The Insider News

Smashing Coding[^]:

Shouldn’t years of Web development and advocacy about performance by Yahoo and Google and many others have born fruit and made us aware of how much each HTTP request costs? If you look at the final products, it doesn’t seem that way.... There are a few reasons why our Web is on the chubby side, and most of them actually are possible for us as developers to change.

Inspired Magazine[^]:

Minimalism has become the latest trend in many web designs, particularly in the area of online business and service professional websites. However, unlike many fads, this trend has more than a few practical benefits that make it ideal not just for the short term but also for long range website decoration and appearance. If you’re wondering about how to best keep a minimalist framework in mind for your site or just want to find out a bit about the pros and cons; see how they compare, then read ahead.

Ron Jacobs[^]:

How many times have you wanted to send a project to a friend or upload it to a web site like MSDN Code Gallery only to find that your zip file has lots of stuff that you don't need to send in it making the file larger than it needs to be. Clean Project is a utility that cleans Visual Studio project directories so you can quickly upload or email a zip file with your solution.

IEBlog[^]:

In Windows 8, we reimagined the browser with IE10. We designed and built IE10 to be the best way to experience the Web on Windows. With the IE10 Release Preview for Windows 7 consumers can now enjoy a fast and fluid Web with the updated IE10 engine on their Windows 7 devices. The release preview of IE10 on Windows 7 is available for download today.

James Padolsey[^]:

For me there was a time that can only be described as adolescence in the field of programming and more specifically JavaScript. This period was characterised by a certain laziness and hubris. I thought I was right. I thought others were wrong. I could see no path but the very strict one that I had boxed myself into through a process in which I longed for certainty and the expulsion of realistic doubt.

Wired.com[^]:

The next game console from Nintendo is a strange beast indeed. The controller, called GamePad, has a built-in touch screen. And the system can wirelessly stream its visuals to both the GamePad and the television at the same time. So you can play games in which the player has to alternate between the two screens. Or multiplayer games in which some players look at the TV while others look at the controller. Or you can just play games on the controller and forget about the TV entirely — which we were surprised to find might be the most compelling way to play on Wii U.

Orion Magazine[^]:

Why and how did humankind become “unusually successful”? And what, to an evolutionary biologist, does “success” mean, if self-destruction is part of the definition? Does that self-destruction include the rest of the biosphere? What are human beings in the grand scheme of things anyway, and where are we headed? What is human nature, if there is such a thing, and how did we acquire it? What does that nature portend for our interactions with the environment? With 7 billion of us crowding the planet, it’s hard to imagine more vital questions.

DisplayMate[^]:

With large numbers of Tablets and Smartphones running virtually identical software, the display becomes the single most important way for manufacturers to differentiate their products – that’s been true for Android and the same will apply for Windows devices. A top notch display makes everything that runs on a Tablet or Smartphone look great or as good as possible – including all of the Apps, web content, photos, and videos – looking a lot better than on devices with inferior displays.

DailyTech[^]:

While Sinofsky was seen as a brilliant figure at Microsoft, his downfall was that he didn't get along with others within the company. He was notorious for picking fights with other executives, including current CEO Steve Ballmer, and even pushed former executives like chief software architect Ray Ozzie to quit.

AllThingsD[^]:

For the first time in its 30-plus year history, the person leading Microsoft’s Windows unit won’t be a man. With the departure of Steven Sinofsky on Monday, Microsoft is handing over leadership of its flagship operating system to Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller, both of whom served as top deputies to Sinofsky.... They will have their hands full.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

All too often I see programmers trying to solve their problems on the internet by blindly "flipping switches." Change something, hit refresh in the browser. "Why is that cached? What's going on?" Change something else, hit refresh in the browser. "What's the deal?"

good coders code, great reuse[^]:

I thought I'd share my favorite regex of all time: [ -~]

Macdrifter[^]:

I like Pythonista and I was impressed with the previous update. Pythonista is a well designed implementation of Python on iOS that goes far beyond just being a dumb shell. The developer, Ole Zorn, has a new release out today that raises the bar considerably. This post will serve as an introduction to some of my favorite new features of Pythonista but also as a practical guide to how I use it.

Robbie Abed's Personal Blog[^]:

Programming is frustrating because the tools, documentation & processes that we use every day are so bad. It’s not because programmer’s don’t understand logic or how to make algorithms, it’s because they’re still working on getting “hello world” to compile without errors. Or get a simple Facebook function to work for PHP CodeIgniter when you realize that the PHP CodeIgniter Github project has 2 lines of documentation...

DOMINIK DABROWSKI[^]:

In my years of programming in Python and roaming around GitHub's Explore section, I've come across a few libraries that stood out to me as being particularly enjoyable to use. This blog post is an effort to further spread that knowledge. I specifically excluded awesome libs like requests, SQLAlchemy, Flask, fabric etc. because I think they're already pretty "main-stream". If you know what you're trying to do, it's almost guaranteed that you'll stumble over the aforementioned. This is a list of libraries that in my opinion should be better known, but aren't.