An Interesting List of Development Stuff (February 2014)
In this installment of my monthly treasure trove of development stuff, we take a slightly more .NET-oriented approach by covering several ASP.NET specific topics, resources and more. But there are quite a few other things that may be applicable to just about any kind of developers (and especially those that may be looking for a job).
Send a Valentine’s Day Math-o-Gram
In honor of Valentine’s Day, the folks over at Desmos decided that rather than sending a crummy card to your loved one, you could give them something that all women really love: math. By creating a very simple Node.js application, you can plug in different formulas and create a customizable “love graph” to send to your significant other.. or just play around with it.
Sidewaffle
No, sadly this is not some new breakfast-related concoction covered with delicious syrup. What is it however is an incredibly useful extension to Visual Studio that adds a bunch of different snippets, templates and other goodies into Visual Studio to help you become a more efficient and productive .NET developer.
Codility Training
Codility is a great site that administers short, automated programming tests for companies that are looking to hire developers. The tests can be performed in a variety of languages and they don’t simply evaluate if the applicant can solve the problem at hand, but how efficient they solved it (considering computational complexity) and if they handled edge cases as well.
Now, obviously most readers of this blog are not going to be hiring managers, but Codility offers a free training area to help prepare those that are entering the job market to beef up their problem solving skills. It’s a superb resource for those of you out there that are currently in the job market and want to improve your chops.
Who needs Code Reviews?
A slightly satirical look at the benefits to productivity, developer happiness and deadlines when developers stop working about reviewing code and just start coding.
Strapfork
While it is still just in beta, Strapfork is a new visual editor for developing themes using Twitter’s Bootstrap. It aims to make the entire process of customizing and creating your own themes a cinch by allowing you to adjust every detail from gradients to typography and more. Stay tuned for more!
A Last Look at ASP.NET in 2013 and what to look forward to in 2014!
Jon Galloway covers the good times and the bad times had in 2013 by ASP.NET and how it has grown and continues to develop into a young adult, and we are so proud. He reviews over all of the major improvements that have been made in the past year and details what to expect and watch for in 2014.
Do you really need jQuery?
Do you ever wonder if you really need to include that jQuery reference in your project or if there might be another very simple approach that could save you all those delicious kilobytes? Well then this is just the link for you. This site reviews over a bevy of tasks that jQuery typically handles and provides the equivalent code in pure Javascript. It’s a great resource for those that may want to slim down their sites and applications a bit if they are just using jQuery for handling things like AJAX or trivial DOM manipulation.
Nu-Gotta-Get-It
If you develop .NET applications, then you probably are a fan of NuGet. This site helps you find the best and most popular NuGet packages that you might be missing out on and allows you rank existing packages based on quality, documentation and more. It’s worth checking out if you are looking to incorporate a specific feature or package into your application and there are a ton of different choices out there.
Using the Pomodoro Technique and Trello to Lead a More Efficient Life
A great article by John Sonmez using the Pomodoro technique to help dramatically improve your productivity not only in your career, but also to help organize your life.
IdentityReboot and MembershipReboot
Security guru, Brock Allen introduces two of his major projects which aim to improve the existing ways that ASP.NET handles both Identity and Membership from a security perspective. If you have any qualms about weaknesses within ASP.NET and its built-in security mechanisms, you can be almost assured that Brock has addressed those in these two packages. Even if you aren’t a security expert, the introductions are worthy reads that may interest you enough to use them in the future.