I don’t write about it much, but I am a relatively prolific reader. My usual genres are in the mystery, thriller, techno-thriller range. However, I also dabble in science fiction and fantasy from time to time.
Full disclosure: more often than not, I listen to my books, not reading them in the strictest sense. That is really the only way I can manage to consume so many books while raising two little boys.
You may have noticed that I didn’t use the “Fun Links [Date]” title for this post. While I’m a fan of routine, I realized that both the fun links category and the date were part of the metadata of the entry. Not creating a relevant title was me being lazy.
Creating a title in the past either would have been a matter of repeating the names of the links in a list, or extracting a common theme.
It has been just one day shy of a year since I last posted. In that time I had grand plans of creating an automated system where I would capture fun links and save them somewhere and automatically generate the posts and emails to send out each week. Well, it turns out I just didn’t have the free time or energy to really get that sorted out.
That said, I have been using Pinboard to save any links I think are worth talking about, so at least I have a decent backlog to work with.
Today all of my links come from one company, which is Zeit. They build software to help developers and designers, with a mission of making cloud computing as easy and accessible as mobile computing.
They have a number of other open source projects and services other than the ones I mention here, so I would recommend checking them out at https://zeit.co
pkg
https://github.com/zeit/pkg
If you have ever wanted to distribute your Node.
ECMAScript modules in browsers
https://jakearchibald.com/2017/es-modules-in-browsers/
This is something that a lot of web developers have been waiting for since the concept of the standardized ES6 modules first appeared. Up to this point, we’ve had to pre-compile our modules into scripts that the browser could load and understand. Now we are starting to see browser native support (behind flags in most cases) to load these types of modules. It will be a while before we can use them directly for day to day use, but it should be interesting in the long run.
Reactide
http://reactide.io/
You know your web framework has reached a new level when someone creates a domain-specific IDE for it. That is just what Reactide is, a bespoke IDE for creating React apps. With an integrated web server and browser view, not to mention build tooling, it is an all in one package. Or it will be, it is still in active development.
Angular 4 Released
http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2017/03/angular-400-now-available.html
You read that correctly.
Many technical people like to come up with overly complicated solutions to problems. Like writing an app that you may only need to use once or twice. Does this sound like you? It certainly sounds like me.
A lot of the time, the reason is to challenge oneself. Or maybe it is because it is just plain enjoyable to procrastinate on real life while learning a new technology. Whatever the motivation, with today’s technology it doesn’t need to be a time-consuming process.
To mark the occasion of the release of Angular 2 (finally), I thought that an Angular 2 themed set of links would be appropriate. And since I’ve been heavily steeped in React lately, it also gave me a chance to come up for air a little bit and see what is going on.
Angular 2
https://angular.io
Can’t talk about Angular 2 without a link to the official page itself. This site is different to the one for Angular 1 and contains documentation and tutorials as you would expect.
Since I’m in the middle of delivering a React training course to some of my colleagues, I thought why not highlight something React-related.
So I’m starting off with some React-inspired alternatives to React. The concept of virtual DOM comparisons and one-way data flow has become very popular in the JavaScript world, so there has been a slew of copycat libraries emerge. Some are almost drop-in replacements, others take the concepts and run in a different direction.
A bit more of a theme today, and that is diagnostic API/HTTP clients. I don’t want to call them REST clients because they are much more general than that. But sometimes that is what they call themselves, perhaps to capitalize on the jargon bonus.
Postman
http://www.getpostman.com/
Postman is probably the most well known of this group. It started out as a Chrome plugin, but I see that there is now a Mac app as well.