Not as much of a theme today for the links. A collection of tools that I thought might be of interest. DevDocs http://devdocs.io/ If you’ve ever used Dash on a Mac, DevDocs is a similar idea. A central place for technical documentation, with offline support and simple, quick search functionality. You can customize which docs you want to load, but unfortunately, MSDN isn’t an option at this point. Mostly web focused, so if that is your thing, this might be a great resource.

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I know I’ve written about static sites before. I’ve linked to some site generators and some complementary services, and now I’m going to add simple, CDN-based hosting to that list. All of these services allow you publish a static site with a simple command, and all offer free plans. Netlify https://www.netlify.com Netlify seems like the most full featured of this batch, but that may or may not be a good thing.

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BOTS! While the picture that forms in your head may vary when you hear that word, I suspect before too long it may become as common a term as social media is now. There is a proliferation of messaging bots at the moment. And as you may guess, that means a large number of services are popping up to enable the simple and convenient hosting, development and maintenance of your bots.

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Back in November, I wrote about reactive programming libraries for JavaScript. Today I’m going to write about some frameworks and libraries which sit on top of the reactive libraries and provide UI or application integration. Using these libraries you can write an app in a declarative manner and not have to worry about state management. Not every type of application benefits from this. At the moment, I’m working on a game with reactive programming, which I think may work well.

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It may be April Fool’s day, but these links are no joke. To be sure, I wrote this article on March 31st. ;) However, to mark the occasion, I’m going to have four links today instead of three. Mind blowing. My theme for these links is immutability. Specifically immutability in JavaScript. Arrays and objects, as well as the new Map and Set in JavaScript, are mutable. That is one can change their values and contents while maintaining a single reference to them.

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I thought I’d start keeping track of all of the errors that I work through as I work on several Angular 2 based projects. Many of these are not issues with Angular 2 per se, but perhaps your build tooling or even something silly you’ve done in your code. In any case, if it results in a semi-cryptic error in the console from Angular, then I’ll try to add it to my site here.

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I’ve mentioned Trello before as a personal productivity tool that many people use for managing software projects. I’ve used it myself for a few. Some people use the issue tracking tools provided by GitHub or Bitbucket to manage their tasks, and that works. But I prefer to leave those for bugs raised externally. Even working on my own, I find tools with workflows and drag and drop particularly pleasant to use.

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Dynamic programming languages and interpreted languages all have the benefit of being quick to use to write code. They have grown quite popular in the past years, driven mostly by the fluid nature of the web. The nebbish amongst us will usually lament the lack of static typing, but the genuine issue with these languages is usually quite simple: execution speed. So while they may be fast to write, they aren’t always fast to run.

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Today I’m revisiting microservices, but from a slightly different angle. While I still don’t believe microservices are a panacea, they certainly have a place in today’s technical ecosystem. If you aren’t going down the microservices as a service route that I mentioned before, then you will likely need to consider how to deploy and orchestrate your microservices, whether that is in-house or in-cloud. The whole concept of microservices just moves where the technical challenges lie, and in this case, pushes extra challenges into the territory of DevOps and Infrastructure.

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Today my links fall into the category of “dev tools”. Some may even lean into the “DevOps” territory. They are all language agnostic but mostly focus on web applications. LaunchDarkly https://launchdarkly.com/ LaunchDarkly calls itself “feature flags as a service” which seems like as good a description as any. It is a service that you integrate with your web application to allow you to roll out new features slowly, tracking the results.

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