- Don’t keep cell phones near your body – Techcrunch: there’s finally some concrete guidelines about this and it looks like maybe the tin-foil hat-wearers were right about cellphones leaking electromagnetic radiation.
- State of Voice Coding – Gustav Wengel: learn how to write code using your voice rather than a keyboard. Very important for developers to know because our industry does not take RSI (repetitive stress injury) and ergonomics as seriously as it should. It mentions the Dragonfly open source framework for “associating actions with voice” (it relies on Dragon NaturallySpeaking however).
- Is spending time on social media bad for us? – Facebook Newsroom: Two researchers who work for Facebook consider whether our addiction to social media is bad for us. They’ve made some changes to the news feed quality, added suicide prevention tools, and more in a bid to get everyone to keep using Facebook (and now they’ve started target children more openly which is frightening).
- Scaling Slack’s Job Queue – Slack Engineering: while we like the alternatives of Riot.im and Zulip, Slack has some really cool software engineering happening. In this article they talk about how they scaled their job queue (jobs run in the background to make sure messages are sent and payments are processed and emails are sent). They’re using Redis and Kafka, cool tech to use when scaling up, both are free/open source projects.
- More resources for professional software developers – SourceContribute.com: we collect links about professionalism, software industry, where to learn new skills and more on the SourceContribute Resources page.
