Developer News #72 – The Winter Break Edition with Historical Videos, new Google Sheets

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Public Service Announcement – The DevNews team be offline until the week of January 30th getting some much needed R&R. Here’s something to tide you over until then.

  • Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on David Letterman – She worked 43 years in the Navy, was assigned to the Mark 1 at Harvard – the very first computer, during WW2. She wrote the manual for the first computer, and developed the COBOL language. For the time, it was a major innovation. Interesting that she brought strands of wire to represent the time electricity can move in a nanosecond… Via @jamie_allen.
  • Have you seen the mother of all demos? This was a demo of hypertext, a mouse, the personal computer, and many other things. This is 44 years old today. I want the device on his left hand – looks like a little thumb piano or shortcut key tool.
  • Google Sheets – better and works offline – nifty videos explaining how the new features work. Cut the cord to desktop spreadsheets for most purposes…
  • Live SQL exercises in PostgreSQL – if you’ve been delaying learning SQL queries, but want to learn, here’s a site. And it’s PostgreSQL, not some annoying in-memory database.
  • Are you the “smartest person in the room?” – We all have been that person, haven’t we? Admit it or not, in our comments on the podcast page…
  • New Data I/O videos online – watch talks from our Data I/O 2013 show, featuring speakers Lance Ball, Edward Capriolo, Camille Fournier, Grant Ingersoll, Claudia Perlich, Lars George and Chariot’s Eric Snyder. Great topics in cloud processing and streaming of data, data mining, machine learning, more.
  • Refactoring and tests a blog entry by Chariot’s Mark Shvets.
  • Chariot’s Nicolas Kijak on Getting Things Done with Task Warrior – yes, that GTD – a command-line task manager that uses commands like task add, task ls, etc… Unix command-line junkies rejoice.
  • Chariot’s Steve Smith writes about Apple’s new App Store submission requirements and provides a few things iOS developers should review in their applications to stay compliant.