Happy June, Five Links You Should Totally Check Out

Welcome to June. Hopefully, you've got a few minutes to spare for some light(ish) reading. If not, bookmark these for later.

Computational Aesthetics

Why do I like this? It's interesting that the science in computer science is starting to get good enough to show us things that are actually beautiful. Being able to leverage this type of thing for different purposes is going to be key. If we ever do make a real AI, I hope it just shows us the beautiful things instead of trying to kill us off.

Transducers.js

Why do I like this? I love anything that helps me turn one type of thing into another type of thing in javascript. Moreso when it comes in a nifty little package that is easy to use. This library will definitely help when dealing with large amounts of data.

Plain JS

Why do I like this? While there are a ton of cool libraries out there that can help you get a lot of things done, being able to do things in vanilla javascript is paramount to understanding how to program in javascript. This resource goes over how to use key vanilla javascript functions and constructs. You didn't want that bloat anyways. Trust me.

CSS Flexbox

Why do I like this? Flexbox aims to fix all the terrible issues with layout on HTML pages. This is something that definitely should be looked into if you want to leverage powerful layout techniques without having to worry quite so much about how well it works between browsers. (Note: Most browsers still have all manner of issues with flexbox, but hopefully this changes over the next 18 months or so.) Also, my friend @mpaarating says we should be using it because it's cool. And he knows cool.

Core War

Why do I like this? Anything that involves blowing something up is good in my book. This type of war allows us to see what we can do while not actually harming anyone or anything. What could be better?