The Curious Coder

JavaScript The JavaScript Developer's Reading List - Actually, a repo on GitGub with a list of recommended books and articles.  HTML A JavaScript Free Frontend - One developer's approach to speed up web sites by leaving off the JavaScript entirely and rendering everything on the server. WebAssembly How WebAssembly will change the way you build web apps - Not too soon to start checking out this revolutionary technology to create web apps that run 10-800% faster than JavaScript. VS Code console.log() Faster with Turbo Console Log - an extension that helps you quickly throw a console.log() into your JavaScript code for debugging. Git Git, GitHub & Workflow Fundamentals - A great review of source control fundamentals for using Git with a team. Machine Learning Why machine learning engineer is the best job in America, not developer or data scientist - And so SkyNet begins... .NET Navigating in Blazor - A navigation strategy for Mic...

CSS Styling Based on Scroll Position - for those of you curious on the state of the art CSS for One Page layouts. Designing An Aspect Ratio Unit for CSS - Very interesting look at how designers deal with maintaining aspect ratios and how an addition to the CSS specification would help. JavaScript Why You Should Know Latest JavaScript - "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript"--Jeff Atwood (Co-Founder of Stack Overflow)  That quote punctuates this article on why when it comes to JavaScript, you need to stay curious! Prevent Object Retrieval TypeError with && - A nice explanation of how to use the Guard Operator, &&, in JavaScript. Guard Operator? I thought && was a logical AND. Yep, read up on how to up your JavaScript skills and avoid a lot of unnecessary if statements. Development 7 Must-Have Chrome Extensions for Web Designers - These extensions cover everything from inspecti...

One of the first things any new developer should learn is how to use a version control system, and the most popular of these today is Git and the most popular home for Git is GitHub. Using GitHub requires the installation of Git on the computer where you're doing your development. That's easy enough. You can readily find the download page for Windows or Mac and install it as you would any other piece of software. So far, so good. And then, you are introduced to the command line. Most new developers are unfamiliar with the command line (check out my series on The Command Line and You) and are baffled by its inconsistent command names, abbreviated option parameters. Throw in SSH or sudo and you quickly discover why GUIs (Graphic User Interfaces) were invented. It seems strange that our operating systems are collections of icons, window and menus, but we still have to use the command line, with virtually the same set of instructions it was born with, to use something that...

.NET Announcing ML.NET 0.11 – Machine Learning for .NET. This, along with Blazor, is at the top of my Curiosity ToDo List. I work a lot in C#, and it's nice to see the tools and libraries for machine learning that were almost exclusive to Python making their way to the .NET world. JavaScript WebGazer - an interesting project that attempts to use your webcam to do eye tracking with JavaScript. I, of course, was curious, but on the one laptop I've tried so far, I didn't have much luck. between 20 and 50% accuracy. But, I'll keep an eye on it... Introduction to Hoisting in JavaScript - And explanation of one of the most confusing aspects of JavaScript for new programmers. Building Angular and React Applications Together With Nx - Dogs and cats sleeping together! You Can Do That? Use Chrome  (the browser) as an IDE - I was aware of most of these features, but I never was curious enough to use my browser as an Integrated Development Environment. Super c...

An Absurd Illustration from https://absurd.design/ World Wide Web World Wide Web Turns 30 JavaScript Get JavaScript Grammar for Free  - New book with some interesting JavaScript Visualizations. You can secure a free copy if you act quickly! How to use the apply(), call() and bind() methods in JavaScript  - A nice introduction into those mysterious methods in JavaScript that let you do things with JavaScript that you weren't sure you could do. React Dynamic Document Head with React Helmet - We all know how to make the body of our React Web Apps change with the state, but what about the information in the head? Could me useful! Gadgets Motorola Razr Foldable Phone Software Features Leaked - I had a Razr phone, and then later a Droid Razr (which even with the higher battery capacity version was very thin for its time). Now, in the age of foldable displays, the Razr is (hopefully) making a comeback in the form of an Adroid Flip Phone. This one may ...

Learning The Value of Inconvenient Design - A very interesting article about how making things easier has unintended consequences. What I found curious was the portion that describes an experiment were 2 groups of people were asked to assign a value to a storage box from Ikea. One group was just given the box, assembled, while the other had to put it together themselves. Turns out the DIYer gave it a higher value because there was a greater sense of ownership. I see a parallel in writing code. Watching videos and cutting and pasting code makes it easier, but you get more value out of following along with that video or retyping the code instead of just pasting it. Something to think about. WASM Blazor 0.9.0 Released - Being a .NET guy, I'm really curious about Blazor, a tool that allows you to write your client-side code using C#. Just wish I had more time to play with it... Exploring Blazor with Visual Studio 2019 - Okay, I just won't sleep this weekend. WASP - ...

The Power to Create and Destroy So, in Part One we learned how to get around the file system using the command line using  cd  to move from one folder to another, and pwd  to find out where we were. This in itself is very useful, but the real power comes from creating new files and folders, then copying, moving and deleting them. Let's start by creating a new folder to play around in. First, change directory to your Desktop folder with the following command: cd ~/ Desktop   note : the screenschots are using Git Bash on a Windows PC, but the same commands will work on a Mac Terminal.