40 New Useful Web Development Tools and Resources [Noupe]

What is Jelly?

From the Jelly website:

Jelly is a casual working event. It’s taken place in over a hundred cities where people have come together (in a person’s home, a coffee shop, or an office) to work for the day. We provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of.

You bring a laptop (or whatever you need to get your work done) and a friendly disposition.

We see a lot of designers, developers, and internet types, but we’ve also had musicians, cooks, sound designers, tea sommeliers, product designers, photographers, writers, and more.

Some of us are entrepreneurs or freelancers. Others work in an office most of the time, but work at Jelly for fresh ideas and a change of pace.

No matter what you do or what you create, you’re welcome to come to Jelly and share your talent and learn from others.

Companies such as Amazon, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, and IBM have had longstanding presences in Lexington, and the city also has the students and faculty of the University of Kentucky at its disposal. However, a majority of the city’s innovators are sprinkled among these institutions with few opportunities to collaborate and share ideas. Coworking spaces like Awesome Inc. and Collexion provide outlets for their target audiences, but what about individuals in other niches or those that don’t want to pay? Coffee shops and libraries are open environments, but this openness permits saturation by those that have no interest in collaborating.

Hosting a biweekly Jelly would be a unique method for facilitating a more cohesive Lexington while also bringing individuals together for at least one common purpose – collaboration. Such an effort has the potential to lead to even greater innovations for our community, and it could be an initial step toward the greater unification of our city’s most brilliant minds.

For more thoughts on the pursuit of office avoidance, Geekpreneur has an interesting article discussing alternatives to cafés and coworking.

1. CodeChef

CodeChef holds monthly competitions in both India and the United States, and each consists of 6-8 problems of varying difficulty levels. These contests encourage participants to write elegant code by placing restrictions on the execution time and source code file size for each problem. Due to the restriction on execution time, most participants use compiled languages for their solutions. However, solutions from a wide range of languages are accepted.

Languages: Many

2. Code Golf

Code Golf offers a unique approach to solving puzzles, as its objective is to generate solutions in the least number of keystrokes. This criteria challenges programmers to develop efficient solutions and requires that they develop both their problem-solving abilities and programming knowledge.

Languages: Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby

3. Facebook Engineering Puzzles

The crew at Facebook has quite a few interesting puzzles to help satisfy your appetite. In fact, they’ve cleverly labeled the difficulties as hors d’oeuvre, snack, meal, and buffet to suppress your hunger as you develop your solutions. There’s also a Facebook application that allows you to show off your progress on your profile!

Languages: C/C++, Java, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Haskell, Erlang, OCaml

4. Project Euler

Project Euler presents a series of mathematical and computer programming puzzles with varying difficulty levels. To allow more developers to participate, the problems are designed in a “chain” style so that easier puzzles will introduce concepts that are useful in harder ones.

Languages: Any

5. UVa Online Judge

The UVa Online Judge website features a robust set of problems along with periodic contests to gauge the skill level of participants.

Languages: Varies by Contest

From the TechStars website:

TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund. Each year we run a summer-long program in Boulder, Colorado and Cambridge, Massachusetts. We’re very selective – each year hundreds of companies apply to the program and we only take about ten per city. These companies get up to $18,000 in seed funding, a summer of intensive top-notch mentorship, and the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the summer.

In summary, TechStars accepts twenty companies out of roughly five-hundred applicants and provides those companies with seed funding and mentorship during a three-month summer bootcamp. After an intensive preparation, each company pitches its idea to investors and venture capitalists in an attempt to raise the funding necessary to make its aspirations a reality. In past years, the organization has aided projects like IntenseDebate, Socialthing!, Brightkite, and Gyminee obtain the knowledge and resources necessary to take their projects to the level that they are at today. We had the pleasure of sitting through this year’s pitch day to see some of the up-and-coming projects designed to take the world by storm. Here is the list of companies that presented.

ReTel Technologies helps stores and restaurants optimize their operations and customer experiece. ReTel’s system analyzes in-store security camera feeds to uncover, analyze, and report on metrics and trends that directly impact the bottom line.

Everlater makes it simple to document and remember travel experiences in a beautiful format. We enable easy sharing with family and friends by connecting to all major social networks and printing scrapbooks, postcards, and photo albums. Finally, we connect people with better travel ideas and information through exploring friends travel experiences.

TimZon is the easiest way to share visual feedback. By combining audio, video, whiteboard and screen capture it enables companies to establish high quality engagement with their customers while lowering support costs.

Take Comics is an end to end solution aiming to bring comics into the digital age just like iTunes has done for music and video. Take Comics creates pixel perfect content on a range of devices with focus on profitability for the publishers and readability for the users.

Next Big Sound measures the growth and popularity of bands across the major web properties and sells actionable insights around tat data to band managers and industry professionals.

Vanilla is open source forum software that is used to power discussions on more than 300,000 sites across the web today. With the releases of the new and improved Vanilla 2, we will now be offering a hosted solution as well.

Send Grid is an email service that solves the problems faced by companies sending transactonal outbound email. Simply by using Send Grid instead of their current outbound email servers, companies experience greatly improved deliverability and scaliability while cutting costs and saving time.

Spry is insight into software projects. By monitoring all the tools and services used to develop software and analyzing the data in real-time, Spry enables clear and consistent communication throughout the team. This helps managers and developers make better decisions throughout the process thereby reducing the likelihood of failure and delay.

Mailana brings your real social network to life – the people you communicate with on a regular basis. By understanding your strong relationships across multiple communication channels, Mailana lets you share what realy matters with the people who really matter.

Rezora is the only Software-as-a-Service email marketing platform specifically designed for the real estate industry. We enable brokerages and their agents to focus their expertise on what they do best: helping their consumers buy and sell real estate.

Out of those ideas presented, my favorites were Next Big Sound, Take Comics, Spry, and ReTel, but I find each of the ten to be highly useful to its targeted audience. I hope to see each of these projects thrive within the next few years and pave the way for future innovations. Keep doing what you’re doing, TechStars! The world needs more organizations like you!