This month’s most useful tools for developers > March 2018
Some are about new thinking or new techniques, some are about old or legacy technology and some are just useful resources for different languages or platforms. Some are just lolz. The brief is simple — if we think they’re useful, you might too.
“User experience can — and should — be the same for everyone.”
Simple steps to improve and enforce your website accessibility.
Terraform
“…enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.”
Write, Plan, and Create Infrastructure as Code.
“The world’s first true design to code platform.”
Supernova converts any mobile design to full-fledged native applications, giving the developers extra time to do actual coding.
Convert designs into native mobile apps.
Look — it’s observables!
“The goal of this lecture was to show you how you can evolve your application from one that uses just a little bit of observables to one that uses a lot more.”
How to use observables when making HTTP requests.
Firefox
Firefox 59 (out this month) has support for distributed protocol handlers…This means that the likes of ipfs can now be supported in Firefox via extensions — exciting times!
Becoming agile is a journey, not a destination
“…the steps that may look from the outside like maturity levels turned out to be fluency zones. Each zone constitutes a valid level of organizational agility.”
Flutter
“Flutter targets the sweet spot of mobile development: performance and platform integrations of native mobile, with high-velocity development and multi-platform reach of portable UI toolkits.”
Google is *still* going with Flutter
Liar, liar
An AI able to synthesise a real human’s voice after processing only one minute of audio…
Uh oh. This probably isn’t going to end well.
Solving it in 3…2…1 — done
There’s a great story behind this supreme nerdery.
webOS lives yet again…
Hand-in-hand with an overhaul of EnyoJS (now Enact, built on React) Well, our man Mark is excited even if no one else is.
Brain.js
A continuation of the harthur/brain repository (which is not maintained anymore)
A library of Neural Networks written in JavaScript.
Atomic collaboration
Teletype for Atom lets developers share their workspace with team members and collaborate on code in real time.
Code together in real time in Atom.
React Context
A short video explaining how React’s new context API works. (Grab the code on Github)
Testing In-App Purchases Ruins Your Phone
“Death by a thousand tiny bugs”
If IKEA did algorithm assembly instructions.
A brief history of time
Like all great existential questions, and complex theoretical astrophysical conundrums on the true nature of time…the answer was Lego bricks.
Tracking where your time went with Lego.
Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election
One election in one country isn’t a movement — yet — but “We’re the only company in the world that has built a fully-functional blockchain voting platform.”
Interesting that the lead is coming from Africa.
(NB: who won the election is still unclear and there will be a runoff election on March 27.) Posted without judgemental comment. Justsayin…