[text-blocks id="knowledge-roundup-preface"]

Busy week - so I did a little less reading than usual. I'm also finally reading "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill so that should have some notes in an upcoming week.

Articles

http://blog.phusion.nl/2014/12/22/phusion-passenger-5-beta-2

Beta 2 release of Phusion Passenger 5 (previously called "Raptor"). If their speed claims are really accurate, the RC and 1.0 releases could be game changers for some apps. I tried it out and hit issues with beta 1, so I may wait until an RC is available to try again.

https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/ruby-isnt-dead

"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated..."

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/north-koreas-parallel-universe-5-stats-ian-bremmer

Articles abound about North Korea in the wake of the supposed Sony hack. But still, interesting stats on a strange and foreign land.

http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

Capable of increasing your IQ, or so Bulletproof Exec says. I'm going to try out one of the app versions, of which there are many.

https://econsultancy.com/blog/65511-hamburger-menus-for-mobile-navigation-do-they-work

Good overview of some analysis done on whether the "hamburger" menu icon that has become so ubiquitous is actually a good fit for user engagement.

https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/latency-compensation/

I've been digging more and more into meteor lately, and I see it as a powerful tool for rapid, featureful development. Here's another article from the Discover Meteor folks, this time about Latency Compensation - which helps Meteor apps feel more responsive by simulating server interaction before the server actual finishes responding.

http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

If you were wondering why in the world the blink tag ever existed.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/how-the-hum-of-a-coffee-shop-can-boost-creativity/

I've been a fan of focus@will for awhile now. Their new Cafe Focus and Cafe Creative channels surprised with me with how effective they are. This article is an older one that goes into some of the concepts that the focus@will channels were probably built from.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/06/oregon-trail-and-nearly-2400-classic-games-now-available-to-play-free-in-your-browser/

And now for the opposite of focus.