As part of an indie game development studio, I've experienced the perks of using open source plugins on proprietary game engines. One open source plugin, BLUI by Aaron Shea, has been instrumental in our team's development process. It allows us to create user interface (UI) components using web-based programming like HTML/CSS and JavaScript. We chose to use this open source plugin, even though Unreal Engine (our engine of choice) has a built-in UI editor that achieves a similar purpose. We chose to use open source alternatives for three main reasons: their accessibility, their ease of implementation, and the active, supportive online communities that accompany open source programs.

In Unreal Engine's earliest versions, the only means we had of creating UI in the game was either through the engine's native UI integration, by using Autodesk's Scaleform application, or via a few select subscription-based Unreal integrations spread throughout the Unreal community. In all those cases, the solutions were either incapable of providing a competitive UI solution for indie developers, too expensive for small teams, or exclusively for large-scale teams and AAA developers.

After commercial products and Unreal's native integration failed us, we looked to the indie community for solutions. There we discovered BLUI. It not only integrates with Unreal Engine seamlessly but also maintains a robust and active community that frequently pushes updates and ensures the documentation is easily accessible for indie developers. BLUI gives developers the ability to import HTML files into the Unreal Engine and program them even further while inside the program. This allows UI created through web languages to integrate with the game's code, assets, and other elements with the full power of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other web languages. It also provides full support for the open source Chromium Embedded Framework.

Also: Why (some) agile teams fail

• Unplugging old batteries

  Python is famous for being a "batteries included" language—its standard library provides a versatile set of modules with the language—but there may be times when some of those batteries have reached their end of life. At the 2018 Python Language Summit, Christian Heimes wanted to suggest a few batteries that may have outlived their usefulness and to discuss how the process of retiring standard library modules should work.

  The "batteries included" phrase for Python came from the now-withdrawn PEP 206 in 2006. That PEP argued that having a rich standard library was an advantage for the language since users did not need to download lots of other modules to get real work done. That argument still holds, but there are some modules that are showing their age and should, perhaps, be unplugged and retired from the standard library.

• Advanced computing with IPython

  If you use Python, there's a good chance you have heard of IPython, which provides an enhanced read-eval-print loop (REPL) for Python. But there is more to IPython than just a more convenient REPL. Today's IPython comes with integrated libraries that turn it into an assistant for several advanced computing tasks. We will look at two of those tasks, using multiple languages and distributed computing, in this article.

  IPython offers convenient access to documentation, integration with matplotlib, persistent history, and many other features that greatly ease interactive work with Python. IPython also comes with a collection of "magic" commands that alter the effect of single lines or blocks of code; for example, you can time your code simply by typing %%time at the prompt before entering your Python statements. All of these features also work when using the Jupyter notebook with the IPython kernel, so you can freely switch between the terminal and the browser-based interface while using the same commands.

The NSA could have access to the code repositories residing on GitHub, which is now owned by Microsoft, if past practices of the Redmond-based software giant are any indicator.

Microsoft announced its acquisition of GitHub on 5 June. The company said at the time that GitHub had about 28 million developers working on 80 million repositories. Microsoft has been one of the bigger code contributors to the site.

The reaction from open-source developers to the acquisition was not exactly been salutary as can be seen from comments on Linux Weekly News.

Released this week was the first alpha of PHP 7.3 and I decided to take it for a spin with some benchmarks. While not as dramatic as going from PHP5 to PHP 7.0, the performance of PHP7 continues getting better.

PHP 7.3 so far introduces several new functions, finally drops support for BeOS, updates the bundled SQLite version, expands WebP support, improves PHP garbage collection, and other enhancements. PHP 7.3 is tentatively planned for release at the end of November while over the months ahead are more alphas/betas/RCs.