[WARNING]: I've only recently unarchived this repository with the intention to begin contributing to it again but its current state is from 2015. Please proceed with that in mind.

Library

If you're anything like me you have too many bookmarks, an overflowing Pocket, and a bunch of other internet tchotchkes flowing in your brain space. This is my attempt to wrestle that beast. Welcome to my library.

Table of Contents

1. Command Line
2. Design
3. Empathy
4. Front End Development
5. iOS
6. Mac
7. Theory
8. Minorities in Tech
9. Work

Command Line

I use iTerm2, zsh, and the oh-my-zsh theme cloud. I go more into mods and stuff in Terminal.

• Git: Resources for everyone's favorite version control from yours truly.
• Markdown: Favorite documentation writing style of most developers, and also how one writes READMEs for Github.
• Terminal: How to make your bland, boring terminal a lot nicer.
• Vim: A confusing, monolithic editor that people like using so they can brag about it. It's worth learning a few commands so that you can quickly edit things on the command line.

Design

I mostly do web design but I've done a lot of other things as well - mobile app design, branding, print design, photography, drawing, and craftier things like DIY projects. I was a long time Adobe fan but lately I've been pretty enthralled with Sketch for UI design and Framer Studio for prototyping. For photography I still find myself using Lightroom and for drawing I've mostly been using Paper53 and Paper53's pencil.

• Books: Physical books on design that are worth reading, in my opinion.
• Color: Articles on color theory.
• Data: Data displayed in ways I find either faithfully or beautifully. (Or both).
• Icons: Lots of nice vector icon sets, some of which are free.
• Illustration: Articles on illustration and examples of illustration I find gorgeous.
• Photography: Stock photography resources.
• Typography: Sigh. Typefaces.
• Sketch: Resources for Sketch, including the plugins I like using.
• Sound: Resources for sounds.
• UI: Specifically articles on UI design, with an emphasis on web but also some mobile.
• UX: Articles on UX, same as UI: mostly web, some mobile.

Empathy

All good design takes into account the user, the people using your product. If you're not improving their lives, what's the point? Envisioning the end user, of course, is easier said than done; the following are articles about how to build products with empathy in mind and user stories from various people: Empathy

Front End Development

Front End Dev is the majority of what I do. I normally will create a local server with the command line and write code in Sublime Text. My favorite build tool is Gulp, and the fanciest tool in my arsenal is BrowserSync, which allows you to populate changes in real-time on save across a variety of devices. My current Gulp setup is a mod of this gulp starter because I really digged how it used Browserify. I use Sass and have used a few different front-end frameworks but I'm ambivalent about most of them. My next foray will be into React.

• Animation: Articles about animation on the web.
• D3: A super-impressive data visualization library with huge community support from @mbstock.
• HTML: It's hard to write HTML semantically and have everything memorized, but it's important that you put thought into it for accessibility reasons.
• Javascript: I got into the game using only jQuery but quickly realized that things were much more complicated than simple DOM-manipulation. Javascript's come into its own over the past decade and is its own formidable language especially with the advent of Node. This of course means that Javascript can be as dumb or as complicated as you'd like to make it for youself.
• News: Where I look to find the newest things happening in web and mobile design/development.
• Performance: Performance is a tricky game, particularly with the rise of large front-end frameworks. Putting the effort into making your pages fast is however all the more important with the rise of mobile devices and if you're trying to reach as large as audience as possible. My favorite tool for this is Google's Page Speed Insights.
• Responsive Design: Responsive design is the philosophy that you should only have one website that's accessible from a variety of devices.
• Sass: My favorite CSS preprocessor. I used Less for a time but Sass has better community support. I tend to use the SCSS syntax.
• Style Guides: A collection of code and design style guides.
• Sublime Text: My favorite next editor for front-end development. This includes some of my favorite packages.
• SVG: Scalable vector graphics, which are a fancy way to have truly responsive elements on the web.

iOS

I'm sort a fledgling developer in this arena, although I fully intend to get more and more into wearables and native development because it's really, really fun. I use Xcode (to state the obvious), along with Cocoapods and Storyboards (for the moment). I've been programming in Swift although I'm interested in Objective-C if only to be able to translate Stack Overflow answers for my own benefit.

• Cocoa: Articles around the iOS framework (which, in my opinion, is the reason iPhone development is hard). Incredibly powerful, has (thus far for me, anyway) everything you could need to achieve what you want to accomplish, and hard to jump into.
• Swift: Articles/tutorials around the Swift language.

Mac

In high school I got my first computer: a Lenovo Thinkpad with Ubuntu on it. I haven't used a Windows computer since. That said there are lots of things that surprise me about my computer, from Unix to Mac-specific things. Every couple of months I like to go through and up my computer-productivity.

• Applications: Applications I use that don't really fall into any other category but that I like a lot nonetheless.
• General: Articles that have helped me demystify my computer.

Theory

Since I'm self-taught my current method for improving my knowledge of computer science concepts is: enroll for an online Udemy class. Get bored in the first class. Need to learn about something to make something work; figure it out, learn just enough to get things working, move on. It's the sad fact of a person more interested in creating useful products and less interested in solving things elegantly, unfortunately. That said, these are the various articles I've collected around computer science concepts that I find useful.

• Academic: Academic papers.
• Regex: Some tools that are helpful for regex/pattern-matching, since I've always found regexes to be rather... I don't know. Not human friendly?

Minorities in Tech

Tech is a field that is still very much a white boys' club. I like collecting articles that eloquently describe various complications/struggles that minorities face in the tech field resources for minorities in the field. Minorities in Tech

I also collect articles on this subject that I don't particularly agree with to better understand the other side of this issue. Debate

Work

Career development is a tricky thing for an introvert like me, so I like collecting articles around how to excel in the workplace. how to become a better writer, and how to be a better public speaker. And, of course, how to stay balanced.

• Advancement: How to excel in the workplace.
• Public Speaking: A combination of articles around how to become a better speaker and how to become a better writer.
• Work Life Balance: A collection of articles around how to just be happy while getting what you need done done.
• Working Remotely: My favorite apps that make working remotely a little easier. Mostly communication tools.

Odds and Ends

My Need to be Vetted file is for articles that I haven't read yet but wanted to keep bookmarked somewhere. I also use Pocket for this, which is... confusing. I might delete this so I wouldn't recommended bookmarking/referencing this file in particular.