Welcome to this first issue of the Aspiring Nerd. This blog is born from the urge to share all the inspiring and thought provoking articles I stumble upon every day. I hope you’ll like it!
Around the web
🌎 The future of the open internet — and our way of life — is in your hands
A lengthy must-read if you care about Net Neutrality (and you should).
“History shows a typical progression of information technologies, from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” — Tim Wu
⚖️ Senate votes to let ISPs sell your Web browsing history to advertisers | Ars Technica
The good news keep coming…
The US Senate today voted to eliminate broadband privacy rules that would have required ISPs to get consumers’ explicit consent before selling or sharing Web browsing data and other private information with advertisers and other companies.
☠️ Hackers Stole My Website…And I Pulled Off A $30,000 Sting Operation To Get It Back
Yet another reminder that you should have a strong password (and change it regularly) and activate the two factor authentication option whenever possible.
Technology
🤖 Can Chatbots Help Us Do Time Sheets? — Chatbots Magazine
Interesting perspective on how chatbots could help us.
“The way we currently do time reports is broken (…) employees face all kinds of obstacles on the way to timesheet completion — the software is usually clunky, the interaction is hostile, the time is always inconvenient.”
🚜 Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware — Motherboard
This is what happens when you try to trap your customers.
To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America’s heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that’s cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.
Web Development
🤓 What I learned from Stack Overflow’s massive survey of 64,000 developers
It’s all in the title! Surprising fact: 1 in 100 developers are blind, and 1 in 200 developers are deaf.
👩🏼🏫 GitHub — kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap: Roadmap to becoming a web developer in 2017
The treacherous path to become a web developer.
🔑 SHA-1 collision detection on GitHub.com · GitHub
GitHub’s take on SHAttered (the first collision of the SHA-1 hash function), how it works and why it matters.
📚 Build a JAMstack-Powered Website in 4 Steps — Hacker Noon
If you’re new to JAMstack and want to understand how it works this is a great hands-on example.