Links (11,732 links)

I think we’re seeing the emphasis shift from valuing trivia to valuing tools. There’s a new set of baseline skills required in order to be successful as a front-end developer, and developers who don’t meet this baseline are going to start feeling more and more left behind as those who are sharing their knowledge start to assume that certain things go without saying.

A system for managing resource dependencies for client-side browser applications.

Setting up a LAMP stack on Virtualbox.

The collaboration on apps like GitHub should be exactly what happens on blog posts. The readers posting comments should read the entire article, and should offer constructive, polite criticism and suggestions, without any unnecessary negativity.

Everyday Carry, or EDC, generally refers to small items or gadgets worn, carried, or made available in pockets, holsters, or bags on a daily basis to manage common tasks or for use in unexpected situations or emergencies.

Hadn't seen this 2005-era post before.

Web standards: trifle. Not web standards: fruit cake.

I'm not the only one who's fond of a good cake analogy.

"A slow savings account would work exactly like a regular account -- I could pay money into it, and transfer money out. The difference would be: when I pay money in to a slow savings account, it appears in the available balance exactly one year later." I want one of these.

Let that picture sink in: at 180KB of JS on average, script isn’t some helper that gives meaning to pages in the breech, it is the meaning of the page. Dress it up all you like, but that’s where this is going.

..."a task-based command line build tool for JavaScript projects."

"Year on year, the number of journeys taken on foot declines – indeed, on current projections walking will have died out altogether as a means of transport by the middle of this century. No longer subjected to the measure of man – or woman – or her oversight, the city has already acquired distorted lineaments: vastly extended thoroughfares are lined by cul-de-sacs, while the architecture defined by Rem Koolhaas as "junkspace" presumes that only a corridor can be a viable destination – especially if it has a cash machine."

Deeply fiddly but good to know it's possible.

I don’t use time signatures. People have mentioned that I use weird ones, but it’s not true! The way I write does not use them at all, it completely side-steps the whole concept. I use combinations of loops that are different lengths. Usually the length of any given loop is a two-figure odd number: 23, 51, 79 or whatever. You start combining four or five of those and you can end up with pieces of music that are made up of short repeating elements but the sound as a whole never repeats exactly, even after 17 minutes.

Uses git to clone a repository containing dotfiles, and saves them in ~/.homesick. It then allows you to symlink all the dotfiles into place with a single command.

Marketing in a not-too-horrible way

Overall, I think [technical debt is] a very powerful tool that -- when used wisely -- can be a great asset to any team. It seems to me that most of the people that I've been talking to really don't agree, and see Technical Debt as a plague that should be eliminated at first sight.

Gives webpages the ability to tell if the user's device is capable of viewing high-resolution images (such as the 3rd generation iPad) before the image is requested from the server. Additionally, it judges if the user's device currently has a fast enough network connection for high-resolution images. Depending on device display and network connectivity, foresight.js will request the appropriate image for the webpage.

localtunnel with apache virtual hosts, it can be done! +

Hacktastic. But the principle works.

"The reason this government's moving so quickly to divide the NHS into privatised contractual fiefdoms for its mates, and to divert education budgets into "free" schools for its mates' children, is because it can. Resistance has been atomised. Working-class rage, once articulated by powerful unions representing people doing proper jobs, has dissipated." Developers: unionise!

Javascript libraries for dealing with touch events, multitouch, normalizing across the Webkit/IE touch models, and all that jazz.

"Are you severely annoyed because none of the supplied keyboard layouts in Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 match up with the key legends on the keyboard, even when you use the US English or US Extended English layouts? I was, so I decided to remedy the situation so I could use the keyboard without getting # instead of £ or @ instead of " whenever I was working on a document or email or anything at all."

"Even more than anachronism, a core theme of Mad Men is the lost art of personal reserve, self-effacement, and mystery. When Don Draper says, "Tell Jimmy I need to talk to him" in season 2 instead of "I have to talk to him," it hits a slightly more narcissistic, self-revealing note than it should. A baby boomer might set up a business meeting by invoking his personal needs; but a member of the "silent generation"—particularly one living a double life like Draper—doesn't talk about himself quite so readily."

"With the exception of Nairobi — insert joke here about Kenyans crushing everyone at the New York City Marathon — the fastest walking cities were from wealthy nations. The statistical analysis confirmed this general perception: two of the three strongest social predictors of walking speed were a country's G.D.P. and its purchasing power parity (the other was its individualism). Indeed, when Levine considered all his "pace of life" metrics, he found that pace of life was swifter in "economically productive countries" like Western Europe and Japan than in undeveloped countries."

Useful.

We can no longer presume that the content accessed through mobile devices will also be viewed on them. With AirPlay, mobile device experiences can just as easily become 10 foot lean-back experiences, negating all your assumptions about display size and bandwidth. Responsive meda strategies will need to get more sophisticated to take this into account.

In terms of web performance, the experience we need to measure is user perceived page load time, and the single number we need to extract depends on the distribution of measurements across the sample. There are a few contenders for what the magic number should be. Do you use the mean, median, mode, or something else? How do you determine the correctness of this number or whether your sample size is large enough? Is one number sufficient?