pivotal

When Reader shut down I migrated to newsblur, vowing to pay for things I really use, so RSS never died for me :)

I switched to Newsblur after the shutdown of Google Reader. It's paid, but after what happened with Reader I realized how important a good RSS feed was to me and that it was worth paying for. The cost is also reasonable.

What is your reasoning for not using query params for the login request? I know it's probably more RESTful to use POST, but otherwise if you're using HTTPS for everything, query params are just as encrypted as the POST body. Or is there another reason?

I feel the same way. Headspace's guided take 10 course was a solid introduction for me, but once I got used to regular practice, headspace's "extras" weren't needed anymore. Now all I really want is a timer and tracking of when I meditated, so I use Insight Timer.

Banning smartphones doesn't preclude having dumb cell phones. My smartphone died last week and I thought long and hard about getting another one. Ultimately I don't have the willpower to totally resist, but these last few days without one have been enlightening.

I used last year to learn Elm really well and plan on using this year for F#. Go for it!

Elm served as a gentle intro to Haskell for me personally since it has easier to read errors and less overall complexity to grok at first go, but it sort of depends on your experience.

I don't disagree that if you can get away with just a local development environment that it is likely easier to get up and running. However, it requires good documentation of project dependencies and discipline by the team to not accidentally upgrade their version of PHP without telling anyone, both things that are easier said than done. Vagrant lets you codify that through "code". In the case of my employer, it's a necessity, but obviously everyone is different.

I've had quite the opposite experience. Vagrant has saved my team lots of time fighting environmental issues. The approach of running apache locally falls apart pretty quickly as you add more components to your application. Elastic search, mongo, one person happens to have php 7 instead of 5.2 and wrote everything with short array syntax, etc.

We also work on many different projects, often getting dropped into something new without much of a primer. Being able to "vagrant up" and not having to know all the dependencies to get up and running is very handy.

Do we spend time troubleshooting vagrant weirdness? For sure, but compared to the time saved it's a no-brainer.

I've been running Nightly and experienced the same thing with inbox. If I attempt to interact with it before fully loaded, inbox will freeze up for minutes at a time. Love everything else about nightly, this is my biggest issue.

Same experience here! I had never seen them, but when we had our daughter my aunt wisely gave us barnyard dance. I was skeptical at first, but the collection of boynton has grown and is still very popular at 18 months.

Doggies is a fun read for onlookers, since it's basically dad or mom making dog noises for 15 minutes straight.

This is an interesting thought. The nicest communities on reddit I've encountered tended to be small or to have a small "core" group that all knew each other and were highly visible in the community. /r/running for example, when I regularly read it, had daily threads where the main people chatted about all sorts of things. It felt very homey, reminded me of when I read obscure usenet groups as a kid.

I wonder if there's space for forums with purposefully limited membership where people could get to know each other on that more intimate level. I know you could always set up your own private forum for your friends, but maybe as a service.

The Hyperion books also have some interesting (and prescient) things to say about humans relying on a vast network of information instead of their own memories. They are some of my favorites.

I spent some time working through various Haskell books with varying success, then decided to do a code challenge (adventofcode.com) using Elm. I didn't finish, but after writing Elm for many days on end, suddenly Haskell clicked a lot more. The Elm compiler is far more friendly than Haskell's and will walk you through a lot of rookie mistakes and oversights.

I find Elm exciting, and with the prevalence of React/Redux these days, a lot of front end developers would be wise to familiarize themselves with the origin of many of the concepts borrowed from Elm.

I learned the unidirectional data flow pattern with flux before redux and redux makes flux look like war & peace! :P

The no frills way I like to think about redux is your rendered page is the result of a function operating on a state object. Changes to the state object trigger re-renders. There's obviously some subtleties in there and complex use cases, but that's the basic gist.