Month: December 2016

In the spirit of giving back that accompanies the end of the year, a new project named 24 Pull Requests has launched with the goal of helping developers give back to open source projects. To use the site you login with your GitHub account and choose the languages you’re proficient with, then 24 Pull Requests provides you with a list of suggested projects that you can contribute to on GitHub.

So much of our, or at least my, digital life is made possible because of OSS. Whether it’s an act of good will or an effort to pad your résumé, contributing to the projects that make our professional and personal lives better is a great way to give back to the developer community.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton

A few days ago, Amazon announced their grand experiment in brick and mortar grocery and light food shopping called Amazon Go. Basically a shopper checks into the store using the Amazon Go app, puts their items in their bag and “just walks out”. Their items will be tallied and charged when they leave the store.

Of course this seems like the future of shopping to me. I personally like to limit my human interaction when doing things like grocery shopping which is why I use Instacart several times a week. But it does have scary implications for removing the human out of the shopping experience. There will still be jobs for people to stock shelves and prepare food but no more baggers, no more neighborhood checkout girl. We’ll have to see how well the technology works and whether or not people end up wasting time with a buggy UX but for now, it’s a pretty neat idea and I’d love to see how it can be implemented to other traditional retailers.