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The term “Progressive Web App” was coined by Google engineer Alex Russell in a blog post in June 2015. The concept describes a web application that adopts a set of features progressively — it works for every user regardless of browser, but adds capabilities like offline access, installation, and push notifications for users whose browsers support them. Read more
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On January 27, 2016, DeepMind published the Nature paper “Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search” describing the AlphaGo system and simultaneously announcing that AlphaGo would face Lee Sedol — 9-dan professional Go player, 18-time world champion, and widely considered the strongest player of the 2010s — in a five-game match in Seoul in March 2016. The paper disclosed that AlphaGo had already defeated Fan Hui, the European Go champion, 5–0 in a formal match held secretly at DeepMind’s London offices on October 5–9, 2015 — the first time a computer program had beaten a professional Go player in a formal match on a standard 19×19 board without handicap. Previous Go AIs, including Zen and Crazy Stone, used Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with handcrafted evaluation functions and required 4-stone or larger handicaps to compete with professional players. Fan Hui, a 2-dan professional and European champion, was ranked approximately 700th in the world — a professional level, but far below top-10 world ranking where Lee Sedol operated. Go’s complexity — a branching factor of approximately 250 legal moves per turn (versus chess’s 35), a game tree estimated at 10^170 positions, and position evaluation that defied the heuristic functions effective in chess — had led the AI community to expect computational professional-level Go was decades away. Read more
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Let’s Encrypt entered public beta on December 3, 2015, removing the invite requirement from its limited beta (started November 2015) and opening free TLS certificate issuance to any website operator. The certificate authority was founded in April 2014 by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, and IdenTrust — with IdenTrust cross-signing Let’s Encrypt’s intermediate certificate, which allowed browsers to trust Let’s Encrypt-issued certificates immediately without adding a new root CA to browser trust stores (a process taking years). The ACME protocol (Automatic Certificate Management Environment, finalized as RFC 8555 in 2019) allowed a server daemon to prove control of a domain through either an HTTP-01 challenge (placing a token at a specific URL path on the domain) or a DNS-01 challenge (adding a TXT record to the domain’s DNS zone), then receive a signed 90-day DV (Domain Validation) certificate. The 90-day lifetime was deliberately shorter than the 1–3 year certificates sold by commercial CAs: short-lived certificates reduced the window of exposure from key compromise, and the automation model made renewal every 60–90 days practical. Certbot, the EFF-developed command-line client, automated the challenge-response and certificate installation process for Apache and Nginx on Linux in a single command. Read more
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For years, HTTPS was associated mainly with banks, shopping carts, and login pages — places where passwords and credit card numbers obviously needed protection. A simple personal website or blog routinely stayed on plain HTTP. Certificates cost money, expired annually, required configuration, and for a blog about recipes or software notes, the effort seemed disproportionate. Read more
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Google open-sourced TensorFlow on November 9, 2015 under the Apache 2.0 license. The project emerged from DistBelief, Google’s internal first-generation distributed deep-learning system used to train the 2012 ImageNet model that sparked the deep-learning surge. TensorFlow was a complete rewrite, designed to be more flexible, faster on single machines, and easier to use outside Google. The initial release supported Python and C++ on Linux and Mac, with CUDA GPU acceleration available from day one. Read more
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Every November 10, Turkiye remembers Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Read more
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Microsoft announced the Surface Book at a press event on October 6, 2015 — Panos Panay introduced it as “the ultimate laptop” — pricing it at $1,499 (Core i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, integrated GPU only) up to $2,699 (Core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, discrete GPU). It was the first Microsoft Surface product with a clamshell laptop form factor (previous Surfaces were tablets with optional keyboard accessories). The Surface Book’s 13.5-inch display (3000×2000 resolution, 267 ppi, 3:2 aspect ratio) was mounted on a proprietary Dynamic Fulcrum Hinge — a curved hinge composed of rotating cylinders that kept the display and keyboard close together without touching the display when open, and which left a visible gap between the closed display and keyboard base. The hinge connected the display and keyboard base with four proprietary electrical contacts that carried USB 3.0 and a PCIe-like signal path, allowing the discrete GPU in the keyboard base to be accessed by the CPU and GPU in the display unit when the laptop was in clamshell mode. Read more
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Apple announced the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus on September 9, 2015, introducing the A9 processor and 3D Touch. The A9 was co-manufactured by both TSMC (16nm FinFET) and Samsung (14nm FinFET) — an unusual dual-source arrangement that caused public concern about performance differences between the two variants, though Apple stated the real-world gap was within a few percent. The A9 carried approximately 2 billion transistors, two high-performance CPU cores clocked at 1.85 GHz, and a six-core PowerVR GT7600 GPU. Compared to the A8, Apple claimed 70% faster CPU performance and 90% faster GPU performance while using the same battery size. Read more
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Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was one of the people who helped turn programming from a practical craft into a serious intellectual discipline. He was born in Rotterdam in 1930. His parents were both highly educated, and Dijkstra initially studied theoretical physics at Leiden University. Read more
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Larry Page published a blog post on August 10, 2015 announcing that Google was restructuring under a new holding company named Alphabet Inc. — the parent company of Google and a collection of separately managed subsidiaries. The restructuring took effect immediately: Sundar Pichai (who had been Google’s SVP of Products overseeing Search, Maps, Android, Chrome, and YouTube) became CEO of Google (the subsidiary), while Larry Page became CEO of Alphabet and Sergey Brin became President of Alphabet. Page explained the rationale in the announcement: Google had become “a bit uncomfortable” as a single entity encompassing both its highly profitable core businesses and long-term research projects that required different management cultures, time horizons, and capital allocation approaches. Keeping Waymo’s (then Google Self-Driving Car Project’s) multi-decade R&D investment lumped inside Google’s advertising revenue reporting made it difficult to assess the performance of either business on its own terms. Read more
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Microsoft released Windows 10 on July 29, 2015 and offered it as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and 8.1 users for one year. The offer addressed Windows 8’s poor reception: launched in October 2012, Windows 8 removed the Start menu in favor of a touch-first tiled interface that laptop and desktop users largely rejected. Windows 8.1 in October 2013 partially reversed course. Windows 10 went further by restoring the Start menu and making the modern interface optional. Read more
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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2015, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more
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Microsoft announced Visual Studio Code at Build 2015 on April 29, 2015 and released it as a free public preview the same day, with VS Code 1.0 (the first stable release) shipping April 14, 2016. The project was led by Erich Gamma — one of the Gang of Four (co-author of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, 1994) and the original creator of JUnit — who had joined Microsoft in 2011 specifically to build a new developer tool for the web era. VS Code was built on GitHub’s Electron framework (then called “Atom Shell,” renamed Electron in 2015), which wrapped Chromium’s rendering engine and Node.js in a single bundle, enabling a cross-platform desktop application built in TypeScript, HTML, and CSS — running on Windows, macOS, and Linux from the same codebase. The Monaco editor component (VS Code’s text editing core) was separately open-sourced and became the basis for browser-based code editing in Azure DevOps, GitHub’s web editor (., now github.dev), CodeSandbox, StackBlitz, and many other web IDEs. VS Code itself was published as open source under the MIT License on GitHub (github.com/microsoft/vscode) at launch. Read more
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Google launched Google Photos at Google I/O on May 28, 2015, spinning it out from Google+ Photos as a standalone product with a simple and powerful offer: free unlimited photo storage for images up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p, with no storage quota against the user’s Google Drive or Gmail space. Google+ had been launched in June 2011 partly as a photo-sharing platform, and over four years it had accumulated enormous numbers of photos; by separating Google Photos from the declining Google+ social network, Google preserved the photo infrastructure and its 200+ million existing users without requiring them to maintain Google+ engagement. The pricing and capacity offer was immediately competitive: Apple’s iCloud offered 5 GB free (shared across photos, mail, and backups), Dropbox offered 2 GB free, and Amazon Prime Photos (November 2014) offered unlimited photo storage to Prime subscribers but only 5 GB for videos. Free unlimited storage for full-resolution photos — at a scale Google could afford because photo storage costs had declined and because Google’s use of the photo data for machine learning purposes provided indirect commercial value — positioned Google Photos as the primary cloud photo backup destination for Android users and a compelling alternative for iOS users. Read more
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The first Apple Watch went on sale on April 24, 2015 in two sizes — 38mm and 42mm — and three collections: Sport starting at $349, Watch starting at $549, and Edition in 18-karat gold starting at $10,000. It used Apple’s S1 system-in-package, a small OLED display with Force Touch, heart-rate sensing, accelerometers, Taptic Engine haptic feedback, and a Digital Crown for scrolling. Watch required an iPhone 5 or later as a paired device and communication partner. Read more
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USB Type-C arrived on major consumer devices in early 2015: the 12-inch MacBook (announced March 9, released April 10, $1,299) shipped with a single USB-C port as its only connector, and the second-generation Chromebook Pixel (announced March 11, $999) added two USB-C ports alongside standard USB-A. Both used USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) over the new connector. The MacBook’s single-port approach drew significant criticism because users needed a $79 USB-C to USB Adapter or a $79 USB-C to MagSafe adapter to connect legacy accessories or charge via existing cables. Read more
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One sentence has caused programmers pain for a very long time: “It works on my machine.” Docker, which released version 1.0 last June and has grown quickly since then, is the most practical answer I have seen to this problem. Read more
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The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B was released on February 2, 2015 at the same $35 price as the Pi 1 Model B+, replacing the BCM2835 SoC (single ARM11 core at 700 MHz) with the BCM2836 (quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 at 900 MHz). The Cortex-A7 delivered approximately 6× the raw compute performance of the ARM11 in multithreaded workloads, and the upgrade to 1 GB LPDDR2 RAM (from 512 MB) made concurrent processes, browser tabs, and compiled code workloads materially faster. Microsoft announced Windows 10 IoT Core support for the Pi 2 the same day as the hardware release — the first Raspberry Pi to support any version of Windows, enabled by the ARMv7-A instruction set that Windows requires (the Pi 1’s ARMv6 was incompatible with Windows Phone and Windows RT binary distributions). Read more
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Microsoft held a “Windows 10: The Next Chapter” event on January 21, 2015 in Redmond, revealing major features of Windows 10 in detail for the first time since the Technical Preview had launched in October 2014. The most visible reversal of Windows 8’s decisions was the return of the Start menu — not the Windows 7 style menu (a list of programs), but a hybrid: a left panel listing recently used and all apps alphabetically, and a right panel with the Windows 8 live tiles resizable in a grid. Live tiles remained optional — users could remove them entirely or populate the right panel with a traditional app grid, giving both the visual dashboard of Windows 8 and the familiar Start menu feel of Windows 7. The Start button on the taskbar was restored as a permanent fixture (Windows 8 had removed it; Windows 8.1 had restored the button but sent it to the full-screen Start Screen). Read more
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Docker had released version 1.0 in June 2014 — its first production-ready release — and by December 2014 adoption was accelerating past developer experimentation into actual production deployments. Docker Hub, the public registry, hosted over 60,000 images by the end of 2014. Major cloud providers were integrating Docker support: Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) launched in November 2014 as Amazon’s first managed container service, and Google Container Engine (later renamed GKE) launched in beta in November 2014 built on Kubernetes, which Google had open-sourced in June. Read more