If you don’t already know webpack, you’ve some catching up to do.
Webpack is a module bundler that bundles javascript and other assets for the browser. It works really well for applications and javascript libraries and is very simple frontend build tool.
- Kent C. Dodds - https://egghead.io/lessons/javascript-intro-to-webpack
Django is great but it’s frontend toolchain is stuck in the past. Imagine if someone told you to copy all your python module dependencies in your source tree and import them from there. Unthinkable, right? We’ve pip and virtualenv for that. We also have npm and bower for frontend packages but we still choose to manage frontend packages manually or write very complex wrappers over javascript tools so that we only have to deal with Python. I think this needs to change. The javascript community has come up with some awesome pieces of software. Npm is one of the best, probably the best package manager I’ve come across. Tools like grunt, gulp,
browserify, webpack are too good to ignore.
I recently switched to Rhythmbox from Banshee and I’m loving it. It’s fast, loads up almost instantly, doesn’t consume as much resources as Bansee and doesn’t crash after every 3 songs. I do miss some features that Banshee had though like remembering the last playing song. So, I created a plugin for rhythmbox just to do that. It remembers the last playing entry (song, radio station, podcast, etc), playback time, browser filters (genre, artist and album) and playlists. It remembers these things (except playback time) even if Rhythmbox crashes for some reason.
Just noticed a small but nice change in Banshee 2. Usually, our music players minimize to system tray when closing the main window so that the music keeps playing in the background. We have to manually look for a quit function in order to entirely close the app or pause the music and let the app live in memory and consume cpu cycles. Banshee 2.0 has no quit function per se. Closing banshee while the music is playing the window, otherwise quits entirely.
We need to promote this bahavior across the freedesktop scene. Abstract underlying concepts as much as we can and make apps inteligent enough to decide for themselves.
In case you don’t already know, GmailWatcher is a Gmail notifier specifically designed for the Ubuntu Operating System. It relies heavily on Ubuntu specific packages like MeMenu, Notifications, DesktopCouch but I’m planning a stock Gnome version also so that people on Fedora, Suse and other rocking distribution can use it too.
This Saturday I’ll be delivering a workshop on the Python programming language in my college. Our university has an age old course for Computer Engineering. C is the introductory language and is taught using the Turbo C compiler from the 90s, VB 6 is considered the best way to make GIUs. It’s time to introduce my friends to 2010 in Computer Science.
In case you don’t already know, GmailWatcher is a Gmail notifier specifically designed for the Ubuntu Operating System. It relies heavily on Ubuntu specific packages like MeMenu, Notifications, DesktopCouch but I’m planning a stock Gnome version also so that people on Fedora, Suse and other rocking distribution can use it too.
Finally Mir Nazim has kicked off the Kashmir FOSS mailing list. Things should only soar from here on. Really excited. Check http://fosskashmir.appspot.com.
