g33ktalk Weekly, Mar 20

Mar 202013
 

g33ktalk Weekly

This content is part of our weekly newsletter that features the best articles, videos and audio for software engineers from across the web. Want to receive it every week? Subscribe here.

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How to Improve Rails Performance on Heroku 

Stafford Brooke describes the steps you can take to get more performance out of Heroku when using it for Rails application hosting. 5 mins

Clojure: All Grown Up

In this article, David Jacobs argues why we should adopt Clojure. He says it will simplify our coding life, speed up product development, clarify how we think about structure and complexity and help us avoid unnecessary coding frustration. Sounds good to me! 15 mins

Support requests: How software gets better

Luke Francl, developer at Swiftype, discusses the importance of having developers on the front lines of support, and the benefits of investing heavily in support infrastructure. 5 mins

Ever wanted to learn how to build common touch gestures into your app’s custom UI components? Learn about the correct way to implement scaling, dragging, scroll animation and more in Roman Nurik’s latest update to the Using Touch Gestures training class. online tutorial

Accelerating Big Data with Hadoop and Memcached

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, D.K. Panda from Ohio State University discusses ways to get more perf out of your Hadoop cluster via integration w/ memcached. 48 min video

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g33ktalk Weekly, Mar 15

Mar 152013
 

g33ktalk Weekly

This content is part of our weekly newsletter that features the best articles, videos and audio for software engineers from across the web. Want to receive it every week? Subscribe here.

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How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

Travis Reeder, Co-founder and CTO of Iron.io, talks about the great results they got in switching from Ruby on Rails to Go due to heavy load. 5 mins

My First 5 Minutes On A Server

If you use your first 5 minutes on a server wisely, you can keep administration efficient enough that you won’t develop “security cruft.” In this article, Bryan Kennedy explains his approach. 15 mins

Learning from Big Data: 40 Million Entities in Context

This article in the Google Research Blog introduces Wikilinks Corpus. Essentially they’ve gathered 40 million total disambiguated mentions within over 10 million web pages using Wikipedia and published it as an open dataset. What might you do with this data? Let us know your ideas! 5 mins

Abba – JavaScript a/b testing

Alex Macaw, a JavaScript programmer and O’Reilly author who is working at Stripe, talks about opensourcing Abba, a tool they built for internal use at Stripes. Abba is a self-hosted a/b testing framework built to help improve conversion rates on your site. 5 mins

Ruby 2.0.0 has now been officially released, so here’s a thorough and detailed run-down of all the tweaks, changes and additions that have made it in to the release. 30 mins

Web Scraping 101 with Python

Learn basic web scraping with Python 2.7, BeautifulSoup, and lxml. 15 mins

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g33ktalk Weekly, Mar 7

Mar 072013
 

g33ktalk Weekly

This content is part of our weekly newsletter that features the best articles, videos and audio for software engineers from across the web. Want to receive it every week? Subscribe here.

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Building Stripe’s API

This article talks about Stripe’s API, particularly lessons learned and what kind of things they did to try to make the API as easy to use as possible. 10 min + slides

This guide shows how you can easily switch between the most recent stable release, a version of Rails patched for Ruby 2.0, and the newest version of Rails (Rails 4.0.0.beta1). With these versions on your machine, you’ll explore the new features of Rails 4.0 while continuing to develop projects with the most recent stable version. 25 min

WebKit for Developers

For many of us developers, WebKit is a black box. We throw HTML, CSS, JS and a bunch of assets at it, and WebKit, somehow.. magically, gives us a webpage that looks and works well. But in fact, WebKit isn’t a black box. It’s a white box. And not just that, but an open, white box. 25 min

How to Inherit Somebody Else’s Code

You’re faced with a daunting upgrade of someone else’s application. How do you get started quickly and with minimal pain? Here’s five guidelines to streamline the process. 15 min

Making Hadoop Real Time with Scala & GridGain

Nikita Ivanov shows adding real-time capabilities to Hadoop through a demo application streaming word counting on a 2-nodes cluster. 40 min video

How Fast is Your Web Site?

Web site performance data has never been more readily available. The overwhelming evidence indicates that a Web site’s performance (speed) correlates directly to its success, across industries and business metrics. With such a clear correlation (and even proven causation), it is important to monitor how your Web site performs. So, how fast is your Web site? 25 min

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g33ktalk Weekly, Feb 28

Mar 012013
 

g33ktalk Weekly

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Have you ever wanted to introduce new functionality to base classes in the iOS SDK? Or just make them work a little bit differently? In order to do so, you must enter the wild and dangerous world of monkey-patching. 10 mins

Stoyan Stefanov, an engineer at Facebook, explains how to approach and address performance issues in JavaScript applications. 50 min video


This one’s pretty cool – it’s a slideshow presentation, use your arrow keys to navigate. slides

Objects that can be iterated over in Python are called “iterables”, and a FOR loop isn’t the only thing that accepts iterables. Read more here. 20 mins

Deep dive into MapReduce programming covering some of the framework’s more advanced features. 30 mins

Matthew Dennis covers the most common mistakes made with Cassandra that he has noticed being made both in development & deployment. 24 min video

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g33ktalk Weekly, Feb 21

Feb 262013
 

g33ktalk Weekly

This content is part of our weekly newsletter that features the best articles, videos and audio for software engineers from across the web. Want to receive it every week? Subscribe here.

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Why HN went down
Perhaps not entirely earth-shattering, but in reading pg’s explanation I was struck again by the developer’s challenge in properly figuring out exactly *what* we’re debugging. 5 mins

Actionable Metrics – Enabling Decision-Making in Netflix’s Decentralized Environment
Roy Rapoport discusses how Netflix uses metrics to monitor and manage their operating environment along with additional info on their event management system. 43 min video + slides

The Evolution of Web Development for Mobile Devices
Building websites that perform well on mobile devices remains a challenge. If you’re sticking with web here are some practical suggestions on eking out the best performance. 20 mins

Principles of Java App Performance Tuning
Part 5 in a series covering JVM tuning, better understanding GC, and other helpful steps. 15 mins

MongoDB: Architectural Best Practices
A look at the architectural best practices of running MongoDB through the phases of the roll-out process: Selecting a deployment strategy to prepare for your MongoDB installation, the installation itself, and the operational considerations of running it in production. 15 mins


The author takes us on a regex joyride through comprehensive HTML tag parsing. If you’ve ever run headlong into the surprising complexities of complete HTML parsing using regex you need to read this article. 30 mins

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g33ktalk Weekly, Feb 13

Feb 132013
 

g33ktalk Weekly

This content is part of our weekly newsletter that features the best articles, videos and audio for software engineers from across the web. Want to receive it every week? Subscribe here.

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Why I like Go

Simple, terse and to-the-point. 16 reasons this hacker likes Google’s Go. 5 mins

14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Genius or a Rock Star

Here’s a list of ways to get involved in open source even if you lack confidence in your technical chops. 10 mins

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The Data Science Toolkit is a collection of the best open data sets and open-source tools for data science, wrapped in an easy-to-use REST/JSON API with command line, Python and Javascript interfaces. Available as a self-contained Vagrant VM or EC2 AMI that you can deploy yourself. Very cool. 5 mins

How accurate is Android GPS?

An analysis of the Android SDK’s android.location package and how you can best take advantage of it to build a great end-user experience.
15 mins

Complete video-course with 38 lectures on YouTube covering algorithms and data structures all the way from the basics through to O notation, sorting algorithms, hash tables and more.  Video-course.

Building Twitter Bootstrap

Insight on why/how Twitter Bootstrap was architected. From the authors comes the processes used to create it and their thoughts on how it has grown as a design system. 15 mins

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g33ktalk Weekly, Feb 7

Feb 112013
 

g33ktalk Weekly

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From UC Berkley’s School of Information, this complete video course will teach you to master big data analysis using examples from Twitter. Video playlist.

A Python library for rapid machine learning prototyping, Ramp acts as a wrapper around several ML and stats libraries like scikit-learn and rpy2. This article works through the ‘Detecting Insults in Social Commentary’ challenge from Kaggle as an example. 15 mins

graph-tool is a super-efficient python module for manipulation and analysis of networks. The core data structures and algorithms are implemented in C++, conferring high performance when using large data sets. 5 mins

Keeping Passwords in Source control

Here’s some slick advice that shows you how to store your passwords and other config info in your repo securely. Protect yourself from this: https://github.com/search?p=3&q=gmail_password&ref=searchresults&type=Code
10 mins

On Rails’ SQLi Vulnerability

Complete explanation of how exactly the Rails vulnerability works, including exploitable scenarios and mitigation tips. 15 mins.

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g33ktalk Weekly, Dec 20

Dec 202012
 


g33ktalk Weekly

This content is part of our weekly newsletter that features the best articles, videos and audio for software engineers from across the web. Want to receive it every week? Subscribe here.

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A List of Data Science and Machine Learning Resources 15 mins

Recently, we’ve been going big on big data tech around here and this article turned up in some of our research. In his talk yesterday at USV, Mike Abbott (former VP Eng at Twitter) commented on his justification for ‘big data’ enablement: “It’s now more cost effective to do machine learning on larger sets of data than ever before.” Who can disagree?.
Surprises when Designing an iPhone App 10 mins

SeatGeek launched their new iPhone last week, and we must say – it’s a real beauty! gives us a run down on what a web-developer should take into consideration when switching to mobile app design..
15 mins

Find out how to make your code more intuitive and easier to understand with Python’s built-in functions that enable elegant ways of manipulating data.
Styling Android: Multiple displays . 10 mins

Mark Allison continues his series writing about multiple screen support in 4.2, this time showing the tools that help in development, as well as further expanding his previous examples.
How do we read code? 5 mins

Discusses an interesting experiment (using eye tracking) designed to measure which features in programming systems help programmers understand what they are doing and how this learning can be used to make systems that lead to higher quality software..

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g33ktalk Weekly, Dec 12

Dec 122012
 


g33ktalk Weekly

This content is part of our weekly newsletter that features the best articles, videos and audio for software engineers from across the web. Want to receive it every week? Subscribe here.

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Web Performance Anomaly Detection with Google Analytics 10 mins
You can always expect great perf stuff from Ilya Grigorik. Here he discusses an anomaly detection algorithm, and how pair it with a tool like GA to monitor your web performance.
Android Performance Case Study 30 mins
This is an excellent walk through a sample Android app that demonstrate ways an expert Android dev would analyze the potential performance bottlenecks and likely problem areas.
And, if you happen to be looking for an Android development role with an awesome engineering team, check out this opportunity at one of our favorite startups, Pocket.
5 mins
Building good navigation for a mobile app is tricky. Hear sane thoughts from one developer that thinks Facebook and Path’s apps use nav examples that should be avoided .
A Saner (and Geekier!) Approach to Working with APIs 5 mins
Fresh perspectives on how best to use API-based services from web and mobile applications, and introducing a new service you can use to make it easy..
Building an automatic, beat-matched, infinite radio stream with Python.
forever.fm is an automatic, infinite online DJ built with Python. According to its author, these are the “gory details” on how it was made..

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g33ktalk Weekly Nov 15

Nov 152012
 

g33ktalk Weekly

This content is part of our weekly newsletter that features the best articles, videos and audio for software engineers from across the web. Want to receive it every week? Subscribe here.

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All the crypto code you’ve ever written is probably broken 15 mins
Are you using an authenticated encryption mode? If you don’t know what authenticated encryption is, then you’ve probably already made a mistake.
The definitive guide to forms based website authentication 15 mins
Since we’re on the subject of auth, eight sections and dozens of tips on building web authentication. One of those Stack Overflow posts you’ll surely want to bookmark..
I Am A Terrible Programmer 10 mins
Dan Shipper’s reflection on what actually makes a good programmer. His focus on simply shipping product might surprise you.
Code Length Measured in 14 Languages 15 mins
Fascinating post from the Wolfram blog on what impact different languages have on code length, and what that really means to you as an engineer.
7 Python Libraries you should know about. 15 mins
Few libraries that stand out as being particularly enjoyable to use. And here they are, all in one place.
The Harvest Platform: Bring Time Tracking Into Your Application. 15 mins
Adding time tracking to a project management, issue tracking or task management application is as easy as embedding a few lines of JavaScript and HTML. Using the Harvest Platform, devs can now focus on the core functionality of their apps while easily harnessing Harvest for time tracking, reporting and invoicing.

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