Commuting to work by public transportation? Doing the dishes? Regardless, you might want a distraction. I found some time during the holidays to look at some new articles and videos on the web. (This is a digest from my Twitter feed. Follow me @johnnybigert.)

Great stuff:

• Steve McConnell – brilliant as always. What makes a World Class Software Company? video
• Great talk on API design by Joshua Bloch. video
• “JavaScript the Good Parts” video. Here’s something you (or I) never expected me to say: JavaScript is a really cool language! See for yourself: video
• No refactoring? Good article on design principles: “SOLID is append only”. article
• Nice paper on how Spotify’s peer-to-peer technology works (by former colleagues from KTH :) article

Good stuff:

• Demo of how to set up an Windows Azure project and run it locally. Extensive prerequisites! video
• Local file storage, 3d animation, audio analysis etc. in HTML5 today! Demo/presentation video. video
• Intro video, Amazon Web Services: wow! CloudFront, Queues, SimpleDB, MechTurk, Private Cloud, DNS… It goes on and on! video
• Confusing presentation but great message: “Jellyfish makes sure your common JavaScript code works for any browser/target”. video
• Nice intro to jQuery from a twelwe-year old kid(!). I’m humbled. video
• Domain driven development? The “Supermodel” DDD framework: “make simple MVC stuff easy and complex stuff possible”. video