Planet Ingres

 NODES is the biggest graph community gathering dedicated to applications, data intelligence, knowledge graphs, and AI. Let's find out what happened this year.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/99-professional/18536-the-gist-of-the-nodes-2025-dev-conference.html

 Claude Scientific Skills give Claude super powers, not just on coding, but about any science. We try them out to see what's on offer.

But first of all what are Claude Skills. If you're familiar with CustomGPTs then Skills is something similar. They both enable the LLM to access specialized agents. In the Skills case, they are shaped as plugins which comprise of a mix of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load dynamically when trying to perform a task. 

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/18534-turn-claude-into-your-personal-research-assistant.html

 In cooperation with the Nebius AI cloud platform, JetBrains has launched a set of ten free courses for developers that demonstrate how to incorporate AI in their workflow to become 10X productive.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/18528-jetbrains-work-with-ai-effectively.html

 A new Advent calendar had joined those for Java, Kotlin and Rust. We now have  Advent of AI, a series of AI engineering challenges from Goose, that is already underway.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/204-challenges/18518-the-goose-advent-of-ai-has-commenced.html

 Connect to PostgreSQL database instances, run queries, create and manage connections and more, all from inside VSCode. Just announced, the extension simplifies talking to and managing PostgreSQL databases from the ease of the most popular IDE.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/90-tools/18512-postgresql-extension-for-visual-studio-code.html

 Hour Of Code has been renamed. This year and from now on it will be called "Hour Of AI", giving in to this AI-dictated era. Another indication that coding has shifted from a task of manual labor to one of automated generation. Code.org is a trend setter and crucial to kids' education relating to Computer Science, so the rebranding is highly significant.

 The concept of hardened images has been picking up lately. The logic behind them is to address the issues arising from running container images.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/240-devops/18526-bellsoft-introduces-hardened-container-images.html

 It's Advent, the time of year when we countdown the days to Christmas having fun doing daily coding challenges. Advents, in the programming sense, are events hosting programming puzzles announced every day till Christmas, aimed at a variety of skill levels.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/204-challenges/18494-advent-of-code-2025-commences.html

 A new course, thanks to Andrew Ng and his partnership with Box, that shows how you can leverage MCP servers to offload otherwise laborious and custom-made work.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/18489-build-ai-apps-with-mcp-servers-with-deeplearningai.html

 The official release of Vaadin MCP server is a reality.

What does it make different?

Yes I'm a fan of Vaadin. I've used it in a couple of projects and productivity was sky high. For those not initiated to the framework, Vaadin allows you to write Java code for the front-end and back-end; no Javascript required, which is an unlikely dream for full stack engineers that nevertheless turned to reality.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/80-java/18481-vaadin-now-does-mcp.html