Stefan Cosma

Just Another Cluster #2

Stefan Cosma -

It's that time of the week again, where I post interesting links / articles / tools and then comment upon them. This is issue number #2. If you haven't read the first one, I suggest you do.
As always, if you find any interesting tools or articles that I might have missed, let me know in the comments below and I'll share them in the next weekly cluster.

Without further adieu here are last week's interesting links!

  1. Firefox OS 2.5 Developer Preview, an experimental Android app
    The guys and gals over at Mozilla have launched the Firefox OS in the form of an Android app. Basically you can now get a taste of the Firefox OS without the hassle of actually buying a new phone.

  2. Microsoft Project Oxford Emotion APIs
    This one is actually really cool. Someone at Microsoft decided one day, that it's about time to find out what their customers actually feel when buying Microsoft products. This set of APIs allows anyone to detect what emotion is present in a photo. How cool is that!?

  3. Koding's Global Virtual Hackathon 2015
    Between December 12th and 13th Koding is hosting the worlds largest virtual hackathon. Last year there were around 60k participants, this year that number will be left in the dust. Did I mention, the grand prize is 100k? Yeah, that too.

  4. Please, don’t commit commented out code
    Kent Dodds explains why it's bad practice to commit commented out code. The explanation won't surprise you, because it makes sense.

  5. Screenshots from developers & Unix people (2002)
    Curios how famous developer's desktops looked like, back in the day? This very insightful article will showcase just that. How does your daily screen look like?

  6. Dark matter
    No, we're not talking about the hypothetical kind of matter that cannot be seen with telescopes but accounts for most of the matter in the universe, we're talking about the dark matter developers that don't read a lot of blogs, they never write blogs, they don't go to user groups, they don't tweet or facebook, and you don't often see them at large conferences. Where are these dark matter developers online?

  7. Developer’s Guide to Open Source Licenses
    You're starting a new project and you want it to be open source, but you're not sure about the kind of license to choose. Worry not, this handy guide will help you in your quest for open source awesomeness.

  8. How to work with SVG text
    Steven Bradley explains why working with SVG text is the best of both worlds. On one hand it’s rendered like other graphic elements and on the other hand it's packaged as XML character data, which means it’s real text.

  9. The art of debugging
    In this article, Remy Sharp explains why it's crucial to learn every tool that's available to use, use it as you need it.

  10. Things to avoid when writing CSS
    Here's a list of things that you should avoid when writing CSS. From nesting in Sass to multiple files, @heydonworks explains why.

  11. Legofy
    This neat little tool will transform any image to make it look as if it's made out of 1x1 LEGO blocks. It's made in Python.

  12. React Cheat Sheet
    React.js is the hottest trend now, and in case you haven't tried it yet, I suggest you do. If you ever get stuck this useful cheatsheet should help.

  13. ECMAScript 6 (ES6): What’s new in the next version of JavaScript
    You heard of lot of rumours, but you're not sure what new things are coming to the newest version of JavaScript. Checkout this article to put aside all those rumours.

Until next time, code long and prosper!

Stefan

Image credit: Guillaume Kurkdjian