These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
Deployer is yet another tool for deploying PHP projects. It looks to have more similarities with Laravel Envoy and phake, than with Robo.li, of which I am a new and growing fan. But I thought I’d throw it into the mix here, just in case I’ll change my mind in the future.
I came across this nice visualization of “Top 29 books ranked by unique users linking to Amazon in Hacker News comments“.
Amazon product links were extracted and counted from 8.3M comments posted on Hacker News from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015.
Most of these are, not surprisingly, on programming and design. A few are on startups and business. Some are on how to have a good life. Which is a bit weird.
Var Masterpiece is a Google Chrome add-on, which formats PHP var_dump() output into something much more beautiful and useful. You can customize the type colors and a few other things in the extension options, once installed.
It’s not often that I need to draw a diagram or a flowchart these days. My time is mostly consumed by more technically challenging tasks. And whenever I do have to produce some form of a chart, I usually fallback on to the Graphviz dot, which allows me to do something in literally seconds.
However, I’m pretty sure the day will (or, rather, return) when I’d need a tool to produce eye-pleasing diagrams and flowcharts. For that day, and for that day only, I’m leaving the link to SmartDraw here. It’s a commercial offering, but at $15/month for their cloud-hosted web-based application, it’s seems to be quite a bargain.
