An Interesting List of Development Stuff (October 2014)

In this October edition of the Interesting List of Development Stuff, we delve into a variety of topics as usual. There are several articles as always related to developer productivity and life in general as a developer, a few discussions of upcoming changes to popular Javascript-based frameworks like jQuery and Angular and much more.

The House Always Wins

This entertaining piece in Wired introduces John Kane, a video poker junkie that discovered a software exploit in a machine that provided him with a loophole to beat the system. But instead of grabbing a few thousand here and there, he decided to test his exploits out in Vegas. Needless to say, his luck quickly ran out.

I Hate Puzzles. Am I Still a Programmer?

In this article, Zef Hemel discusses a topic that just about every developer has heard of: puzzles. He covers the often puzzle-filled recruitment processes of many of the world’s top development companies and their reliance on this style of questioning.

Do Not Disturb

Developer productivity is something that every company will always strive to improve upon. Uri Bram recommends the best approach to handling this, is to simply leave the developers alone and let them work. Uri discusses all of the daily occurrences that can interrupt the productivity of a software developer and how these same events affect the amount of work that gets done.

jQuery 3.0 : The Next Generations

It seems like only yesterday that jQuery finally hit that 2.0 milestone and here they are yet again announcing the big three-o. In this blog post, Dave Methvin details some of the plans for the jQuery 3.0 API and many of the goals that this new release will aim to reach including performance, compatibility and being future-oriented.

Angular 2.0

This summary by Coman Hamilton briefly introduces many of the new planned features for the latest release of the ever-popular Angular JS framework. In the latest iteration, there are an abundance of “drastically different” changes from the existing versions and many developers will likely need to do quite a bit of “re-learning” when the new version hits the public. But don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time as the release isn’t slated until “before the end of 2015″.

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! Or is it a Park?

Machine learning can generally produce some really cool stuff and this post from the folks at Flickr is no exception. The team came across a popular xkcd comic and decided “Hey, Let’s do that!”. The team leveraged the extensive computer vision areas of the site to create a fun application that can tell you if any picture you provide is either of a national park, or a bird, or in some cases, a bird in a national park. If this kind of thing is your kind of thing, you can read a bit more about it in this white-paper.

This is Why People Leave Your Company.

This month’s final piece is another work-slash-life one aimed at company management and leaders and why they can sometimes fail to hold onto valuable assets (e.g. you). The article goes into depth regarding many of the most common reasons at why employees jump ship (and why they stick around). It’s a great article for managers to read over to get an idea of how to retain their employees and what those same employees (e.g. you if you aren’t in management) can do as well.
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