An Interesting List of Development Stuff (November 2014)
This month’s Interesting List of Development Stuff is a bit all over the place, which I am sure you have come to expect as the norm. Several of the posts touch on Git and various flavors of using it, there are a few .NET specific articles sprinkled in as well as well as a few silly Javascript ones.
Contributing to Open Source (from a ASP.NET Perspective)
In this article, Ghislain Proulx walks through the process of what you need to do if you want to start working on an open source project. He introduces Git and some of the learning curve that it may involve (e.g. forking, branching, cloning, etc.). By the end of it, you should be able to at least pull down a project and get involved.
Firefox Developer Edition
It looks like Firefox began getting a bit jealous from all of the developers that were flocking to Chrome, so it hit the gym, got some new clothes and is back with a vengeance. Firefox recently released it’s Developer Edition browser that not only looks pretty, but features an enhanced set of Developer Tools that aim to put it back on top of the mountain.
An Interesting Proposal for Visual Studio
I stumbled across a proposed idea within Microsoft’s User Voice, which is where possible suggestions and ideas go to incubate, that sounded quite interesting. The idea is to develop a version of Visual Studio that can run entirely off of a thumb-drive on either 32-bit or 64-bit machines (essentially running out of a folder) and would require no installation and could be used from any computer.
Meet Application Insights: Analytics on Crack
In this blog post series, Kevin Green introduces the reader to Microsoft’s Application Insights tool, a powerful telemetry and analytics engine powered by Azure. The series walks through the basics of setting it up on a site and then goes behind the scenes at what kinds of powerful things you can do with it.
The Nobel Prize of Computer Science?
This Forbes piece centers around the Turing Award, long considered the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, and how Google is working to lift the award and bring it into the same prominence as the Nobel Prizes, especially in a financial regard.
makemeasandwich.js
Just when you think you have seen every crazy Javascript project out there, think again. This open source project based on an xkcd by Travis Tidwell leverages Node.js and Phantom.js to actually function as a command line application to order sandwiches from Jimmy Johns.
How to Git for Dummies
Everyone loves flow charts, at least those that aren’t actually meant to be taken seriously. Justin Hileman apparently shares this same sentiment as he created Git pretty, a chart that lets you know what type of commands you should and shouldn’t be executing based on how messed up your current repository is.
Ridiculous Javascript
I use Javascript quite often, but I am by no means as ridiculous as the author of this entry. Jani Ylikangas created a bad-ass visualization of a car driving down the highway at night that will bring you back to playing an old school arcade game. Oh and did I mention, it’s only 1023b of Javascript code.