If ever you needed proof as to why Stack Overflow is just amazing, behold this question and solution about how to efficiently pair a pile of socks. (The answer is hashing!)
Selenium is an automated UI testing tool whereby you can record interactions to replay later. Weskerfoot has published instructions on github on how to use Selenium to delete all of you Facebook wall posts.
SCAR is a lightweight and cheap hosting stack configured on Amazon's AWS infrastructure. The stack allows you to deploy a statis site on a custom domain with SSL and a CDN for approx $1 per month.
Wolfram have launched their Wolfram Engine as a free package for developers. Described by Stephen Wolfram himself on his blog, the Wolfram engine implements the Wolfram Language, which in turn offers a huge range of computational intelligence and algorithmic processing, access to the Wolfram Knowledgebase as well as over 5000 abstracted functions like machine learning, visualisation and image computation.
Cloudflare have launched an image resizing product for their Business and Enterprise level customers. The service offers resize, crop, compress and convert to WebP features and can be used with by replacing the image scr URL or by running Cloudflare worker to intercept image requests on the fly.
Mandalagaba is a web drawing site that allows you to draw mandalas, snowflakes, recursive lines and other symmetric patterns using a suite of apps. They are incredibly satisfying to use and you can switch modes using the link in the bottom right hand corner.
Erik Bernhardsson takes an interesting look at software estimation with some statistics. He looks at how estimating the median time of a task seems to be easier for developers than estimating the mean average, and he investigates plotting the blow-up factor (actual vs estimate time).
Stack Overflow have published the results of their 2019 developer survey. Javascript remains king of the languages, and VBA is the most dreaded language!
Ken Bellows has a nice introduction to semantic HTML over on dev.to. While reading it, I realised that I started learning HTML 20 years ago this year! I've come along way since framesets, but not far enough apparently, time to break out some more of these fancy new tags! (Although, I do find it difficult to use <strong> instead of <b>, <b> is so much faster to type!)
