Friday Links: Engineering Edition
Friday Links: Engineering Edition
Here are the five most interesting links this week from our engineering department. Thanks to Jeremy Mack. Collated by Chloe Olewitz.
The unbearable lightness of web pages
When GeoCities went dark, so did over 7 million of the internet’s first websites. Web pages aren’t durable, says Joel Dueck, who believes that the way to introduce a certain permanence to the internet is to print websites as books. The integrated workflow would create a simultaneous PDF file each time a website is published, so that readers can order printed and bound hard copy versions of their favorite sites. Link from Kevin Barrett.
Depth-first search algorithm visualizer
Depth-first search is an algorithm for analyzing or searching tree or graph data structures. Starting at the root, the code explores as far as possible along each branch of the architecture before backtracking. “An excellent visualizer for how algorithms execute,” from David Ashby.
A critical atlas of the internet
Why is the internet a complete different experience in the US than it is in, say, France? Or China? This research project maps out a spatial visualization of the internet in order to understand the social, political, and economic issues of the web. Creator Louise Drulhe packed the “atlas” full of enough maps and charts and diagrams to make any nerd happy. Link from Kevin Barrett.
On GitHub—this is Redfin’s react framework with server render for blazing fast page load and seamless transitions between pages in the browser. “This is a very interesting pre-package React server renderer”, according to Jeremy Mack.
Joel Spolsky’s company Fog Creek Software, makers of Trello, just launched a web-based IDE that lets you make web apps—you can click, and edit a little code, and have an app up and running. It eliminates a lot of work. This is an early release, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. Link from Paul Ford.