Top 50 links from The Changelog Weekly, Issues 1-10

This is the first of many top 50 list of links from The Changelog Weekly.

Weekly Issue #10 — October 19, 2013

OSS Perks (free stuff for open source)

OSS Perks is a listing of tools and services that are made freely available to open source projects.

FREE programming books!

This is a great repository of free programming books. The list is large, well organized, and keeps growing everyday.

Billion dollar question (or, how Walmart uses Node)

Eran Hammer, Senior Architect responsible for Walmart’s Node platform, shares some deep insights into the ways Walmart is using and deploying Node.

Shields as a Service (status badges)

Chad Whitacre, founder of Gittip, did some amazing work on this status badge solution for third-party codebase services. Shields supports services such as Code Climate, Coveralls, Gemfury, RubyGems, Travis CI and more.

Users around the world rejoice as Wireshark switches its GUI to Qt

Wireshark recently announced that they’re switching their GUI from GTK+ to Qt.

Weekly Issue #9 — October 12, 2013

Hoodie: Very fast web app development

Last week Alex Feyerke and Caolan McMahon presented Hoodie at LXJS 2013. It’s is a noBackend architecture for frontend-only web apps. Build complete web apps in days, without worrying about backends, databases or servers.

The myth of the 10x Engineer

Shanley Kane shares a deep and well cited post on Medium covering various perspectives on 10x engineers. And this is the Twitter conversation that started it all.

The birth of a GNU era

30 years ago, a hacker named Richard Stallman posted an unusual message to the net.unix-wizards newsgroup. That message is shared in its entirety for us to read.

Yeoman is modern workflows for modern development

Yeoman is a workflow and collection of tools built by the Chrome Developer relations team, that work together to make developing for the web even better. The three tools: yo (the scaffolding tool), grunt (the build tool) and bower (for package management).

Airbnb's JavaScript Style Guide

In their words, it’s a “mostly reasonable approach to JavaScript.”

Weekly Issue #8 — October 5, 2013

Level up your Git skills

Vaguely inspired by Git for Computer Scientists, except this page is not just for CS folks. And it's a lot more detailed. Oh, and it's actively maintained, meaning I will respond to feedback ;-)

JavaScript best practices

This guide was adapted from a popular slideshow by Christian Heilmann, a Web Evangelist at Mozilla. Includes a list of best practices, code samples, and side-by-side examples to help you write more readable, efficient code.

A tale of two MVC's by Yehuda Katz

If you build apps with Ruby on Rails, you need to watch this. Actually, if you make web software, you need to watch this.

The Codeship Workflow: Pull Requests and Code Review

This is a great primer for those who love a peek behind the curtain of someone else’s workflow of shipping code. It’s just part 2 in a multi-post series on “The Codeship Workflow” — check out part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7.

"I Love Open Source" enables simple recognition for open source'

Open source developers sign up and list ways that people can support their projects. They get an embeddable widget for their README or project home page.

Weekly Issue #7 — September 28, 2013

So you want to be a designer: Top 5 list

Everyone could use some guidance to be a better designer. Aza Raskin shares his top 5 list of what he’s found to be most important to do and master to get into design.

Continuous Delivery with Docker and Jenkins (Part 1)

Gerhard Lazu, Lead Engineer at How are you?, discuss’s their staging environment setup with the promise of following up on their production environment at a later date once the first stable version of Docker gets released.

How to survive a ground-up rewrite without losing your sanity

It’s a long read (15 minutes), but well worth it if you want to hear about lessons learned from an epic rewrite and the rare occasions where you’re justified in doing so.

Alfred Workflows

A collection of Alfred 2 workflows that will rock your world!

Popular coding conventions on Github

As part of the GitHub Data Challenge II, popular conventions from JeongHoon Byun’s (aka Outsider) makes it easy to analyze coding conventions from GitHub commits to know which convention is popular.

Weekly Issue #6 — September 21, 2013

Time tracking for command line lovers

Do you spend most of your time on the command-line and find it exhausting to fire up your browser just to record the time spent on various projects? Do you constantly undercharge your customers because of this? Stop.

Responsive Nav: a drop-in burger menu for your responsive website

Responsive Nav by Viljami Salminen is the quickest way to add the trendy menu to your site.

Oh, Fox News...

You’ve probably seen this, but if not, it’s a must watch! Fox Business spent “3 Days in the Valley” on a technology focused business special. They talked with GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner. No clue why they are in the Jive office.

Fábio Rehm announces Ventriloquist, combining the powers of Vagrant and Docker

Ventriloquist combines Vagrant and Docker to give developers the ability to configure portable and disposable development VMs with ease. It lowers the entry barrier of building a sane working environment without the need to learn tools like Puppet or Chef.

Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

Devin Walters’ debut post to The Changelog made it to the frontpage of Hacker News, hungout there for 24 hours, and topped out at 259 points. Devin shared a list of talks from Rich Hickey (the creator of Clojure) which he considers “required viewing” for most, if not all programmers.

Weekly Issue #5 — September 14, 2013

Call the Doctor, Jekyll 1.2 was released

After nearly a month and a half of hard work, the Jekyll team is happy to announce the release of v1.2.0.

It’s full of bug fixes and feature enhancements you’re sure to love.

The three best debugging tools

Mike Perham, recent guest on the show, and open source developer shares his wisdom on the best debugging tool. Your brain.

Requests 2.0 coming soon with proxy support and bug fixes

The author and maintainers of the popular Requests library are working on a crucial version 2.0 release. This is a quick breakdown of what you can expect.

git-browser from Tim Caswell

Browse Git repos offline. Tim has also been very vocal on Twitter, sharing screenshots and various hurdles he’s overcome along the way.

Enjoy sane database change management with Sqitch

Most schema migration tools are tightly coupled with the ORM or the framework in use. Sqitch lets you write the upgrade scripts in the native language of your database and provides automatic dependency resolution.

Weekly Issue #4 — September 7, 2013

The case for Go #golang

Yes, [we’re fans of Go[(https://changelog.com/tagged/go/). Many of our recent guests on the show recently have said that they intend to, or are currently learning Go. Thanks to Erik Unger for putting together this extensive list of successful case studies supporting the adoption of Go.

Free your HTML of .row & .col classes w/ Thoughtbot's Bourbon Neat

Neat is thoughtbot’s semantic grid framework built on Sass and Bourbon. It’s lightweight and simple, yet powerful enough to handle any responsive layout you can dream of.

Bootstrap Magic makes generating Bootstrap themes fast and easy

Bootstrap Magic, made with AngularJS, lets you easily create your own Bootstrap theme. If you like it, you can save it.

Avdi Grimm open sources Quarto after self-publishing Confident Ruby

Planning to self-publish a technical book? Take a look at Avdi Grimm’s Quarto, a Ruby-based toolchain for generating ebooks in EPUB, Mobi, and PDF formats.

Rouster: an abstraction layer for controlling Vagrant VMs

Control Vagrant virtual machines from Ruby scripts.

Weekly Issue #3 — August 31, 2013

Remote pairing in the browser? Pssh!

Pssh is basically your tmux/screen session or vanilla shell shared in the browser. It is seriously the coolest tool we’ve seen for pair programming.

Flatland brings flat UI to Sublime Text 2 and 3

Flatland is a simple theme and accompanying color scheme for Sublime Text 2 and 3.

Octopress 3.0, the writer-focused usability layer on top of Jekyll

My goal for Octopress is to be a writer-focused usability layer on top of Jekyll and a cohesive framework for building themes and plugins. Octopress will work alongside Jekyll without getting in the way at all. -- Brandon Mathis

Developers, please use an error service!

Friend of the show, Mike Perham, tries to save you from scanning your logs constantly for errors.

FuqIt. Shit files into a dir, get some web.

I'm kind of tired of following the stupid rules of MVC and want to just try out making something where I shit files into a directory and they just work. I basically did this on a Saturday morning because I was bored. -- Zed Shaw

Weekly Issue #2 — August 22, 2013

Animation the CSS3 way with Animate.css

Animate.css is a bunch of cool, fun, and cross-browser animations for you to use in your projects. It’s just-add-water-awesomeness!

So, you want to run a young coders class?

If you’re teaching kids to code this thorough guide from Katie Cunningham will help you get set up.

Developers and Depression

This talk on Developers and Depression by Greg Baugues is possibly the best talk I have ever heard. EVER. #scrc13 -- Sara Blackthorne

Facebook scales Apache Giraph to a trillion edges

Facebook shares the details about their improvements to Giraph.

Like Git? Use Sketch? Omg we were made for each other.

SketchGit is a simple Git client built right into Sketch. Important: For this plugin to work you must be using the non App Store version of Sketch so that its environment is not sandboxed.

Weekly Issue #1 -- August 15, 2013

Oh, Behave.js!

Behave.js is a lightweight library for adding IDE style behaviors to plain text areas, making it much more enjoyable to write code in.

Medium.js – taking control of contenteditable

Medium.js is a very minimal and straightforward approach to rich text editing in the browser that’s based on the awesome editor powering Medium.

Revel is a high performance, comprehensive web framework that's ready to Go

While still in an early stage of development, Revel (a Go-based web framework by Rob Figueiredo) shows a lot of promise. Revel features hot code reloading, high performance (3 to 10x Rails in recent benchmarks), synchronous programming style, and a comprehensive set of tools.

Automate your GitHub processes with botdylan

Heavily inspired by GitHub’s Hubot — botdylan lets you automate any process in GitHub. botdylan runs as a daemon and gets configured through a config.json file that describes cron and hooks scripts. cron scripts execute periodically and hook scripts execute on github hook events.

Deploy apps to your own mini-Heroku with Dokku

dotCloud’s Docker — a project which makes managing Linux containers easy, previously covered here and discussed on episode #89 — is inspiring & enabling a bunch of open source Platforms as a Service (PaaS). One of the first (and definitely the smallest) of these is Dokku by Jeff Lindsay.