External Resources

It took 5hrs to raytrace a simple scene in 1986. Today we can do it in seconds, in a web browser, in JavaScript, on a phone.

Something I'm sure many people are not aware of; there's an inherent racial bias in the technical history of photography.

Brilliant video explaining why and how Diffie-Hellman key exchanges work to secure communication from man-in-the-middle attacks.

Genius idea: Dutch students can live in nursing homes rent-free, as long as they keep the residents company.

What does a black hole *really* look like? Here's a simulation, and a walkthrough on how it was done.

ES7 has some fancy new features, among which is a new kind of function, the async function.

A database designed to run on both the browser and server, and sync the two as required. "PouchDB was created to help web developers build applications that work as well offline as they do online."

An excellent cheat sheet for VIM commands.

From April 21st, mobile friendly websites will have a significant SEO advantage over old-school sites. Good times.

A web based editor for web based animations, currently in Alpha - looks promising!

Detecting modern browsers in order to send them enhanced functionality without breaking older, less capable, browsers.

A site to generate a .gitignore file for your specific needs. Great for stopping those .DS_Store and .Thumbs files from winding up in your projects.

"http2 explained" describes the protocol HTTP/2 at a technical and protocol level. Background, the protocol, the implementations and the future.

Sometimes as a developer we have no choice but to bow to client demands and add those bloody social share widgets to websites. Don't use the official JS versions, they are notorious for loading excessive JS and making page loads very slow. Here's a better way...

How HTML elements are supported by screen readers; ongoing research into how HTML5 attributes and tags are supported by various screen reading software, which are used by people with vision impairments.

A Pep talk from my favourite author, to authors everywhere. A good read :)

Solid advice from a pro; should you be a photographer looking for lighting kit with more punch than a speedlite can deliver, you'll want to watch this.

Service Worker still isn't in every browser, but here's how to use it to make your websites about 100% more awesome.

Smart web-page full of developer documentation, that can also be accessed when offline. The future is here, and it's wonderful.

Very clever stuff; fancy in-page animations that respond to music you play.

An online, service-worker enabled, offline capable, SVG optimisation tool.

Stephen Greig explains some practical real-world use cases for Flexbox along with example code. Useful.

Ever wanted to show your perfect-sighted friends how you really see the world? Enter your prescription here and then they'll know! Incidentally: here's how I see things; only I'm also colour blind!

A new design of input peripheral that combines a split keyboard and mouse - looks very interesting; as long as you can touch-type.

If you're writing shell scripts then running them through this checker might be a neat idea; it'll help find bugs.

CoreOS is another Linux distrobution aiming to re-imagine the way packages are managed and installed. It, much like nixOS, seems very interesting.

NixOS has a completely declarative approach to configuration management: you write a specification of the desired configuration of your system in NixOS's modular language, and NixOS takes care of making it happen.

How to build a lightweight virtual machine for development purposes.

Another Open Source distributed database. This one's pretty new and aims to take the best parts from MongoDB, Riak, CouchDB and others, while adding its own ideas in there too.

Getting an SSL certificate is a monumental pain, and costly; Let's Encrypt aims to be free, automated, and open. A certificate authority aiming to make https far easier to implement.

Build tools are appearing all over the place; Grunt and Gulp to name but two. Apparently, you could just use npm instead...

Need to relax or focus? Music not good for that? Here's the ambient sound of a Cafe in the rain. I love this.

A podcast that's 15min long, comprised of a number of top authors, giving advice on writing.

If you're not sure where to start or where to go next with JavaScript, this list is a decent place to look.

A self hosted Git service written in Go. Essentially seems to be a GitHub clone you can run yourself on your own infrastructure.