An Interesting List of Development Stuff (January 2014)

Software development is a fascinating thing.

With a scope so vast and so many languages, topics and general cool things that people are doing, it can be difficult to keep up. So I have decided to start compiling a few of the links, resources, blog posts and other projects that I find “interesting” or just worth reading and putting them up on here to share with others. I don’t really plan on having any particular scope for the content and it may or may not even be related to .NET, but I thought it would be a nice addition to the blog.

Overthinking Development

Ars Technica compiled a collection of posts that stems from a question that was posed on Stack Exchange regarding how far you should plan into the future when developing software (or if you should even look into the future at all). Several developers chime in and provide different points for different scenarios in a very read-worthy article.

Kimono Labs

The folks over at Kimono Labs recently created a neat little tool that will essentially turn any website into a structured and usable API that can be stored, queried and used to create other wonderful things all from the comfort of your browser. It’s currently in the beta phase and who knows what the future might hold when it is officially released.

Choosing a Javascript MVC Framework

Craig McKeachie reviews over some of the major players in the Javascript MVC Framework game that you might encounter if you wanted to develop a sweet SPA application. He discusses some benchmark numbers, features and some things to consider when choosing one over the other.

Learnfun and Playfun

Tom Murphy, a recent PHD graduate from Carnegie Mellon decided to venture out and see if he could write some software to teach a computer to play Nintendo games and succeeded (relatively). In a series of entertaining videos, he reviews over the algorithm that he uses to “teach” the computers how to play by exposing them to a small portion of the game being played and then lets it loose and demonstrates some pretty entertaining things.

How to Not Hire a Google Software Engineer

A short-article that discusses why a start-up looking to hire one of the elusive “rock-star” developers from everyone’s favorite search engine giant failed event with a hefty “$500,000″ salary offer.

Programmers and 4K

I love high-resolution monitors, especially when I am doing anything development related. This blog post covers over why 4K is basically designed for programmers and software developers and why it may actually be cost effective to go buy one for yourself.

Algorithms and Combat

The folks over at CodeCombat, a start-up with a focus on using creative means teach development and to find talented developers through games and puzzles, review over an algorithm design contest they held and some of the results. As with most things on the Internet, if you think that you have done something in the best possible way, you are wrong (and people will love to tell you about it).

Updated .NET Releases

The ASP.NET team released a series of “.1″ releases earlier this month that featured improvements for ASP.NET MVC (5.1), Web API (2.1) and Web Pages (3.1). Each of these are available through their respective NuGet packages.

Mentoring Software Engineers

Matt Brown has a nice blog post on the process of mentoring  up-and-coming Software Engineers and some things to consider both for the mentor and the student. It’s a great article for anyone that has ever done any mentoring of fellow software developers and hopefully interests those that have not to do so.