColdFusion 10 and a prerelease build refresh for ColdFusion 11.
ColdFusion 11 was released less than a year ago, and removed many of the features identified as “deprecated” in prior releases. While in the past, users were able to continue using certain tags or functions, 11 eliminated that.
In 2012, Adobe released a roadmap for ColdFusion, projecting development of the product to continue to the year 2021.
Ever since the dawn of computing, computer programming has always been a subject that has been heavily influenced by math and science. Just the thought of programming, where a person sits in front of a computer staring at lines and lines of code on end, does not sound like an exciting career to most. However, there is one initiative that has recently come to pass to let the “Average Joe” create a simple program without having to break a sweat or strain their brain cells. This initiative has been called The Hour of Code.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama released a video on YouTube that challenges Americans of all ages, races, and credos to learn a programming language. Along with this challenge, President Obama has teamed up with various students, teachers, businesses, and non-profit organizations that are taking steps to support and enhance Computer Science within the American school system. With this in mind, President Obama challenges Americans not just be participants of technology, but to engage in the creation of it:
“Don’t just buy a new video game, make one. Don’t just download the latest app, help design it. Don’t just play on your phone, program it.”
President Obama continues his speech by stating that learning how to program code is not just important for your future, but it is important for the country’s future as well. The more programmers our country has, the more America will stay on the “cutting edge” of technology.
To help give the public a taste of how computer programming has evolved, along with how fun it can be to create something using a computer, The Hour of Code (THOC) website will show you. To describe what THOC is all about, I have provided a brief summary from the site’s about page below.
“Code.org is a non-profit dedicated to expanding participation in computer science education by making it available in more schools, and increasing participation by women and underrepresented students of color. Our vision is that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer programming. We believe computer science should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra.”
On THOC’s website, participants can program code using the following methods:
Tutorials for beginners – Learn the basic concepts of Computer Science with drag and drop programming.
Tutorials that teach JavaScript – Learn the basics of JavaScript programming while creating fun drawings with your code.
No device or internet? Try ‘unplugged’ computer science – Using a pre-defined “Robot Vocabulary,” students will figure out how to guide each other to accomplish specific tasks without discussing them first.
Tutorial apps for any device – Learn core programming logic, starting from super-basic programming, for ages 4+, on iOS or Android (or Web browser)
Other programming languages – Choose from 3 activities designed to give you your first experience programming.
Make your own apps – Know some programming already? Learn to make an iPhone game in an hour!
Other learning options – A collection of 8 fun activities for children of all ages to try programming.
Are you still not convinced that programming can be easy? See actress Angela Bassett, actor Ashton Kutcher, and singer Shakira get involved with The Hour of Code.
When you hear the name Gabe Newell, what immediately comes to mind? For most of us, it’s probably Valve, Steam, Half-Life or some combination of the three. Not many would immediately equate Newell to coding as it’s easy to forget that he’s a programmer first and lord of Valve second. That’s why Google recently invited Newell to speak to computer science students as part of the Hour of Code – a campaign dedicated to getting students interesting in coding and computer science.
In the below Google Hangout, you’ll get to hear how Newell got into coding and how having knowledge in computer science greatly impacted his life. If you’re already a coder, you’ll want to check it out to get more insight into one of the most famous programmers of our time. For those who aspire to be coders, Newell might just inspire you to bust open that C++ or Visual Basic book and start studying.
Oh, and those of you wanting to hear about Half-Life 3, you’re not getting it here. You will still want to watch the video though. You might just learn something.
A new campaign looks to teach people about a “superpower” that is only being taught in about 10% of U.S. schools.
We’re talking about programming, and an array of high-profile tech figures and celebrities are throwing their support behind the new initiative.
Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, and Gabe Newell are some of the big names that participated in a new ad called “What Most Schools Don’t Teach.”
In the video, they discuss how they all got started in coding and why they think it’s important that more people learn the process.
Check it out:
The push come from Code.org, a non-profit foundation dedicated to increasing the amount of computer programming education available to everyone.
“Our vision is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn how to code. We believe computer science and computer programming should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra,” they say.
Code.org was founded by entrepreneurs Hadi and Ali Partovi, who between them have been early investors in Facebook, Dropbox, airbnb, Zappos, and Indiegogo.
It’s that time of the year again – Facebook has just opened up registration for its annual Hacker Cup, “an annual worldwide programming competition where hackers compete against each other for fame, fortune, glory and a shot at the title of world champion.”
This is the third Hacker Cup that Facebook has hosted.
“Hacking is core to how we build at Facebook. Whether we’re building a prototype for a major product like Timeline at a Hackathon, creating a smarter search algorithm, or tearing down walls at our new headquarters, we’re always hacking to find better ways to solve problems. In the Hacker Cup, programmers from around the world will be judged on accuracy and speed as they race to solve algorithmic problems to advance through up to five rounds of programming challenges. This is your chance to compete against the world’s best programmers for awesome prizes and the title of World Champion,” says Facebook.
Of course, hackathons are some of the main ways that companies (Facebook included) come up with potential new products and cool new features to said products. Facebook, for one, is pretty proud of its hacker roots.
The registration period will last for a few weeks, followed by some online elimination rounds. The finals are always held on campus in Menlo Park.
Attention Hackers! The dates have been set for Facebook Hacker Cup 2013. Jan 7 – Jan 27– Registration Jan 25 – Jan 27 — Online Qualification Round Feb 2 — Online Elimination Round 1 Feb 9 — Online Elimination Round 2 Feb 16 — Online Elimination Round 3 March 22 -23 — Onsite Finals at Facebook Registration will open next week – stay tuned! Powered by socialditto1,000+ likes · 220 comments
Minecraft is an absurdly popular video game, but it’s becoming much more than that. Teachers are beginning to use it in the classroom to teach basic STEM skills, and Mojang will soon use it to teach basic programming.
Mojang announced today that it’s working on Minecraft: Pi Edition for the Raspberry Pi, the $35 Linux computer. The hope is that kids, adults and anybody else can hack away at this version of Minecraft and come away with some basic programming skills in the process.
Minecraft: Pi Edition is based on Pocket Edition, the iOS and Android version of Minecraft. Unlike those versions, however, Minecraft: Pi Edition will be totally free. It’s part of a partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to get more kids interested in programming on cheap hardware that anybody can afford.
It should be noted that this version of Minecraft is still fully playable. In fact, Mojang encourages players to just start out building objects in Minecraft before moving on to code-related actions. Even then, learning code should pretty straightforward for most as players will be learning code in the context of Minecraft as they manipulate the world around them.
Minecraft: Pi Edition is a great move on the part of Mojang and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It can be difficult to educate children, but turning their education into games is a great way of making it actually fun. A game like Minecraft, which kids love, should be even more effective than other programming and educational games that feel more patronizing than fun.
Google, the company whose code of conduct begins with the words “Don’t be evil,” has uploaded a new video to its developer channel talking about its programming language Dart, which Google calls its “evil plot to make it easier for you to build web apps.”
It’s a 40-minute video that talks about the programming language and its features.
“When we announced Dart, it kicked up a bit of a dust storm,” says Dart engineer Bob Nystrom in the YouTube description for the video. “In this talk, I discuss the challenges that Google and others face when building web apps today. I introduce Dart and show how its features were designed specifically to address some of those challenges.”
“You’ll see how Dart protects you from many of the dark corners and sharp edges of JavaScript and the DOM,” he adds. “When your programs grow and evolve over time, you’ll see how Dart can help keep your app nimble and maintainable. Thanks to Dart’s Dart to JavaScript compiler, you’ll see how you get all of that while still being able to run on any browser that supports modern JS and without the bad karma of fracturing the web.”
Google has been uploading tons of videos of sessions from Google I/O, and these two deal specifically with the Dart programming language, so if you’re looking to learn more about it, and were unable to attend the event, you’re in luck.
The first video is from the session: Dart – A Modern Web Language. Here’s the video’s description:
The two creators of Dart will discuss the rationale behind Dart’s design and its impact on web scalability and performance. They’ll also present how Dart helps developers innovate by increasing their productivity without breaking backwards compatibility.
The second is from the session: Migrating Code from GWT to Dart. Here’s the description:
Curious to learn how to port your GWT code to Dart? In this session, we will go over Dart equivalents for various GWT libraries and idioms, techniques for interoperating with existing GWT server backends, and tricks to allow Dart code to talk to existing GWT and Javascript code.
According to Google, you should learn Dart because:
Not about ‘best’, all languages have strengths and weaknesses
It is fun to learn new languages, bilingualism is good for the brain and career
Dart is an important new language for Structured Web Applications
You can’t really evaluate a language without using it first
Last week, we heard that the long-time Facebook litigators Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had started their own venture capital company. In an interview on CNBC, the twins weren’t too forthcoming with the details, but did say that the company would focus on “early stage disruptive start-ups.”
“We’re looking for companies…where we can add both capital and operational experience and sort of make an impact and work with the entrepreneurs to build their team,” said Cameron Winklevoss.
Now, they’re looking for software engineers. Well, Cameron Winklevoss is. But since his Twitter details still boasts that “he’s 6’5″, 220 and there’s two of me,” we’ll just assume that both the twins are in on it.
On Tuesday, Cameron Winklevoss tweeted this to his followers:
We reported back in February that Microsoft launched the Visual Studio 11 beta for developers to try ou and give their thoughts before the actual product launch. Microsoft says that there has been “significant” community response to the beta and so they are introducing some changes to the user interface to satisfy the needs of the community.
The community feedback for the Visual Studio 11 beta has been corralled into three key areas:
An overall desire for more visual “energy” and contrast
Calls for a more balanced application of Metro styling
A desire for greater icon clarity and differentiation through the use of color
To that effect, Microsoft has made some significant changes to Visual Studio 11 for the release candidate version. The company has provided before and after comparisons to show the changes that were made.
Visual Studio 11 Beta
Visual Studio 11 RC
The first problem was there was not enough color. Many users complained that everything was too gray. To that end, they have taken steps to colorize more of the components that developers will work with. Apparently colorize means turning everything blue, but blue and gray are a nice combination. The other change is bringing more colors to the status bar to denote different statuses from development to debug mode.
Since Visual Studio 11 is likely to launch alongside Windows 8, Microsoft has been applying the Metro style to the interface in the form of using all caps for the tool window titles. These have been returned to normal with only the top level menu items going all caps for greater emphasis.
To better fit into the Metro style, Microsoft has also created a new window chrome. No longer will there be a blue border around the window to denote the OS namesake. Now the entire window is the same color to bring the entire thing together. I find it more aesthetically pleasing, but some are sure to disagree.
Probably the biggest change introduced in the Visual Studio 11 beta was the removal of color from icons. This obviously created some confusion for similar looking commands since color is a great way to tell these apart. Microsoft has heard the complaints and will be adding color back to select commands.
Color is also being added back into the icons within the Solution Explorer, IntelliSense and the application icons. This should make everything more readable and easier to distinguish.
It’s obvious that Microsoft cares about their users by making these important changes to Visual Studio 11. There’s still more work to be done though before the official launch sometime this year. If you have yet to download it, check out the Visual Studio 11 beta and keep sending your feedback.
A big theme in the development scene these days is how we can make creation via code easier and more fluid for the average user. Not everybody has the time, patience or education to learn a programming language, let alone the two or three that are required to create an app or software program. There have been some strides lately with The App Builder and Game Maker, but a lot of development is still firmly out of reach.
Augmented reality company metaio doesn’t like that so they set off to do something about it. The company’s tools contained in the metaio Mobile SDK have been a huge hit for developers wanting to create AR experiences on mobile devices. It has seen over 10,000 downloads with 1,000 active developers. There are almost 200 applications out there now built on their Mobile SDK with 900 currently in development.
“The response from the developer community was phenomenal,” said metaio’s CTO Peter Meier. “It however inspired us to offer software that would put this technology in the hands of designers, content providers, publishers, and the average users who might not have extensive programming knowledge.”
That’s why the company is now introducing the metaio Creator. It’s aimed squarely at “non-developers, designers and people who have the desire to create amazing AR experiences but with to do so without using a hard-coding environment.” The Creator is compatible with junaio, a mobile AR browser, and can be used to quickly create cloud-based AR content for Android and iOS devices.
In an even more exciting news, the next update for junaio will introduce HTML and JavaScript support, so developers will be able to expand their AR applications to do even more. Looking even further ahead, the metaio Creator will allow users to upload their creations to all of metaio’s software including the Mobile SDK.
“The most important thing for metaio is to cultivate development and content creation for the entire community,” said Head of US Marketing Trak Lord. “Programmers, users, designers, artists – everyone should be able to live in the Augmented City.”
From May 8 through 21, the metaio Creator will be 30 percent off. The price is still a pretty hefty $227, but it may be worth it if it delivers on its promise of advanced AR creation without the need for expansive programming knowledge. There is also a demo available for you to try out.
Now that summer has begun for all those kids still in college, it’s high time to find a summer job. If you’re a programmer or developer in college, chances are you already have that summer job. Google Summer of Code exploded this year with over 1,000 students representing countries from all around the world.
In its eighth year running, Summer of Code saw the highest number of applications and applicants all vying for a coveted spot with one of the 180 organizations, including Twitter, that are offering programming internships this summer. Google received 6,685 applications from 4,258 students representing 98 countries.
Unfortunately, not everybody can make it, but a large number of them did. In fact, this year saw more students being accepted than ever before. There are 1,212 students from 69 countries participating in this year’s Summer of Code.
India is at the top spot this year with 227 students having been accepted in the program. The United States is in second with 172 students. German is in third with 72 students. The rest of the students came from a variety of other countries including Russia, China, Poland, Sri Lanka, Romania, France, Canada and more.
Google makes special note of a student from Mauritius being accepted into the program, a first for the small African nation. It just proves that programming is starting to be accepted and proliferate throughout the world. Like art and music, code is a universal language that can tie people together.
In other fantastic news, this year set a new record for the number of women accepted into the program. Out of the 1,212 students accepted this year, 8.3 percent identified themselves as women. That’s up from 7.1 percent last year. Here’s hoping that number can get above 10 percent next year. We need more women in computer science and programs like this are perfect for fostering that kind of interest early on.
The next update will see Google breaking down students by university. I hope my Alma Mater, the University of Kentucky, will be proudly representing this year. They have a fantastic computer science program that doesn’t get enough credit for all the awesome work they do.
Even if you do happen to be NASA, sorting through 100 terabytes of data and images amassed over the past thirty years of planetary exploration is still a daunting task. NASA, however, had decided to make the best of the situation and announced an open competition for developers to build mobile and web-based apps that will increase the general public’s access to the colossal amount of information archived in the Planetary Data System.
The NASA Tournament Lab is collaborating with the TopCoder community to host the competition, which is now entering its second phase of the PDS Challenge series. The goal of the collaboration is to hopefully build new and different types of apps with the non-technical users in mind, making it easier for children or instructors to access PDS’s trove of data.
Competition registration is open now through 6:00PM EST Friday, April 20, at TopCoder’s website. This stage of the PDS Challenge series is offering $13,000 in total cash awards, an invitation to visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, to experience the Mars Science Laboratory mission landing on site and an opportunity to meet members of the NASA astronaut-led judging panel.
“There is a huge untapped potential for the extraction of knowledge and insight from within the PDS archive which could be transformed by average people from different, non-scientific walks of life,” said Jason Crusan, NASA Chief Technologist for Human Exploration and Operations. “These kinds of Challenges are being made to produce useful tools which will allow, for example, high school-level students to access, organize and make their own discoveries from this huge volume of digital data.”
This task looks to be no slouch, either. Given that PDS has fourteen different search tools dedicated to just the search of data related to Mars, typically divided up into how the information was collected (e.g., images captured by the Viking Orbiter or the Mars Pathfinder), entrants into the competition will most definitely need to wear their developer Nikes.
