Starred in March 2018: Block Facebook, deploy to AWS, play beats in Python, delete Redux and enjoy some triply visuals
Again with the stars, and again with posting this nice and late the next month.
Here's a few projects that caught my eye in March.
StevenBlack/hosts
Not a new one but a very important one. Steven Black's hosts file provides a tailored list of hostnames to block using your /etc/hosts
file. In the age of websites using third-party tracking services the simplest way to ensure your privacy is to never let your computer communicate with known trackers. It only takes a couple of minutes to completely block Facebook and others from tracking you across the web.
hamiltron/py-simple-audio
Ever needed to play audio in a Python project? py-simple-audio
enables just that in an incredibly easy way (simple, even?). If you've ever tried to play audio with PyAudio or PyGame you've run into the same dependency nightmares I have. To keep things simple it only supports WAV files – which is plenty for a lot of use cases (including a simple drum machine that I made last month).
apex/up
Apex's up
service launched last month and promises to deploy highly scalable, serverless application to AWS "in seconds" from you command line. It already supports a multitude of languages including Python and Node.js and intends to be cloud agnostic (though, only AWS Lambda is supported right now). I'll be using the OSS version of this to deploy a Django project ASAP, the paid version is $20/mo and offers things like instant rollbacks and encrypted secrets.
jamiebuilds/unstated
Flux/Redux takes quite a while to get your head around when you jump into the React world. unstated
removes the "all your state in one place" concept and builds on top of React's existing context patterns to share state between components. Unstated introduces Containers, Subscribers and Providers to manage state closer to the Components than you would in a Flux-like architecture. It's an interesting departure from the traditional "React way" and seems to be gaining a lot of traction.
gridwalk/pixel-synth
Finally, a fun one: pixel-synth
is a lo-fi video synthesiser written in Javascript that runs in your browser. There's a demo online and the visuals are fun and Trippy.
That's it for now. I'll be back in May to talk about some fun discoveries in April. Then I'll be heading to Germany for DjangoConEU – can't wait!