Links:

• QA Feedback from Lewis — I thought I was going to be in a big rush to get out of the basement and up to a developer position, but after listening to the show I really feel like my contribution to this team is going to be important and necessary from the get go.
• Request: Subreddit recommendations — Anyone know any linux and/or programming subs aren't full of mindless circlejerking? Most seem to be afflicted with mindless circlejerking, free software extremism and other indiscretions.
• Feedback on Tools for Docs — One idea is a mind map tool (like Freeplane). This can provide a free-form way to show at a high level how all the parts link together, and attach as much details as needed
• Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development — “Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcement. “Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code written in Kotlin often mean much less code for you–less code to type, test, and maintain.”
• Flutter and Chrome OS: Better Together — Flutter initially focused on providing a UI toolkit for building apps for mobile devices, which typically feature touch input and small screens. However, we’ve been building keyboard and mouse support into Flutter since before our 1.0 release last December. And today, we’re pleased to announce that Flutter for Chrome OS is now stronger with scroll wheel support, hover management, and better keyboard event support.
• How Windows and Chrome quietly made 2019 the year of Linux on the desktop — The cleverly named Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, announced at Microsoft’s Build event this week, shakes things up by shipping a full Linux kernel (version 4.19) within Windows itself as a lightweight virtual machine. Doing so should supercharge performance for developers who use the tool.
• Ubuntu 19.04 – Easy-to-use setup script for your EGPU — I have created a script which automatically detects your (E)GPUs and creates the needed X-Server configuration files. You won't have to mess around with finding the correct BUS-IDs and convert them from dec to hex or anything like that, the script takes care of it.
• Linux Action News 105 — RHEL 8 is released, we report from the ground of the big announcement, Microsoft announces WSL 2 with a real Linux kernel at the core, and details on their new open source terminal.

Plus some really fun picks, a bit of hoopla, and more.

Links:

• Feedback from Steve: Employment vs self-employment — Just a comment regarding an episode a few weeks back regarding being an employee or working for oneself.
• Emma on Twitter — Keep @dominucco away and make sure all beverages are in a separate room!
• Why Freelancing Creates Anxiety About Money — But once I started freelancing, things changed. I became hyperconscious of how much money I could (or should) charge for my time, and this made me unhappy and mean when my nonworking hours didn’t measure up to the same value. It was akin to the rage of watching cab fare tick up while you’re sitting in traffic, minutes and dollars dribbling away before your eyes.
• What Hooks Mean for Vue — You may read through this and wonder what Hooks have to offer in Vue. It seems like a problem that doesn’t need solving. After all, Vue doesn’t predominantly use classes. Vue offers stateless functional components (should you need them), but why would we need to carry state in a functional component?
• Hooks at a Glance – React — Hooks are functions that let you “hook into” React state and lifecycle features from function components. Hooks don’t work inside classes — they let you use React without classes.
• Making Sense of React Hooks – Dan Abramov — Unlike patterns like render props or higher-order components, Hooks don’t introduce unnecessary nesting into your component tree. They also don’t suffer from the drawbacks of mixins.
• Create Your Own AI Family Portraits — This week NVIDIA's research engineers open-sourced StyleGAN, the project they've been working in for months as a Style-based generator architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks.
• A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks
• StyleGAN GitHub — This repository contains the official TensorFlow implementation
• Python Developers Survey 2018 Results — In the fall of 2018, the Python Software Foundation together with JetBrains conducted the official annual Python Developers Survey for the second time.
• miniC — What is it? A simple stack-based virtual machine that runs C (missing features below) in the browser and the beginning of an interactive tutorial that covers C, how the VM works, and how the language is compiled.
• MiniC Online Demo
• Make all videos fun to watch — Our project Laff track is a plugin to Chrome, which adds this craziness to all Youtube videos. It simply detects when people are not talking, and adds in a bit of laughter.