npolet

I always reach for django for new projects. It's never let me down and can be used in many, many ways.

I usually end up with fairly succinct code and it's never difficult coming back to a project that is 5-6 years old. Can always understand what's going on in the project and get my mind back and running quickly with it.

Using it with GraphQL (graphene) makes it feels a bit more like one of the newer frameworks out there.

Really happy I learned it years and years ago. Nice to invest time into a framework that is still going strong so many years later.

It's back now. Definitely worth a look. Been using bitwig for ages as it works beautifully on Linux and I'm really excited about version 3. Nice to see the project progress in such an amazing way.

I suppose you wouldn't notice great things so much, as they wouldn't stand out from the crowd.

It almost doesn't matter. Do you remember the hours and hours spent trying to debug something on IE that worked perfectly on Chrome/Firefox/Safari? All because MS didn't follow the standards that everyone was getting used to and had (mostly) advocated?

The thought of having to do anything remotely similar to that makes me shiver. Since MS made me go through that years ago, I simply will not go through that again. They did such a poor job with IE and it takes time for wounds to heal. Might sound a bit pathetic, but working life without having to develop for IE is much nicer. Chrome, Firefox and Safari generally behave in a similar manner. Yes, there are some inconsistencies, but nothing like IE. Especially the earlier versions (6!).

Really not sure this is an alternative to blender. Blenders functionality stretches way way further than this. Go check out the blender 2.8. I think you'll be really quite impressed by the improvements that have gone into it.

Blender might be a "nightmare" for you. But without putting any proper criticism, your point is null.

This is it. Safari really doesn't compare to chrome/firefox in terms of good developer tools. They are there, but no where near as useful/powerful.

I have noticed a few quirks in Safari that I have to work around. Like not rendering things exactly the same way as chrome/firefox. Bit of a pain, but there is never anything that's really "broken".

Really great advice here. Sometimes might feel a bit stupid having all that equipment for a relatively short journey, but so worth it when you do need it.

This is what I've been waiting for. As a developer, I love developing on Linux, I just flow better with it, servers are Linux as well etc...

But I do a lot of design work and this is where I miss all the Adobe apps. I've found a good workflow with inkscape and it serves me well.

Using a Windows VM with the Adobe cc suite is fine, but it's not as clean as having it (somewhat) natively available.

Great work Wine team.

I've got a little 13" XPS Developer Edition and it's a really solid option. The build quality is perfect and I've yet to come across any issues with it. Use daily for web development in work and for personal projects.

With an i7 it runs really smooth. I opted for the FHD option for the longer battery life, but would have gone UHD if I didn't mind about battery life.

It's really nice to see Dell make Linux part of it's line-up. Part of me bought it as a little heads-up to Dell that Linux laptops are a good thing. I've always just installed Ubuntu over existing windows laptops, but it's nice to see it somewhat as a first class citizen with Dell.

Weekend?

Good god I owe you a beer. I am able to live a very nice life developing with django. Working on a large(ish) system with django, and it's an absolute joy. Thanks to you and everyone who has contributed.

Yea I'm big fan of it. Strange things used to happen with npm, dependencies would break, installs would fail etc... Maybe something to do with our build config, but since moving to yarn, no problems. We don't ever think about packages breaking or anything now (which is how it should be).

I was part of a team developing a travel product which needed huge amounts of data from flights to car rental... My god the travel industry is a mess in terms of accessible data. It was the biggest pain point. API's would randomly change structure, endpoints would stop working with unknown errors, data would be significantly different across companies for the same data etc... It was a shambles. Never again will I develop in the travel industry. Unless you own the data, working with it is terrible.

We ended up building our own little system that merged our own flight data with data from suppliers. The schema some of the suppliers provided was non sensical and it ended up being a really finely tuned system that would break reguarly if one of the data suppliers decided to change it without notice.

I spent my days dreaming of a standardized data pool, and while some of the data was standardized, not enough of it was.

Thank goodness I'm now working in an industry that we can totally own our data and are not reliant on anyone else for it.

I tend to run:

    python -m http.server 0.0.0.0:8000

Great list. I use a few of these on all projects.

Interestingly, django-webpack-loader has completely replaced django-compressor and all the other static bundlers. I like how configurable webpack is and how much control it gives you.

Anyone else completely switched over? Every single static file runs through webpack for me now, and I couldn't imagine ever going back.

Django Rest Framework is one of the reasons i use django so much. It is done in a really solid way, allowing great power and flexibility over how you want to abstract your rest API. I've used tastypie before, but got the feeling it wasn't as fleshed out as DRF. I remember coming across strange behaviour with complex nested data. Moving over to DRF empowered me.

It's more contextual to the user. Music suggestions for when you are at the office. Music suggestions for when you're at home etc...

Most of this is to do with the customer support, and not really about the actual laptop. But... It is annoying when things go wrong and you have to deal with poor customer service and you feel like you are constantly battling the company.

I've had a little Dell XPS 13 Dev edition and I really really like it. Everything works well, it's fast, it's got a good display and it stays out of my way and allows me to fully focus on work. I've added gestures on the trackpad to act similar to OSX as I got used to them on my Macbook. Nothing really special to this laptop, but it's damn good and has been behaving itself.

Great link. Just finished reading through it and I feel more educated on typography. At the very least I now have a better feel of the lingo and vocabulary which surrounds typography. Thanks.

This really isn't why the JavaScript community is fucked. It's just a reference project for others to learn from. The spreading of information and ideas through code doesn't mean anyone's fucked. Why fucked? Are you reading into the fact that it's a young ecosystem with a turbulent flow at the moment? JS is just finding its groove. It's an always developing language that has the difficult job of being the language that runs on a fuck load of systems, within the enormities of the internet.

"Post Job -> Magic Happens = Perfect Candidate".

Well that's helpful. Don't see any indication of this "magic" is. I know, I know, once you know the magic it's not special anymore... but I think I want to know what the hell is going on here. At least break it down in really simple terms. You don't have to spill your secrets, just give me a hint.

Am I the only one that much prefers command line git to all these fancy tools for git? I'm more than happy with the power that terminal commands give alongside the visuals of branches and commits in bitbucket/github/gitlab etc...

Am I missing something by not using tools like this? I downloaded it to see if I was missing anything, and while it looks fairly pretty, I just cannot see the need for it. I have worked on some fairly large code-bases with many developers branching and committing and the good ol terminal has kept me up-to-date with what's going on. I do use the more graphical visuals in github/bitbucket as a reference to see how messy or clean the branching is and how far branches are straying from master or parent branches... but that's it.

Someone educate me.

I fully agree. I had that "click" moment with react that really made larger, more complex interfaces seem manageable. Granted that it's still not easy, but most of the time complex apps are tricky to develop and maintain, making sure that they work across a whole load of different devices and their varying screen sizes.

With the huge number of frameworks/libraries/guidelines out their for JS developers, if you can't find a combination that works for you... then front-end work just isn't for you. A lot of people moan about the massive choice of frameworks and libraries. But even the most popular, most maintained and most loved ones will be replaced in a number of years. So find your combination, learn it inside out and ride it's wave until it's time to learn something new that changes paradigms and mindsets.

This is a pretty neat idea, and I could see myself using this in day to day life.

It's nice to see real thought, study and execution into new ways of portraying things that have the possibility of becoming stale. While maps and their functionalities are very much "still in development" with many developers adding new features to them... most of these "new features" don't try to rethink how we see and use them. They just extend the feature set instead of stopping and trying to re-think what a map is and what it is supposed to do.

Sure, a few years ago the difference between browsers was really quite large. But we're in 2017 and most of the most used browsers are mostly in line with the supported features and expected behaviour of them.

But... safari is now the one that has weird behaviour that does not occur in Firefox, chrome and edge. Just because historically there was a massive split in behaviour doesn't mean that Safari gets off free. It's the one browser I hate testing because there are usually edge case and unexpected behaviour.

Typically I use it to create illustration style renders that I use within pages. I create a lot of complex isometric diagrams for my current job that are interactive. So I create them in blender, chop them up, then load them in with WebGL or just slice them into image layers that allow me to create interactive elements.

Yet again I'm amazed by blenders progress. I've been a 'hobby 3d artist' for the past decade and find it incredibly useful in my full time job (front end dev). Blender to me is a shining example of an open source project that seems to constantly improve and give the proprietary apps like 3ds max and maya a run for their money.

While the learning curve for blender can be fairly steep, once you get over that hump, it's an absolute joy to use. A lot of people struggle with the UI, but once you 'get it', it becomes an incredibly fluid and well thought out interface. It still has it's quirks, but as far as 3D packages go, the UI is actually really great.

This update adds lots of things that I have been waiting for. Shadow catchers with cycles has always been possible, but it required a fairly obtuse method to get there. The denoiser for cycles as well in an incredibly nice feature and works incredibly well. The PBR shader is also a real joy to use. Coupled with a decent set of textures, PBR shaders make shading a seriously fun activity. Although it's nothing new (in the industry) it's really nice to have it in blender.

A real asset to any designers toolkit.

This is the real reason why I've stayed with Ubuntu for many, many years. It was my first entry into Linux years ago and I've never had any reason to switch to another distro.

I also like that I can use the same OS on my servers as my desktop. It just makes server setup/maintenance simple for me, as I never have to "learn" a new way of thinking or flow of processes.

I've never had issues with Ubuntu, no crashes, no issues with drivers (even with nVidia graphics cards etc...). I recently purchased a dell XPS laptop which came with Ubuntu pre-installed. It was more as a vote for "yes Dell, this is a good thing" rather than "I can't be bothered installing ubuntu myself".

I used to working with AS3 and was always confused about the amount of hate that was thrown it's way. I found most things about the development flow very nice and it was a brilliant abstraction that HTML and JS just didn't provide.

I was involved in developing a really simple video editor in the browser that would have been impossible (or at least incredibly difficult) to accomplish without AS3 and the graphical abilities that it allowed.

But... it really did used to suck power from laptop batteries like nothing else.

I'll miss you flash. Thanks for shaping what we do and use now.

Not really. There is the "channels" project which brings it closer to proper websocket capabilities, but it still isn't great to work with. I tried using it for a production project and gave up as I encountered too many issues. Ended up rewriting the app in phoenix as we needed really solid websocket support. Phoenix makes websocket seriously nice to work with and we've found the performance to be quite impressive.