Leonid Mamchenkov - Life, universe, and everything else

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

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:

Indicate that a particular repository / project is obsolete and is not maintained.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.
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.

Easily optimize images using PHP

Via this blog post I came across this PHP image optimization library, which somewhat reminds me of this blog post from a couple of years ago. As good as ImageMagick is, it takes time and effort to find all the right options. With Spatie Image Optimizer you have an almost out of the box solution for optimizing images in a variety of formats.

This package can optimize PNGs, JPGs, SVGs and GIFs by running them through a chain of various image optimization tools.

Best Automation Testing Tools for 2018 (Top 10 reviews)

Here is a nice review of the top 10 best automation testing tools circa 2018. It covers the following:

If you are just setting up the QA team or department and want to know what’s new and hot, or old and tested in the world of automated testing, have a look at these tools.

Interviewing astronauts

Here a couple of recent Q&As with astronauts. First comes the interview with Scott Kelly, with a whole bunch of questions around his time in space. And secondly, a few tongue in cheek answers from several space men and women. I found this answer by Barry Wilmore particularly entertaining:

“You never know true beauty until you see Earth from space, or true terror until you hear someone knocking on the space station door from outside. You look through the porthole and see an astronaut, but all your crew is inside and accounted for. You use the comm to ask who it is and he says he’s Ramirez returning from a repair mission, but Ramirez is sitting right next to you in the command module and he’s just as confused as you are. When you tell the guy this over the radio he starts banging on the door louder and harder, begging you to let him in, saying he’s the real Ramirez. Meanwhile, the Ramirez inside with you is pleading to keep the airlock shut. It really puts life on Earth into perspective.”