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Annual Hackathon 2017

Every year I participate in a 48-hour hackathon at work. It’s an opportunity to write software you otherwise wouldn’t get to write, this could be a neat automation tool to save you time on daily tasks or something totally unique like a virtual reality Blackjack game that will never see the light of day. As long as you think you can write it in 2 days nothing is off limits. There are several prize categories; Most Creative Hack, Most Business Value, and Non-Technical Project. This year I decided that I’d give virtual reality a crack and aim to at least get an honourable mention in the Most Creative Hack category.

The hackathon typically starts on a Thursday and finishes on Friday afternoon before our annual Christmas party. Given its participated in during work time, most teams don’t go hardcore and spend the full 48-hours on their projects like some hackathons you hear about. It is a lot more laid back than that and most hacks usually never have more time spent on it than the 16 working hours, I think this reduced timeframe adds to the pressure of creating something that is worth entering in the contest.

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Visual Studio Code Header
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5 Must Have Visual Studio Code Extensions

This article looks at improving the effectiveness which developers can write code in Visual Studio Code through the use of extensions. Having an effective development environment makes writing great software both faster and easier. Visual Studio Code is a relatively new open-source IDE primarily developed by Microsoft. VS Code is targeted mainly at developing languages that traditionally haven’t been easy to develop in Visual Studio with such as JavaScript, Python, etc. It has full debugger and breakpoint support for languages that otherwise usually don’t have an easy to use debugger such as JavaScript.

1. Instant Markdown

Instant markdown example

As developers working effectively with markdown files typically used within version control systems such as Git for things such as changelogs or readmes, is very important. This extension makes working with markdown from within VS Code a lot simpler. It also allows viewing as the file is being edited which proves to be an invaluable feature for documentation writing and more. Download and installation instructions found on the visual studio marketplace.

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Increase Website Performance

Increasing website performance is a huge topic that is often overlooked by developers, especially novices. This is becoming an even larger problem with the increase of readily available JavaScript plugins and ever growing bloat from CMS providers. Site performance is not only a defining factor in the SEO ranking you receive from search engines like Google but it is also the number 1 factor in deciding if a user stays on your site or not. If you can improve performance you can almost certainly improve customer retention or any other number of metrics. This article aims to provide an absolute basic example on how to increase a websites performance.

Analyze Site Speed

First things first you need to check what the current state of your website’s performance is before you try and improve it. The fact might be you could have an absolutely blazing fast site without any of these suggestions required. The main tools I use in this area are; Google PageSpeed, GTmetrix & WebPageTest. These three tools all offer a similar selection of tools however it is a good idea to use a combination rather than rely on a single source. One good feature about WebPageTest is that it offers the ability to see how the site will perform from different geographic locations and from different browsers.

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Mastering Unity 2D Game Development Review

This is my chapter by chapter review of “Mastering Unity 2D Game Development”. I come from a games programming background and have used Unity for several years so I am relatively skilled in using the engine and have been exposed to many programming elements discussed in the book before reading.This prior exposure to complex topics I feel made the book easy to read and progress through, whereas somebody with less experience may find certain topics such as design patterns daunting. The author does try and make these as accessible as possible though.

Chapter 1
This chapter includes a lot of focus on improvements for Unity 4.3 which will no doubt become outdated very quickly (at the time of writing Unity has already released another new version 4.5). It does talk about several new features added in this version (4.3) which is relatively useful. It also describes the mission statement of the book really clearly and introduces the project that will be worked on throughout the book. It also points towards several good websites which can be used to get free assets for any projects readers might be working on.

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