Things learned this week #5

Posted on June 26, 2016
Tags: learned this week

Another series of links that I found interesting and want to share with others.

Projects

Faker.js

Nice lib for creating some fake data. Can be useful for demos, prototypes and mockups.

esdoc

Can be helpful for generation documentation. Was created with es6 in mind but is also extensible with reach ecosystem of plugins. Unfortunately didn’t found plugin for supporting flowjs types. Would be great to have.

http archive

A lot of interesting statistical info about web pages. Can be useful for setting web site performance budget.

pattern lab

Interesting approach for building UI. Introduces the concept of atomic design.

Blog posts, specs or articles

Four months with Haskell

Quite a nice article from one guy that switched from ruby + js to Haskell. Was really interesting for me as a fan of Haskell. The author describes major pros and cons of Haskell, it’s ecosystem and community.

State Streams and React

Describes the value of RxJs for modern apps. Shows an example of building applications with React and Rxjs. Personally, I was also working on something similar but stuck on composing components hierarchy. Need to check this out.

4 Steps To Be An Effective Engineer

" To be an Effective Engineer you need to be responsible, valuable, efficient and replaceable."

What I learned from analyzing 1.65M versions of Node.js modules in NPM

Just awesome research on how npm works. Gives some advice about how you can speed up you npm install time. Provides interesting statistics about existing packages.

Why Functional Programming Works for Games

This post invalidates a couple of myths about functional programming for game dev. I agree with the author and sure that ideally, the functional approach will lead to more robust and reliable codebase and to more performant games.

The Art of the Scientist

This article highlights the importance of the scientific approach for doing anything. Was surprised to discover that penicillin, microwave, X-ray, gunpowder, plastics, and vulcanized rubber were discovered accidentally because of someone’s wrong guesses.