February Beer and Tell

mozilla

Every month, Mozilla web devs and community get together and do lightning talks for each other about little things we’ve been working on. We call it Beer and Tell. They are on Friday afternoons.

The February 2013 Beer and Tell was not one to disappoint! Unfortunately, we don’t have a recorded video of this one, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Or read on!

NoodleAmp Reborn

Michael Kelly (mkelly) showed us the latest iteration of NoodleAmp, and let random people from the internet pick which songs to play from his computer. If you can write a Python generator and get gstreamer installed, you, too, can use NoodleAmp!

DetourApp

ednapiranha showed us DetourApp, the messaging app for spies, where all the messages self-destruct after 10 seconds. Hop over, sign in with Persona, and start sending missives. The code is up on GitHub and it uses Flask, Redis, PIL, Jinja2, nunjucks, and my personal favorite: bleach.

django-fancy-cache

peterbe is at it again, coming in with django-fancy-cache, a replacement for the built-in @cache_page decorator that lets you use useful custom functions to control how you cache views, when they expire, and even manipulate the output! If you’ve ever wished you could cache a form with @cache_page and then been bit by the CSRF token, this is the library for you.

LeechTracker

Wraithan admits to getting distracted during the day, but it’s OK because he built a tool to help! Combined with LeechBlock, LeechTracker helps him figure which times of the day he’s most susceptible to distraction, and what those distractions are. Then he goes back to work. And you can, too! Just install the add-on and follow the instructions. Or check out how the distractions have tapered off over time.

My Search for the Perfect Keyboard

Erik Rose knows that the tool developers use more than anything else is their keyboard, so he invested serious time in making sure he had the right one. After trying the rest:

  • http://www.keyboardbumps.com/
  • http://matias.ca/quietpro/mac/
  • http://pckeyboard.com/

Erik found the best: http://www.daskeyboard.com/

Though he’d be the first to tell you it’s a personal thing. Find a place you can try out a bunch of them!

That’s all for this month. Tune in next time. Same Bash time, same Bash channel.