Make Smarter - Open Source Government, Simple Tricks to Make Your Web Site Faster, The War Against General Computing

First up in this month’s Make Smarter is a talk by Beth Noveck titled Demand a more open-source government. It’s a timely talk for me (I’m planning an open data refresh when I can clear the ever-growing pile of crap from my desk), and Ushahidi gets some props.

Chris Coyer of CSS Tricks gives a talk called Let’s Do Simple Stuff to Make Our Websites Faster. If you are impatient: turn on HTTP compression, cache stuff, optimize images, and combine css and JS.

Cory Doctorow, author of one of my favorite books among (many) other things, gives a good talk on The Coming Civil War over General-purpose Computing.

And now a few parting links:

• WebRTC is awesome stuff. Get your feet wet with HTML5 Rocks' Getting Started With WebRTC.
• Andy Osmani's JavaScript Style Guides and Beautifiers will help you write JavaScript code other people will actually want to read. My code is still drivel, but it might help you.