Greetings heroes. This week we saw another happy hour bring X-Teamers together from around the world and let us get to know the hero behind each mask a little better.
For those of us who were not fortunate enough to take part in the happy hour, have no fear, a brief recap of the links shared during the hangout is described below. (*Laughter and witty banter not included in the recap, must be present during happy hour to experience)
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Inline Docs Project
Inline Docs was created by our very own superhero, Josh Johnston. He set out to make a difference by generating a way to aid and connect developers. The idea of documentation and inlining your code is not new, but the approach is. Inline Docs aims to tell the context and reasons why a developer is doing it that way, rather than just the comments that tell you what the code is doing.
The ultimate goal is to give a developer a walk through of your code. One of the ideas being implemented in Inline Docs to accomplish this is being able to link from one section to another if there are things that are related to each other.
Another example of what is being tested is if you are interested in how you extract the document links, then you can search for that section and it will tell you what it’s doing, why it’s doing it that way, and it also gives you a link back to the line of source code where the comment came from.
Josh would love for any hero to go visit Inline Docs and test it out and build upon it. This is definitely a simple and great way to get involved in open source contributions.
The Neutron
The Neutron is described as a full blown Windows PC in the palm of your hand. It is currently on Kickstarter looking for backers. Although it doesn’t seem like it will have to wait long to be fully backed as $25,000 out of $30,000 has already been pledged with 25 days still left in the campaign.
Upon closer inspection, it seems the creators have designed the cooling system and the case, but the board is from Intel. The Neutron does boast a Core i5 Processor, 16 GB of DDR3 memory, 480 GB internal SSD, a video card, and a wi-fi card. Currently for a pledge of $1,099 the Neutron can be yours, or for $100 more Windows 8.1 will be included as well.
Speaking.io
Speaking.io gives advice on public speaking. The creator, Zach Holman who works at GitHub, draws upon his experience giving speeches at technical conferences to provide the tips and tricks.
He breaks down public speaking into the following topics: planning out your talk, designing and building your slides, prepping for the big day, delivering and doing your thing, and reacting and reflecting on what just happened.
Each topic has subcategories that he goes in depth on in order to help you accomplish the overlying topic. He seems to have some solid advice interlaced with a comedic touch. One topic of particular interest to look at is planning out your talk. In that topic, he has a section that discusses how to write the CFP (Call For Papers) which is a necessary task for anyone who wants to speak at a conference.
Totally Nuclear Club
Totallynuclear.club is built by Erik David Price who is a backend software engineer at Meetup. It is a simple, tiny linux machine run for social purposes inspired by Paul Ford’s tilde.club. It is a fun idea that gets people to think outside of fancy frameworks, which only makes sense as the name totallynuclear.club derives from the response the creator gave a 7th grade girl who told him that her friend had the “hots” for him.
Quail
QUAIL is a handy jQuery plugin for checking content against accessibility guidelines. There are over 200 tests on QUAIL, for example images missing an alt text. QUAIL recently moved from a PHP library to a lightweight and powerful client-side accessibility checker.
CoreOS
CoreOS is a new Linux distribution that has been rearchitected to provide features needed to run modern infrastructure stacks. CoreOS is Apache 2.0 licensed and runs on your existing hardware or cloud providers. The code can be viewed on GitHub. Ultimately CoreOS attempts to enable warehouse-scale computing on top of a minimal, modern operating system.
EdX Functional Programming
EdX offers interactive online classes and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) from the world’s best universities, such as MIT, Harvard, and Berkley. Unless you are taking a course for a verified certificate, the course and subsequent knowledge gained is free. This particular link takes you to a course offered on functional programming. Functional programming is definitely worth learning as it is something that is being talked about and the underlying skills you learn can be utilized in many different areas.
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