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DH Dev Links for 2/14

By Wayne Graham on February 17, 2011

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There seem to be quite a few links this week loosely grouped around interface design, with some other geeky goodness mixed in.

Isotope jQuery Plugin: Seriously one of the coolest jQuery plugins I’ve seen in a while. When I get some time, I plan to spend some time with this plugin and Solr results for a couple of projects…
Duke, Exeter, and Howe I Wish Computer Science was Taught: Good post on some of the shortcomings of the current state of computer science education.
Queuing Theory Books Online: Eventually you’ll find a problem that could use some queuing. This is a great list of books that give a great theoretical handling of the subject.
Here is the Biggest Mistake You Will Make on Amazon EC2: With the popularity of cloud computing, there are some things you need to remember when deploying to platforms like EC2. Take away from the article…be careful rebooting server instances!
What is the On-Boarding Process for new Employees at Twitter: While most DH centers have pretty small teams, I’m always interested in how bigger companies bring new developers in and cultivate their cultural beliefs. This is a nice piece on how Twitter brings new people in.
How to Use Dropbox to Organize Your Startup’s DH Project’s Documents: Just replace “startup” in this article with “your project” and this has some good tips for keeping your project documents organized.
Pull Request Diff Comments: Github now allows you to comment on individual lines on pull requests! Very useful for code reviews.
Landing Page Best Practices: Remember Flash splash pages? This post has some great tips on designing landing pages to engage users in the content of your site.
IE 9 Beta: Let’s face it, a lot of people don’t have access to other browsers for various reasons (can’t install software on work computer). Even though IE is painful, Microsoft swears IE 9 will be better…
Better grids: Lessons learned from Design for Developers: Thoughtbot is putting on a series of training sessions to teach design principals to developers. Take away on this…3 and 4 column grid systems provide a solid foundation that introduces clarity to your web layouts.
Documentation is Freaking Awesome: Enough said.
Paul Irish on HTML 5 Boilerplate: Anyone who’s looked at any HTML I’ve done in the last 6 months will notice that it starts with HTML 5 Boilerplate (usually with some 960gs). This is a nice presentation by Paul on its development and use.
Reuse your JavaScript as jQuery Plugins: Nice post on converting JS scripts in to jQuery plugins using a couple of different patterns. Definitely worth a look if you are writing any Javascript.
How to use Dropbox as a git server: Can’t/Don’t want to use github as your SCM? This tutorial shows how you might use Dropbox to replicate your git repo (you’ll need to adjust the paths if you’re a Windows user).
Announcing TileMill: A Modern Map Design Studio Powered by Open Source: The folks at DevelopmentSeed are doing some amazing work. If you have need to create some maps, TileMill looks like a nice piece of software to get you running without needing to install a large server infrastructure!
Hacked Floppy Disk Plays Starwars Music: Just for fun