Amazon AWS : Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users

This must be one of the greatest presentations on the Amazon AWS that I’ve ever seen.  It uses a gradual approach – from small and simple to huge and complex.  It covers a whole lot of different Amazon AWS services, how they compliment each other, at which stage and scale they become useful, and more.

Even quickly jumping through the slides gave me a lot to think (and Google) about.

Firefox : The Quantum Era

Entering the Quantum Era—How Firefox got fast again and where it’s going to get faster” is an insightful article showcasing the big changes happening with the Firefox browser.  It seems, the pendulum is swinging back towards the browser that almost became irrelevant.  I think that competition is good for everyone, and it has proven much more so in the end-user applications.  New ideas, new approaches, new technologies, and plenty of stimuli for the Google Chrome and other browser teams to respond with something even better.

WordPress 4.9 Field Guide

WordPress 4.9 is just around the corner (scheduled for release tomorrow, November 14th).  This version brings an impressive number of new features and improvements.  The stats so far are:

Roughly 400 bugs, 181 enhancements, 7 feature requests, and 42 blessed tasks have been marked as closed in WordPress 4.9.

Figuring out all these changes and how they affect you is an effort in itself.  But don’t you worry!  Here’s the WordPress 4.9 Field Guide, which showcases all the main changes and provides plenty of additional resources to follow up.

Wow!  WordPress 4.9 packs quit a punch!

Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds

I’ve been a fan of  Jeff Atwood’s writing on Coding Horror for years.  But it was mostly about technology and programming.  Today, I was reading through his review of a video game – Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds – and for the first time in a really really long time, I wanted to download it and start playing even before I finished reading his post.

That reminded me of how gaming reviews and guides were done back in the 90’s – not by professional content managers and editors, but by people who had a passion.  Learn from that, the gaming industry.  Learn from that, everyone else!

GitHub : Archiving Repositories

GitHub archive repositories

Last week, GitHub introduced archiving of repositories. While it might not seem like a news worthy feature, it is quite useful for both individuals and teams.  Two particular scenarios that I find helpful are:

  1. Indicate that a particular repository / project is obsolete and is not maintained.  This should save quite a bit of time for people who randomly end up on a project’s page, via searching GitHub/Packagist/Google or somewhere else.
  2. Provide an insight into how many of the person’s or team’s profile are active.  It’s often difficult to estimate at a first glance, when looking at a GitHub profile of a person or a team who have been developing for a long time, how many of their projects are actually actively maintained.