Babies can be mystical, confusing little buggers. Just when they appear to have conquered the art of sleeping through the night, they're up every other hour. They go ticking through the milestones fast and furious until all of a sudden, they're regressing.

There are as many ways to learn to code as there are ways to use your coding ability. You can learn it from college courses, books, online resources — or from one of several growing boot camps for developers of all ages. We talked to the founders of two such boot camps: David Graham of Code Ninjas, for kids 7–14 and Michael Choi of Coding Dojo, for teens and adults. They explained their different approaches, both of which give their students the ability to build their own applications.

Patrick Moberg has wasted hours of your life, or of the life of someone next to you in a waiting room. His studio Dots created the beautiful and addictive mobile game Dots (the thinking person's Candy Crush), and its sequels Two Dots and Dots & Co, all of which are on millions of phones. We talked to him about the game development process, his favourite games, and his children's book.

We like to say that people should "find their passion" to experience success in their careers and therefore, in their lives. If you really love something, it will feel easy and right. Right? That may actually be the worst possible way to approach new ventures.

The apps economy is suffering from a growing skills shortage, which can make it difficult to get a new software project off the ground. The good news is that there's still plenty of talent out there -- you just need to know where to look. This infographic from UpWork explains how to find and attract a remote development team that doesn't suck.

Apple is running a secret project, condenamed Marzipan, which will allow developers to build a single app that will work Apple's smartphone, tablet and computing devices. This will likely help bolster the offerings in their macOS App Store which is languishing behind its iOS sibling.

Many development teams have established .dev domains for testing their software. But a recent change means these connections will no longer work unless they are secured. While that's a good move - dev environments can be just as damaging if successfully attacked as production - this will mean many developer teams will need to make changes to their test environment.

Sometimes, great ideas come from the simplest places. Snap, Send, Solve was one of the first apps developed by Danny Gorog and his partners when they started their app development business, Outware Mobile. The genesis was the confluence of a Victorian government competition calling on developers to find innovative uses for publicly available data and a chance trip to a playground. From that, Gorog has gone on to build Snap Send Solve into a platform that is being exported to other countries.

The cycle in which ideas turn into software is getting shorter and shorter. By and large, this is a good thing as new functions are delivered to users faster than ever before. But one of the consequences is software bugs are introduced and sometimes missed. I suspect part of the reason is testing cycles are being squeezed. This is part of the root cause, I think, as to why a two year old bug was introduced into Linux.

Whenever a new version of iOS is announced, developers scramble to update their apps so they don't become disabled. For iOS 11, this is particularly important as support for 32-bit applications is dying off. This is also the reason a bunch of older iOS devices will no longer be upgradeable to the latest iOS. Over the weekend, my iPhone 7 Plus had over 30 apps that needed updating. That's a pain but I was amazed at how big those updates were.

When we look back at the history of Microsoft, as with many other large businesses, there are moments you can see where the company clearly got things wrong. Apple's collapse, before the return of Steve Jobs was precipitated by the battle fought between the rival Lisa and Mac camps. And in Redmond, Windows Vista was a turning point.

Following on from last week's news that iTunes will be coming to the Windows Store, WhatsApp is doing the same with their app. I haven't spied a listing for it yet, but MSPowerUser reports that a listing is up although it's just a wrapper for the app that's already available.

Over at freeCodeCamp, there's a guide to becoming a web developer. Created by GitHub user Kamranahmedse, the article points to three different paths; front-end development, back-end development and dev-ops.

Dear Lifehacker, I have a little background in coding, and I'd like to make an iOS app. I'm just not sure where to get started or what tools I need. Where do I start?

Twitter has always baffled me. It's value as a way to send short messages to a broad audience is almost unparalleled but the signal to noise ratio makes it challenging to extract value and to have your message heard. But developers who create ways to make the platform more useful will be interested in some new APIs and other changes Twitter has added to the API Platform Roadmap.

Most technology decisions are an exercise in compromise. When it comes to choosing the software you need you can choose to either buy or license applications developed by a third party or you can roll up your sleeves and create your own.

Hackathons are all the rage. Lock a bunch of smart people together with a problem to solve and enough food and drink to keep them fuelled and reap the whirlwind of creativity. But not all hackathons deliver instant value

Windows: Today, Microsoft released the newest version of its popular IDE Visual Studio 2017 for Windows, alongside a preview of the still in development Mac software. The biggest improvement comes in its installation screen, which finally lets you pick and choose which components to install.

Let's say you're new to web design, but you're intent on learning how to build a site from start to finish. It can be a lot of info to take in, but this interactive tool can at least help get you started with the design.