Breaking Ground on Food

Breaking Ground on Food

The closure of two “ultra-private” e-mail services shows just how weak the system really is.

When Lavabit—an e-mail service used by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden—suspended service last week amid hints that it had received a government demand for information, a competing service called Silent Circle made a draconian decision: to obliterate all of its customers’ stored e-mail.

Professor Alan Sherman received two research awards from the National Science Foundation to support work at UMBC on cybersecurity.

Sherman is a co-principal investigator on a two year, $300K Eager award to foster research cooperation among four successful and mature Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research: Purdue University, UMBC, UC Davis, and Mississippi State. The project will provide opportunities for students to work on problems proposed and mentored by practitioners in the real world rather than just faculty led research. As a result, more pressing and urgent problems will be addressed, the students will benefit from the guidance of multiple and interdisciplinary research faculty from multiple institutions and the student-lead research may produce solutions for pressing national problems.

Professor Sherman also received a supplement of $271K to his UMBC Cybersecurity SFS Program award to support graduate research assistants who will work on two new projects. One will develop new algorithms for verifiable randomness that can generate random bits in a way that the recipients will have verifiably high assurance that the bits were generated in a truly random fashion. The work will improve upon the (unverifiable) NIST random beacon project. The second project will develop a new security education game, inspired by the UMBC-developed classroom game SecurityEmpire, to be fielded as a Facebook application for free use by anyone. This is joint work with UMBC faculty Marc Olano and Linda Oliva.

The research will be carried out in the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance under Professor Sherman’s supervision.

The August edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery resources, web development tools, responsive design tools, color resources, coding resources, and some really great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments. And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.

Typewolf

Looking for typography inspiration? Then Typewolf is just the site. Not only does it provide plenty of online typographical inspiration, but it also identifies the fonts used for you.

Bootstrap 3

Bootstrap, the mobile-first responsive framework from Twitter, has been around for awhile, but Bootstrap 3 RC1 has just been released. It has a number of new features over the last version, with more than 1600 commits and 72,000 additions/deletions, so basically everything has changed.

iOS 7 Wireframe Kit

This iOS7 Wireframe Kit from Blake Perdue makes it easy to wireframe your iOS 7 apps in Illustrator, and includes all the basic UI elements you might want.

Tiff

Tiff is a type tool that lets you visually contrast the differences between two typefaces. It currently works with Google Web Fonts, as well as your system fonts.

Bytesize

Bytesize is a new weekly podcast about tech, design, and development. You can also read summaries of the week’s news on the site, along with links to the original articles.

Skeuocard

Skeuocard is a progressively-enhanced credit card input form that provides visual cues as credit card information is entered.

WakaTi.me

WakaTi.me brings time tracking directly to your text editor. Just install the plugin (it currently works with Vim or Sublime), and then visit the WakaTi.me website to see your time spent on each project.

Responsive Web CSS

Responsive Web CSS makes it quick and easy to layout your pages for responsive sites for a variety of devices.

Colorgorize

Colorgorize is a web design gallery sorted entirely by color. You can browse sites, or search by specific color.

Spectacle

Spectacle is a Mac app for window control via keyboard shortcuts. It’s open source, has customizable keyboard shortcuts, and is easy to use.

Snapnote.io

Snapnote.io makes it incredibly easy to share and annotate images and screenshots. Just drag and drop your image onto the page, use the built-in tools for annotation, and then share it.

Pico

Pico is a simple, fast, flat file CMS, meaning that it uses no database. It uses the Twig templating engine for powerful and flexible themes, and is completely free and open source.

CSS3 Animation Cheat Sheet

This CSS3 Animation Cheat Sheet shows a variety of animations that are possible with CSS3, including slide up and slide down, expand open, and more.

Precomposed Touch Gestures

This set of basic, Precomposed Touch Gestures is great for use in product demos or presentations. They’re available as raw Quicktime animations, so they’ll work in your video editor or Photoshop.

Mailparser.io

Mailparser is an easy way to automate your daily email routine. Just set up your data extraction rules, and tell it how to handle the results.

Progression.js

Progression.js is a jQuery plugin that lets you add real-time hints and progress indicators to your forms.

CSS Zen Garden

CSS Zen Garden has been around for awhile, but has recently been reworked as an HTML5 template. It’s a great demonstration of what can be done with CSS-based design.

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is a web hosting service where you only pay for what you actually use. There’s a pricing estimator you can use to get an idea owf what your hosting will cost based on what you’re likely to use.

Webflow

Webflow makes it easy to design responsive sites visually, with pixel-perfect control. It includes a responsive grid, versioning, web fonts support, custom forms and more.

Emmet LiveStyle

Emmet LiveStyle is a plugin for bi-directional editing of your CSS. It works with Google Chrome, Safari, and Sublime Text.

TypeWonder

TypeWonder makes it easy to test and preview web fonts on the fly, without coding. Just enter your site’s URL and pick a font to get started.

Cloud Cannon

Cloud Cannon lets you crate a hosted CMS from your HTML and CSS in seconds. It has a 30-day free trial.

SVGeneration

SVGeneration is a SVG graphics showcase and generator that lets you quickly and easily create graphics for use on your sites.

Chronic (by donation)

Chronic is a new experimental typeface inspired by Native American culture and geometry. It includes over 300 glyphs in 4 different styles.

Cash (free)

Cash is a slab serif typeface that’s free for personal use.

Summit (name your price)

Summit is a beautiful, elegant, legible display typeface with a basis in geometric sans serifs. It comes in 10 styles and 5 weights.

Origami Beta (free)

Origami Beta is a beautiful sans serif typeface with slightly condensed letterforms that’s great for display use.

Allumi Dingbats (free)

Allumi Dingbats is a set of minimalist dingbats, available in both free and pro versions.

Oami (€10)

Oami is a funky display typeface with open letterforms. You can also pay with a tweet.

Woodwarrior (tweet/FB post)

Woodwarrior is a modern display typeface with geometric letterforms and a very bold style.

Squirrel FY ($39)

Squirrel FY is a plump typeface that comes with fancy alternates, perfect for composing headlines or other display uses.

Pusekatt ($15)

Pusekatt is a handdrawn typeface that’s lively, happy, and useful for things like posters.

Sedona ($29)

Sedona is a very bold, quirkuy display font based on an isometric grid and evocative of travel, campgrounds, rustic lodges, needle point, and more.

Know of a new app or resource that should have been included but wasn’t? Let us know in the comments.

PixelKit: Unlimited access to UI Kits, Icon Sets & More – only $25!

Lately I’ve found it difficult to get to the next phase in my knowledge as a programmer. After having spent the last year and a half learning to program and building my new startup, my job’s role has mostly transitioned out of programming daily to marketing, sales, and product management. I’m finding myself losing the motivation to get better just for the sake of getting better. Without having clear programming deliverable in my sights, the need to open up a book or take more Treehouse classes has left me for the time being. I don’t consider myself a career long programmer, and I’m having trouble figuring out how much I should learn.

That’s not at all to say that I don’t want to continue to learn more, but I know that I don’t want to be a career developer. When I started I wanted – and I believe I achieved – the ability to be able to prototype ideas. Some might say I cut corners, as I never worried about scaling or learning to write tests. Doing things right is very important to me, so I did write with best practices in mind and kept my code clean.

Lately I feel as if I’ve achieved almost all I want to achieve with programming. One disincentive from keeping focused on programming is that I still think there’s much that I could improve on in other areas, more important aspects of my career as a serial entrepreneur I could and should focus on instead. Josh Long, Managing Editor of Treehouse, asked me if “knowing what I know now, I would learn to program again.” I told him emphatically that I would never trade learning to program for anything, but that I’m not honestly not sure how much farther I want to progress.

I’d love to start a discussion among the readers of this blog about how much you think non-career programmers should learn. Do you believe that I, and others, should continue to dedicate some of my time to learning new concepts, or what? I’m really looking forward to your answers, as it’ll help me figure out what to do next.

The post How Much Should Non-Career Programmers Learn? appeared first on Treehouse Blog.