DPL Reading List – February 17, 2017
Some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week:
What I want other parents to know about women in tech – “But what grabs fewer headlines is the fact that there’s a lot going right with women in tech. Talk to people on the inside and they’ll tell you, if nothing else, there’s a ton of energy surrounding this issue. We haven’t “turned the corner” just yet, but we’re rapidly approaching the tipping point. That’s great news for parents, young women, and tech companies alike. Because we need your daughters. We need their diverse perspectives in order to build technology for everyone — not just for the boys. And we need them to know that we’re working our butts off to make tech a great place for them to build their careers.”
How Flexbox works — explained with big, colorful, animated gifs (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Flexbox’s underlying principle is to make layouts flexible and intuitive. To accomplish this, it lets containers decide for themselves how to evenly distribute their children — including their size and the space between them. This all sounds good in principle. But let’s see what it looks like in practice.”
“What Have You Failed At This Week?” (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “Dwelling on that failure can not only compound it, it can lead to additional failures. A fear of failure often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The batter who steps into the batter’s box with a fear of striking out is far more likely to strike out than the batter without that fear.”
Our Bots, Ourselves – “In the coming decades, artificial intelligence will replace a lot of human jobs, from driving trucks to analyzing X-rays. But it will also work with us, taking over mundane personal tasks and enhancing our cognitive capabilities. As AI continues to improve, digital assistants—often in the form of disembodied voices—will become our helpers and collaborators, managing our schedules, guiding us through decisions, and making us better at our jobs.”
The Line of Death – “When building applications that display untrusted content, security designers have a major problem— if an attacker has full control of a block of pixels, he can make those pixels look like anything he wants, including the UI of the application itself. He can then induce the user to undertake an unsafe action, and a user will be none the wiser.”
How algorithms (secretly) run the world (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “But while such automated tools can inject a measure of objectivity into erstwhile subjective decisions, fears are rising over the lack of transparency algorithms can entail, with pressure growing to apply standards of ethics or “accountability.””
dotnet new angular and dotnet new react – “Now I’ve got “dotnet new react” or “dotnet new angular” which is awesome. Now I just “npm install” and “dotnet restore” followed by a “dotnet run” and very quickly I have a great starter point for a SPA application written in ASP.NET Core 1.0 running on .NET Core 1.0. It even includes a dockerfile if I like.”
