The Weekly roundup is my regular post of interesting and useful things I’ve found or done over the last week.

Topics: Diversity in tech, crypto, online verification, Windows pkg management, .NET Foundation, a better RSS reader, tutorials, taking credit cards, debugging mod_rewrite.

• New Mozilla CEO, who supported anti-marriage equality efforts, has stepped down.
• Watched a good, if old, overview of how to create a data-driven application in Visual Studio – in under 10 minutes.
• According to @shanselman Azure Websites now supports Java and Tomcat.
• Khan Academy has what looks to be a good course on cryptography.
• The New York Times has a well-written, comprehensive article about the technology industry’s bro’ problem.

From the //Build/ developer’s conference

• OneGet is a new effort at package management on Windows that builds off and extends the work Chocolatey started. It sounds like they’ve got the right ideas for moving in the direction we need to go.
• Microsoft announced new .NET Foundation to oversee(?) all the parts of .NET that have and will be open sourced.I think this approach is the right way to do this.

Tools, etc.

• Signed up with Keybase – a new service that facilitates public/private key-pair (e.g. PGP, GnuPG) encryption and verification. You can find my public key at https://keybase.io/shawns. And if you’re interested in signing up I have some invites – just give me the e-mail address you want me to send them to.
• If you’re still consuming RSS like me InoReader is a wonderful new online feed reader. The free tier gives you unlimited feeds and one filter rule along with folders that have their own feed, light & dark themes and an API.
• Looking at using Stripe – simple online payments for developers – to accept credit cards directly for supporting my work.
• Thanks to Dan for passing along this handy tool for debugging your Apache mod_rewrite rules.

Projects, etc.

• Published some SSH and GnuPG tips in my tech knowledge base.
• Re-published Understanding Binary and Hex tutorial I wrote many years ago.
• I now have a TrustCloud profile, which measures my “trustworthiness” online and assigns me a Trust Score – kind of like a credit score. You can see my Trust Card to the right.

Topics: Unit testing PHP, test images for color-blindness, hands-on learning, RSS on Github, myths of software development.

• The Open Data Protocol (OData) 4.0 has been approved, along with the OData JSON Format 4.0. If you’re not familiar with OData, it’s a standard for reading and writing to data sources with RESTful web services.
• Need to explain computing concepts to somebody? Computer Science Unplugged has some pretty nifty activities that do just that.
• I remember hearing about Flattr years ago – one of the early services for giving back to open source developers – but I had no idea they were still around. And doing reasonably well.
• Migrations in Entity Framework are a topic I could be stronger on. The ADO.NET Blog has some screencasts that just might do the trick.
• Friend Dan passed along another comic I need to add to my list of regulars: CommitStrip.
• Dan also shared some thoughts on a thought-provoking article from Model View Culture about the myth of the software developer. I hope to share my own thoughts on it later this week.
• OSS Perks is a listing of tools and services (including commercial ones) that are available for free to qualifying open source projects.

Tools, etc.

• Colblinder has a handy Color Blindness Simulator for your images. Upload an image then select different types of vision to see what it looks like. (via @DanielSolis)
• Portable.Text.Encoding is a portable (i.e. cross-platform) implementation of .NET’s Text.Encoding namespace. (via @migueldeicaza)
• Did you know Github repositories can have releases? You can find them using the following URL path:
  • https://github.com/<account>/<repository>/releases
  • To get an RSS feed, just add .atom to the end of the above URL.

Projects, coding, etc.

• Been studying up on WordPress plugins. There’s lots of documentation and tutorials out there, but I found that HardcoreWP has a very nice overview.
• Published a new KB article on Configuring PHPUnit for PhpStorm after introducing unit testing to a WordPress plugin project at work.