A short roundup this week; been busy with the funding campaign for the FoodStats mobile app.

Topics: VMWare re-certification, “you want to be a programmer?”, symlinks for WordPress plugins, open source HTML5 widgets, 1-click VM deployment.

• In an interesting development, VMWare has started expiring their certifications. It actually makes sense to me, but then I’m not the one with a certification that’s going to be outdated in 2 years.
• When someone who wants to be a programmer asked maymay which language to learn, they offered a response that really resonates with me. (Note: post contains language that some may find offensive.)
• Maymay also points out that the new 3.9 upgrade of WordPress now supports symlinked folders for plugins. (See the Under The Hood -> General section.)
• Telerik open-sourced the core elements of their Kendo UI framework – “HTML5 widgets for web and mobile development.“
• A friend and co-worker mentioned Bitnami, which provides turn-key platform stacks in a VM for development and/or testing. In addition to supporting VMWare and VirtualBox they also provide “1-click” deployment to cloud hosting like AWS and Azure.