Don Marti

Sat 29 Sep 2012 07:44:28 AM PDT

Happy hacking: software development links

Where did the freedom-loving volunteers go? Selena Deckelmann on Europe’s open source advantage.

Joseph Reagle: The Feedback of “Tiger” Moms and Women in Computing. Female participation is much higher in cultures where computing is seen as a good career path and a skill to be learned...rather than a masculine or personality-driven type activity.

Just relax and use Go? Go at Conformal. The contract Go offers is simple, you do things our way and the rewards will be great. You use the prescribed directory structure, you get collaboration and a build system for free. You name simple go programs that have _test appended to the filename, you get unit test and performance analysis for free. You use comments in a certain way, you get documentation for free. No more arcane makefiles and crappy scripting languages.

Retrocomputing fun: Before There Were QR Codes: Cauzin Softstrips.

From the alt.fan.heroku department: Do a "git push" to deploy an application to Windows Azure: Announcing: Great Improvements to Windows Azure Web Sites.

Mark Shuttleworth: Amazon search results in the Dash. In other news, Amazon delivery boxes at 7-11. (Now all that the world needs to complete the loop is Ubuntu kiosks at 7-11.)

Good-looking source code typeface: Announcing Source Code Pro (via Google Web Fonts and Webmonkey)

Interesting UI for setting up "if this then that" rules connected to Dropbox, Twitter, and other Web APIs: ifttt.com (via From Python Import Podcast)

Mozilla Persona released. This helps to deal with a key Internet security problem. What are people bad at? Remembering strings of characters. What does the security of many sites depend on? Making people remember strings of characters.

Making the rounds: Clay Shirky on How the Internet will/could (one day) transform government (via Giles Bowkett)