Gist: Interesting diagram of when to write new code.

 

NYTimes: A terrific photo story of a pencil factory, gives you a better feel for the backstory of I, Pencil.

Book and Ledger: Introduction to forming a business, good overview, especially the part of different business structures (LLC, etc).

IndieHackers: Some links to interviews and info on no-code programming. I think this is fine for people who want to put together strawman products or MVP apps, but I am not sure this would be a good base for a “for-real” business. But – who am I to say this? I am no entrepreneur!

HackerNoon: A story of what a person did over last year to go from zero knowledge of web development and Javascript to becoming a full-time web development employee. There was a little bit of deception to me in that near the end of the article, the author adds that he did have programming experience prior to starting his education effort.  That greatly reduces the effect of rags-to-riches, in my opinion.

Joshua Lyman: What I learned about bootstrapping in 2017 – the article breaks his experience into seven lessons. I liked the details he shared about his stumbles as well as his successes.

 

 

FreeCodeCamp: People getting their first development job in their 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. This was interesting to me, I am in my mid 50’s, and it is neat to see people applying themselves to learn programming.

 

Some good year-in-review posts:

Aaron Parecki: Lots of different IndieWeb projects listed – he’s busy!

Amber Case: Leader in the area of “calm technology” – again, lots of interesting activities.

 

Jon Udell: Annotating Web Audio – this is a very interesting article, I think this is a big opportunity for curation given the great amount of podcasts available today.

Linux Journal: Where Do I Start? – a good overview of starting to learn to program in the Linux environment,

Some good articles from Jack Crenshaw on how he creates and tests software:

Embedded.com: How I write software

Embedded.com: How I write software – reader feedback

Embedded.com: How I test software

Embedded.com: How I test software again and again

Bonus: How Jack worked on Apollo guidance problems

IEEE Computer (PDF): In a February 1995 article, “A Plea for Lean Software”, Niklaus Wirth (inventor of Pascal and Modula-2) laments the size growth in software applications, and calls out time pressure and lack of good design as possible reasons for this growth. In the second half of the article, he discusses his own solution for this problem (Project Oberon) which comprises an operating system, a compiler and a computer. To me, this was a good approach to take from an academic standpoint, but I do not think this had any effect on the mainstream practice of software development (similar in nature to Donald Knuth’s concept of literate programming). A second version of Oberon was released in 2013 (see link below).

Project Oberon – Website linking to Oberon book PDFs and other artifacts

Niklaus Wirth – Home page

Some Javascript file handling links:

Writing files:

Eli Grey: Article describing his library FileSave.js

Demo 1: FileSaver.js demo of saving text from a HTML text area

Demo 2: FileSaver.js demo of saving a string in a blob

Github: Source for FileSaver.js

Reading the contents of files:

Treehouse: Several examples of opening files and displaying the contents in a web page

HTML5 Rocks: Multiple examples of opening files

NCZOnline: Code-only examples, no live demos