Good morning!

Spring is finally here! For some of you, it's already been for a while but also here up north we're finally starting to hear the birds sing and feel the sunshine warm our backyard patios. This month my colleague Jens from our Stockholm office shares videos from his reading list to help you improve as a developer.

Jens Östlund is a software developer at Futurice working across the stack. He has a background in linguistics and started getting into coding around 2013. Jens loves learning new programming languages and exploring how they help you see problems and solutions from new angles. He is also very passionate about software development as a craft and always strives to simplify both code and work flows.plify both code and work flows.

Jens' Picks

Simple made Easy

This talk by Rich Hickey (the inventor of Clojure) is a real classic and dissects the distinction between simple and easy, and their relation to complexity. I still find myself reflecting on the conclusions drawn by Rich in this presentation and I highly recommend you take the time to watch it if you haven't seen it.

Moral lessons from free software and GNU Emacs

In the next article (and accompanying video) Protesilaos Stavrou tells the story of how he got into computers and Free Software. His story is full of interesting life lessons many of which resonate with myself also coming from a humanities background. I especially find his argumentation on autonomy and continuous learning to be really inspiring. Though the title mentions Emacs, the takeaways from this talk has a lot more to do with life in general.

All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again 

In this talk Mark Allen goes through the history of programming languages and the main drivers behind their evolution. A really funny and intriguing talk full of amazing quotes.

WebAssembly: Building a new kind of ecosystem

Speaking of programming languages, there are a lot of interesting and exciting things happening in the world of WebAssembly with a lot of decision and discussion being had which might end up deeply changing how we work with the web and even beyond that. This talk by Lin Clark looks at the possibility of creating a more secure ecosystem when WebAssembly is moved out of the browser. I really like this talk because of its accessible explanation of common security issues found in the current package managers we use.

A cartoon intro to WebAssembly

If you want to know more about what exactly WebAssembly you can't get a better introduction than this. I really love this article series because Lin Clark explains not only what WebAssembly is, but also how it works and, most importantly, why it exists.

A foray into the world of Progressive Web Apps

Progressive Web Apps or PWAs are web applications that offer native-like functionality for mobile devices. Coined in 2015, PWAs share a few traits with modern web development like responsiveness, linkability and safety but add their own unique aspects with connectivity independence and re-engageability.

In this talk, Graham Daw walks you through what PWAs are and how they are made. He also talks about the pros and cons you can weigh when you're making a decision between a native app and a PWA.

Jobs

Software Developer | Stockholm

Whether it's JavaScript frameworks, continuous integration, test automation, CSS, deployment frameworks, mobile apps or NoSQL databases - as long as web is your thing - and you can position yourself in frontend, backend or somewhere in between; this might be the opportunity you've been looking for.

Cloud Developer | Stockholm

It's not just about getting the data to flow from the database to the user's screen, it's about getting to know the technologies, understanding the layers and finally delivering code to production. If you're right at home with cloud tech, web backends and building elegant APIs, don't miss out on this opportunity.