Linkdump 8 - HTML5, CSS3, Programming and a Bit of Art

Mmm. It has been a while since I've done one of these posts. Here we go then!

• CreativeJS. A blog about creative JS. Mainly graphics stuff, though.
• HTML5 Doctor. Nice series of articles about HTML5. The element index is super handy too!
• CSS3 Sticky Note. If you ever write a "notes" app, you'll likely need this.
• Drawing Lines with CSS3. Another handy CSS3 technique. If you ever need to draw lines between some elements, you know how to do that now.
• Clean Up Your Mess - A Guide to Visual Design for Everyone. Good introduction to the basics of visual design.
• Swiss Army Knives. What should you focus on your product? What are your key features? This article might give some insight on that.
• Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby - a side-by-side reference sheet. If/when you need to jump between the languages you'll likely need something like this.
• Try Haskell! An interactive tutorial in your browser. What a nice way to grok some basic concepts of Haskell. I managed to get into the language a bit thanks to this.
• Codecademy - Learn to Code. Same thing for JavaScript. Awesome concept.
• jswiki. A good starting point for ventures in the world of JavaScript.
• Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Superb illustrations by Arthur Rackham! Well worth studying if you are into art.

HTML5 Canvas Gradients - Rectangular Gradient

I came by an interesting question at Stack Overflow a while ago. It asked how to render a rectangular gradient using HTML5 Canvas. I'm going to present you my solution in this post. It ended up being quite nice and simple.

New JavaScript Libraries - colorjs + bunit.js

After a long while of doing some real work I've been able to spend some time on my own, personal development. As I happen to like to have nice tools at my disposal whenever the time comes, I've focused on tools. I still have some ideas to implement. These two should provide a nice start, though.

In this post I'm going to introduce two new libraries of mine: colorjs and bunit.js. The former provides a simple color abstraction while the latter one is handy for testing.

Book Review - Node Web Development

Disclaimer: I received a digital review copy of this book from the publisher, Packt Publishing.

Node.js, or just Node as I shall refer to it, is perhaps one of the most hyped web development platforms at the moment. Compared to established solutions, such as Django or Ruby on Rails, it provides a lower level approach to web development. It utilizes Google's V8 JavaScript engine renowned for its performance.

Node is not just about a different kind of approach to development. npm, Node Package Manager, is probably one of the main reasons for its surging popularity. This popularity is also visible in the increasing amount of documentation available.

Node Web Development by David Herron is one of the newcomers on the Node documentation scene. It is a book aimed for people that have already some experience with web development in general and wish to make the leap to Node. I think it manages to reach this goal amicably. It is not a thick book given it has only 172 pages. Nevertheless, it succeeds in providing enough information for one to get started.

I'll cover the book and its content in more detail next. The free chapter available provides a nice overview of Node modules for those interested and gives a nice glance at the book itself.

My Epic Biking Trip from Oulu to Jyväskylä

I've been quite an avid cyclist for whole my life. Two years ago I decided to take my hobby to the next level and buy myself a proper bike. I ended up purchasing Bianchi Via Nirone 7 road bike. It was probably one of the better decisions of my life on retrospect.

It is truly amazing what a difference a proper bike does. I know mine isn't totally top notch one. Compared to my previous hybrid one it's totally from another world, however. And now that I upgraded its wheels a bit, it feels better than ever. I guess the next step is to get one of those fancy carbon bikes. That'll have to wait at least till the next Summer at least.

As my biking hobby has progressed, so has my overall fitness and health. I'm probably in the best condition of my life at the moment. The last two months were quite busy due to a job and I wasn't able to ride as much as I would've liked. In order to make up for this a bit, I decided to make my first epic bike trip as the gig ended.

In this post I'll cover my trip to some detail and offer some guidance to other people that might want to do something like this at some point. It really gives you a different kind of perspective on the environment when you travel "slow" sometimes. Often the trip to the destination is more interesting than the destination itself. That's true in this case at least.