Sponsored By:

• Linode: Receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Promo Code: linode.com/coder
• Datadog: Try Datadog free by starting a your 14-day trial and receive a free t-shirt once you install the agent.

Links:

• Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device — Microsoft will acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00 per share, in an all-cash transaction valued at $68.7 billion
• Microsoft Effort to Buy Activision Spurred by Misconduct Fallout at Gamemaker
• Bobby Kotick interview — Bobby Kotick has been CEO of Activision Blizzard since its inception in the merger of Activision and Blizzard in 2008, and he was also CEO of Activision for decades before that. He engineered the $5.9 billion acquisition of King, maker of Candy Crush Saga, in 2015.
• "The deal that will change the industry forever" — This is not only the biggest games M&A deal of recent years, or even the past decade, but the largest in the industry's history.
• Xbox on Twitter — Xbox is committed to our journey for inclusion in every aspect of gaming. We hold all teams to this commitment. We’re looking forward to extending our culture of proactive inclusion to the great teams across Activision Blizzard.
• Vivek Sharma on Twitter — What a time to be alive! Some thoughts on Microsoft + ActiveVision with my usual caveat of these being my own musing and nothing much to do with our work at Meta
• marak 🗿 on Twitter — What's up @Github? Ten days since you removed my ability to publish to NPM and fix the Infinity Zalgo bug in colors.js
• Duane O'Brien on Twitter — The crux of this thread is: we sponsored faker.js, I don't think it helped the maintainer much, we didn't get any notice, and I'd do it all again.
• faker - Open Collective
• Dutch Regulator Says Apple's Plan for Third-Party In-App Payments is Insufficient — As a result, the ACM has hit Apple with an initial 5 million euro fine as a consequence, and fines will continue to be assessed at 5 million euros per week up to a maximum of 50 million euros until Apple complies.
• Introduction to Celery — Celery communicates via messages, usually using a broker to mediate between clients and workers. To initiate a task the client adds a message to the queue, the broker then delivers that message to a worker.
• GE Z-Wave Plus Smart Outdoor Switch — No wiring required. Simply plug in the device and connect to your hub for convenient ON/OFF functions.
• Deezer plans

Plus Objective-C's return to grace, Mike’s big bet on .NET, and more!

Links:

• The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2019 — The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.
• Hello .Net Foundation - dominickm.com — I am pleased to share that I have joined the .Net Foundation.
• Avalonia: A multi-platform .NET UI framework — Avalonia is a WPF-inspired cross-platform XAML-based UI framework providing a flexible styling system and supporting a wide range of OSs: Windows (.NET Framework, .NET Core), Linux (GTK), MacOS, Android and iOS.
• Google’s Stadia looks like an early beta of the future of gaming — “The future of gaming is not a box,” according to Google. “It’s a place.” Just like how humans have built stadiums for sports over hundreds of years, Google believes it’s building a virtual stadium, aptly dubbed Stadia, for the future of games to be played anywhere.
• Stadia — Push the envelope of game development with Stadia.
• Rust is not a good C replacement | Drew DeVault’s Blog — The kitchen sink approach doesn’t work. Rust will eventually fail to the “jack of all trades, master of none” problem that C++ has. Wise languages designers start small and stay small. Wise systems programmers extend this philosophy to designing entire systems, and Rust is probably not going to be invited. I understand that many people, particularly those already enamored with Rust, won’t agree with much of this article. But now you know why we are still writing C, and hopefully you’ll stop bloody bothering us about it.
• Introduction to Python Development at Linux Academy — This course is designed to teach you how to program using Python. We'll cover the building blocks of the language, programming design fundamentals, how to use the standard library, third-party packages, and how to create Python projects. In the end, you should have a grasp of how to program.
• Marc-Etienne M.Léveillé on Twitter — Here's something interesting: the backdoor in ASUS Update Setup.exe is _again_ located in the CRT, just like the CCleaner case and recent games with a backdoor. This time in _crtExitProcess.