News
Atom is working on a new experimental editor called Xray. The goal of Xray is to allow rapid development and testing of radical ideas, which won’t risk the stability of Atom. The first update for the project was announced on March 5, in which Atom announced Xray would start as a 12-week experiment, and the beginning focus would be Text shaping, Anchors and Selections.
It's possible to write CSS that will work in all browsers, regardless of age. Jen Simmons details this process in seven videos: how to use the latest CSS technologies like CSS Grid, without compromising users older browsers. All the videos can also be found out the mozilla outreach youtube channel, Layout Land.
Flutter is all the rage this week, and we found a neat article (from August of last year) that goes into some specifics we haven't yet seen summarized. Mohamed Labouardy combines Flutter and AWS Lambda to make a serverless mobile application. Go through Mohamed’s step by step tutorial to get a movies listing app built with Flutter up and running!
It ends up keeping your GitHub green (active) isn’t as important as you might have thought. 17% of users on GitHub pushed no code publicly last year. If you still aren’t feeling good about yourself, only 1.4% of users pushed more code greater than 100 times. In Ben Frederickson’s neat piece, ‘Why GitHub Won't Help You With Hiring’, you can also mess with an interactive graph to see how your number of followers compares with your friends, coworkers, and ofcourse Linus Torvalds.
John Carmack took a week off to build a neural network with C++ on a OpenBSD system. John details the week, which was a break from work for him, in a facebook post. He found himself watching some Stanford CS213N lectures, debating the value of C++ and eventually having a hacky neural network that he will likely use when an established NN library isn’t needed.
Experienced in automated testing? Check out this micro-course on Ruby testing. The course contains four lessons that will help you get comfy with testing in Ruby. No experience with Ruby is required to start.
Dmitri Melikyan’s collection of ‘Practical Go Benchmarks’ is a great set of interesting algorithms in Go, and how they benchmark themselves. If you want to improve your Go skills and learn more about algorithms, this is a good place to start. If you just want to brush up on your algorithm knowledge, check out Introduction to Algorithms instead.
Yes, you already have a linter, so why do you need Prettier? Good question, and Saransh Kataria has the answer. Prettier automates formatting, so you don’t have to argue about things like tabs vs. spaces, and it is easy to set up. This makes working on big projects a lot easier to collaborate on, and in general makes your code look a lot better / readable.
It takes Makefiles, Webpack, Babel, Transpiling, Flowtype, and a couple more things to get a JavaScript application running. With so many things to get up and running in JS, one can get overwhelmed quickly. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Dive into Jesse Hallett’s piece ‘The Lost Art of the Makefile’ before you start your next JavaScript project. Especially if you want to learn when to stick with Webpack, why JS needs a build step, and a solid intro and practical use case for the Makefile.
Tools for automated testing, like Travis CI, are great. However, when automated testing is a 100% use case, coding without similar tools can be intimidating. Nader Safadi goes a step further and refers to coding without automated testing tools is a ‘Paralyzing Fear’. Nader discusses how his team uses testing tools like Elm-Tests, WDIO and SimpleTests, and how using this tools has led him to an insecurity without their presence.
No more worrying about what exactly the Hacky word means your boss posted on your code. Hackterms is an urban dictionary for Hacker / Computer buzzwords. Some currently trending words are code smell and rubber duck debugging.
Last week Google announced the beta for Flutter, which was designed to make native apps beautiful. Top features include high-velocity development, expressive and flexible designs, and high-quality experiences. Well, that is great and all, but for all the Android devs out there, Harshit Dwivedi went ahead asked the question for you in his piece ‘What the F**tter!? Understanding Flutter as an Android (Java) Developer’. In this piece, Harshit doesn’t debate on which is better, but instead will help you get a Flutter project up and going.
Phantomjs is suspending all development immediately. Ariya Hidayat announced that there hasn’t been active contribution, so PhantomJS will be archived. The last stable version will be 2.1.1.
Want to solve a fun problem with Ecto.Multi? Probably not, but after reading Lena Feldberg’s post about it you will no longer worry, and instead love Ecto.Multi. Take a look at the the NomNomsFarm GitHub Repo to see the toy elixir app that was built with GraphQL. If that was not fun enough for you try ‘Solving a Mysterious Heap Corruption Crash’ with Agnes
Machine Learning is hot, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple to learn. However, it might not be as hard to get started as you thought, Emmanuel Ameisen recommends always starting with a stupid model. Emmanuel argues that a baseline model helps you understand data and understand the task. He then talks about how to choose a baseline, and when to move on from it.
Mozilla has started an experiment in hopes of reducing bias during code reviews. The two part experiment aims to anonymize PRs and gather information on how blind reviews work. The project’s goal is to fight unintentional bias based off things like gender and race.
The long and winding road to become a senior developer is quite the trip. Alfonso Paredes Cervantes has some tips for anyone currently on the road to becoming a senior developer. Top tips include: (1) Know & keep priorities (2) Avoid assumptions (3) Analyze before coding. Not enough tips for you? Follow it up with Julia Evans’ tips on computer networking. tl;dr Learning takes a long time. - Julia Evans.
RedMonk’s programming language rankings are in. They rank based upon factors including number of pull requests, exclude forks, and historical rankings JavaScript landed on top, followed by Java and Python. However, RedMonk has some very interesting things to say about Go, Kotlin, Powershell and Rust, so make sure to check out the whole read.
Hillel Wayne discussed the importance of code documentation on Twitter, too.
https://twitter.com/atebitbyte/status/971478316484997120
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by Matthew Ray