On Our Radar: Creativity, Mapping PHP and Color Keyboards

Dear Creativity,

Thanks for showing up this week at the Forums, old friend. We’ve missed you, and it’s a great joy having you here. Finding creativity, to me, is that first sip of hot coffee in the morning or the taste of bacon wafting through the house in the morning: once it hits you, you’re good to go. Speaking of breakfast foods, I figure computers at breakfast food companies use serial i/o. Like my dad joke? There are a lot more where that come from today!

On Our Radar:

Tom created an incredible PHP mapping program called Maphper, which looks great on paper but is ridiculously difficult to pronounce. Try it, I challenge you. Maphper treats database tables, or other data sources, as arrays. Once your data is defined you can call up pieces of it at will, basically making you the sorcerer and the data your minions.

Not to be outdone, Katrina (simdragon90) asked if any color typewriting programs exist, and a week later came back to the forums with a program she’d created on her own, because she’s obviously some sort of webdev wizard. I like your attitude, Katrina: if it doesn’t exist, just build it. OzRamos (creator of Stemlet; we’ll get to him in a second) took it to the next level with extremely cool pixels drawings typed on the screen. You guys amaze me.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s so good it’s worth mentioning again: OzRamos’ Stemlet. He calls it The Next Wikipedia, but I call it Better Than Wikipedia because it kinda is. He devlogs about his creation; so if you’re in the middle of creating the next big thing, you too should think about devlogging so we can applaud your progress and give you direction and inspiration on your journey to being the next Silicon Valley millionaire. Just don’t forget where you came from.

If you aren’t feeling that creative right now, maybe you can help Ryan out. He asks us for help building the perfect computer. What’s the perfect computer, you ask? Basically, in Ryan’s world (and any sane person, really) it’s a computer built for Netflix binge sessions and general webdev. It’s a wild guess but you’ve probably built a computer from scratch before, so give Ryan some advice.

In Short:

sg707 asks us a cryptic question: if you found a job that doubles your salary, but requires you to learn a new language, would you take it? Meanwhile, Swader wants to know if PHP devs are still full-stack.

Don’t forget to check out this week in .NET and JavaScript!

Question of the Week:

Which language do you find most useful in your day-to-day working life? Is it the same one you’d use for personal projects?

Until next week, Creativity.