Read UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right? by Zach Holman (zachholman.com)
Programming time, dates, timezones, recurring events, leap seconds... everything is pretty terrible.
The common refrain in the industry is Just use UTC! Just use UTC! And that's correct... sort of. But if you're stuck building software that deals with time, there's so much more to consider.
It's time... to talk about time.

As programmers, we’re kind of inherently built to want the ABSOLUTE BEST HIGHEST FIDELITY FORMATS OF ALL TIME. Like dammit, I need the timestamp down to the micromillinanosecond for every cheeseburger that gets added to my bespoke Watch-The-BK-Throne app. If I do not have this exact knowledge to the millisecond of when I consumed this BBQ Bacon WHOPPER® Sandwich From Burger King® I may die. 

I totally want this as a Post Kind on my website now!
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 07:28PM

Read Reducing Friction in OER Adoption by David WileyDavid Wiley (iterating toward openness)
Last week I promised I would write a few posts about reducing friction with regard to OER. When I use the phrase “reducing friction” in this context, I mean taking things that are needlessly difficult and making them much easier. In last week’s post I talked about how we’re making it ridicul...
Bookmarked The Top 3 Books to Get Started with Data Science Right Now (towardsdatascience.com)
Python For Data Analysis
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow is by far the best book to get started with machine learning.
Introduction to Statistical Learning.
Read A fictitious, somewhat farcical conversation between me and the JavaScript programming language (littleyellowdifferent.substack.com)
Ernie: Hey, JavaScript. JavaScript: Oh. It’s you. E: Yeah. So it’s been a while. JS: Oh. It has. E: I’m sorry I’ve been away so long. You know how it goes; it’s just been super busy the past couple of years. Being a manager at all of that. JS: Mm-hmm.
This is pretty hilarious and oh so true.

🔖 Visual Studio Code

Bookmarked Visual Studio Code (code.visualstudio.com)
Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications.  Visual Studio Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Downloaded a copy of this today to try it out.

📺 Is that a toothpick or a flux capacitor? Oh wait, it’s Google Sheets. | Domains 2019 | Jeff Everhart, Tom Woodward, Matt Roberts

Watched Is that a toothpick or a flux capacitor? Oh wait, it's Google Sheets. by Jeff Everhart, Tom Woodward, Matt Roberts from Domains 2019 | YouTube

Are you looking for low stakes ways to store and display data? Welp, here’s Google Sheets. Do you want to automate all of the boring parts of your job and sip a drink on a beach somewhere? Looks like you owe Google Sheets a beer. Have you ever wanted to build a lightweight full stack application without spinning up an orchestrated Docker container cluster running on AWS using Typescript that has 90% unit test coverage. Well, hold on to your hats, cause Google Sheets is about to hit 88 MPH while keeping your molecular structure intact.

At VCU’s ALT Lab, we’ve used Google Sheets to build educational experiences that range from novel, to complex, to entirely absurd. Brace yourself for temporal displacement and a little but of JavaScript.

There’s some low-level stuff here that could be dovetailed with IFTTT.com to do some simple automation for maybe doing Snarfed’s backfeed problem.

👓 12 Best WordPress Books for Learning the Platform | Beaver Builder

Read 12 Best WordPress Books for Learning the Platform (Beaver Builder)
If you're new to WordPress, there are a lot of resources that can help. Let's explore twelve of the best books on the market for learning WordPress!
A few interesting things in here. I particularly like the idea that all of them are more recent/modern.

🎧 Triangulation 397 Brianna Wu | TWiT.TV

Listened to Triangulation 397 Brianna Wu from TWiT.tv

Jason Howell speaks with Brianna Wu, video game developer and Candidate for US House of Representatives in MA District 8 for 2020. They discuss how she got started in tech, surviving the Gamergate harassment, why she's running for Congress, and more.

Interesting statistics about first time congressional candidates. I loved the way she framed her run for congress as something she would do at least twice since an engineer would look at the problem and know that the first time would be a failure, but that a second attempt would be more likely to win.

👓 Engineering bioinformatics in seconds, not hours | Ryan Barrett

Read Engineering bioinformatics in seconds, not hours by Ryan BarrettRyan Barrett (snarfed.org)

It was winter 2014. Pharrell had just dropped Happy, the Rosetta probe landed on a comet, President Obama was opening diplomatic relations with Cuba

…and here at Color, the bioinformatics team had a problem. Our pipeline — the data processing system that crunches raw DNA data from our lab into the variants we report to patients — was slow. 12 to 24 hours slow.

This wasn’t a problem in and of itself — bioinformatics pipelines routinely run for hours or even days — but it was a royal pain for development. We’d write new pipeline code, start it running, go home, and return the next morning to find it had crashed halfway through because we’d missed a semicolon. Argh. Or worse, since we hadn’t launched yet, our live pipeline would hit similar bugs in production R&D samples, which would delay them until we could debug, test, and deploy the fix. No good.

👓 asciinema for recording command-line terminal sessions | Rayna M. Harris

Read asciinema for recording command-line terminal sessions by Rayna M. Harris (raynamharris.com)
Live coding screencasts are way more awesome when the text can be copied. asciinema makes this possible.
The ability to copy and paste from video like this is tremendously awesome! Because it’s text-based, it also looks like I can annotate it with Hypothes.is too. Example: https://hyp.is/-Ay6wD7nEemnq3uyMRrhrA/asciinema.org/a/3uHCusbqQd6KAYNZ15NSv21bQ

This could be an awesome teaching tool, particularly for programming.

👓 What Is A WordPress Hook? | Caldera Forms

Read What Is A WordPress Hook? by Josh Pollock (WordPress Form Builder | Caldera Forms)
You can’t spend too long working in WordPress without finding out that you need a “hook.” Hooks are WordPress’ system for you to do something at a specific event. Hooks can be used to either change the value of something at some point — we call this a filter — or to do something, which i...

👓 Emacs from a clean slate | rousette.org

Read Emacs from a clean slate (but she's a girl...)
I feel like this post could be subtitled “For real this time”. Let’s just say that it’s certainly not my first time down an Emacs rabbit hole. I’ve used Spacemacs, then given up because I found it hard to maintain and fix small issues that arose. Then I moved to Doom Emacs, and liked it a lot. It was more compact and less monolithic than Spacemacs, but it still required more Emacs knowledge than I had at the time to understand how all the working parts fitted together. Then I went back to Neovim, and so the bouncing between Vim and Emacs cycle began again. This time, something struck me: what if I was approaching Emacs in the wrong way, trying to make it into something it isn’t, namely Vim? What if I actually took the time to learn how to do things the Emacs Way, and built up my configuration from scratch, adding only what I needed and understood? It was a crazy idea, but it might just work…

📅 RSVP for DevFest LA 2018

RSVPed Attending DevFest LA 2018

A tech conference carefully crafted for you by your GDG community! All about Android, Web, and Cloud from the world experts!

Join us for one day of talks, codelabs, and breakout sessions from the GDGLA team, Googlers, and major companies using Google Technologies.

We will be serving morning refreshments and lunch. More importantly we will be giving away over hundreds of dollars worth of prizes throughout the day! All attendees will have a chance to win Gift Cards, Google Home devices, Google Daydream Headsets, and much more.

Come learn about Android, Firebase, Machine Learning, Artificial Reality, Virtual Reality, and more

Sun, December 2, 2018 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM PST
at Cross Campus, 800 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90017