This story was written by Keith Dawson for UBM DeusM’s community Web site Develop in the Cloud, sponsored by AT&T. It is archived here for informational purposes only because the Develop in the Cloud site is no more. This material is Copyright 2012 by UBM DeusM.

Friday Four for November 9

Four things developers need to know this week.

In Friday Four, I bring you useful and interesting topics from around the Net that developers need to know about this week.

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Lessons from 25 entrepreneurs
Serial entrepreneur David Hauser asked 25 of his compatriots what they wish they had known before taking their first investment. Some examples: "You didn't need to know how to do anything in the beginning -- you just needed to get good at finding the right answers quickly" (Dan Martell). "Only hire people you'd want to hang out with during personal time" (Allan Branch).

In a similar vein, but from a singular perspective, designer Joshua Kaufman recently serial-tweeted the 10 things he has learned (and later collected them on his blog). Examples: "Creativity comes from everywhere. The best deliverables are prototypes."

Chrome gets do-not-track
We've had a very lively discussion here lately around the question of how patents are affecting the process of arriving at an industry-wide agreement on a browser do-not-track flag. The news this week is that the last holdout among the major browsers, Google Chrome, got DNT in the mainline distribution (version 23; it has been present in developer builds since September).

All browsers can now be set to ask 3rd-party advertisers not to track one's browsing. To my knowledge no advertiser except Twitter currently honors "DNT=1" -- that is, does anything differently when the flag is present. Some, such as Yahoo, have said explicitly that they will not honor the flag when it comes from Windows 8. This is a result of Microsoft's decision to send DNT=1 by default in version 10 of their Internet Explorer browser. Surveys consistently indicate that up to 80 percent of Web users would prefer the "opt-in" stance that Microsoft has adopted.

Breaking in to a front-end development career
Brian Rinaldi works in developer relations at Adobe. Writing for those who might want to embark on a front-end development career path, he starts with the premise we explored a few months back: that front-end developers need to be more knowledgeable and rigorous as the standards and the available toolsets expand like the universe immediately following the Big Bang. His advice in a nutshell: study the standards, particularly HTML5 and CSS3; learn JavaScript; and look into mobile development, at least enough to know what the issues are.

Software Carpentry
This appears to be high-value educational resource for developers. It's aimed at helping scientists be more efficient by teaching some of the basic mechanics around software development: code construction, version control, the shell, python, regular expressions, and the like. You won't find here up-to-the-second topics such as HTML5 or the latest mobile development frameworks. The subjects are evergreen, and the video / screencast introductions to them are quite well done. The site has been running boot camps around the world, mostly at universities, for the past year. Many more are scheduled. (Hat tip to our own Cameron Laird for this find.)

Related links

The Friday Four gives a hat tip each week to Ron Miller, whose collection of five links for developers and IT pros runs weekly on Ness.com.