Make Smarter - My Podcast List, Sublime Text, How the Internet Will Transform Government, QGIS Training Manual, Chrome Dev Tools

My podcast list tends to swell and recede as I add and cull content. Here are my top 5 at the moment:

  • Back to Work - "productivity, communication, work, barriers, constraints, tools, and more". This is my favorite. Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin are very smart and extremely funny. You may ROFL.
  • Philosophy Bites - "podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics". ~15 minute segments that will leave you thinking for the rest of the day.
  • Shop Talk - "a web design and development podcast with Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert". This one is the most applicable to my day to day work and it has given me lots of tips and tricks.
  • The Linux Action Show - all things Linux. If you are a Linux user or you have been thinking about it, it is a great podcast for news, reviews, and tips.
  • TED Talks - "ideas worth spreading". TED gets some of the best speakers out there. I've sat riveted listening to someone give a talk on a subject that 2 minutes before I didn't give a flying crap about.

Next up, Nettuts+ has one of their premium courses available for free, and it’s a great one - Perfect Workflow in Sublime Text 2. Sublime Text is my new favorite text editor, so much so that my notoriously stingy wallet coughed up $60 for it. It is awesome. I have never been more productive writing code than I am with Sublime Text 2. The Nettuts+ course goes over all of its nooks and crannies, the best extensions, snippets - it will get you up to ninja level in no time.

Speaking of TED Talks, Clay Shirky gives a great one on How the Internet will (one day) transform government.

Do you want to get going with QGIS but you don’t know where to start? Check out linfiniti.com’s QGIS Training Manual. As one who would rather create metadata than write software documentation, bravo to the folks that put this together. It is extensive, thorough, and includes exercises for students.

And finally, if you are a web developer and you haven’t familiarized yourself with Chrome’s dev tools, you really should. There’s a great slideshow by Ilya Grigorik called Wait, DevTools could do THAT?. It will walk you through all kinds of examples. At the very least check out breakpoints on the dev tools documentation - it makes JavaScript debugging a much more pleasant experience.