Today we have an article about student’s favorite teacher deciding to leave teaching. It is a good read and an indictment of funding at public schools. WIRED shows some cool “technology” that captures water from the air, which could be good for remote areas where clean water is hard to find.

As always, enjoy today’s items, and please participate in the discussions on these sites.

Top Stories

• The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom | Josh Waldron
• A Bamboo Tower That Produces Water From Air | WIRED

Career and Process

• How to Focus with Work-in-Progress Limits | Javalobby
• Stop More Bugs with our Code Review Checklist | Fog Creek Blog
• 6 Ways to Quantify Your Code – and Why You Need to Do It | Javalobby
• The Product Owner’s Checklist for the First Sprint | Javalobby
• Lessons learned from the big rewrite | Anton Pirker

Development

• The God Login | Coding Horror
• The 300 ms Click Delay and iOS 8 | Javalobby
• Implementing Java 8 CompletionStage (Part II) | Javalobby
• API Best Practices: Hypermedia (Part 1) | Javalobby
• Grabbing for Good Enough | Javalobby
• Do Good Microservices Architectures Spell the Death of the Enterprise Service Bus? | Voxxed
• Master Concurrent Processes with core.async | Clojure for the Brave and True
• Abusing CSS3’s nth-child selector to invent new ones | grack
• Focus & Do the Simplest Thing Possible | The Holy Java
• Make agents, not frameworks | Java Code Geeks
• 15 Tools Java Developers Should Use After a Major Release | Javalobby
• thoughts on replacement languages | tedunangst.com
• Run your ANTLR DSL as a Groovy Script | Javalobby
• Reducing Test Times by Only Running Impacted Tests | Paul Hammant’s blog

AI, Machine Learning, Research and Advanced Algorithms

• Markov Chains – Explained | Tech-Effigy

Big Data, Visualization, SQL and NoSQL

• Fake correlation | Flowing Data
• Python NLTK/Neo4j: Analysing the transcripts of How I Met Your Mother | Mark Needham

Infrastructure, Operations and DevOps

• Collecting Docker Container Data with Fluentd | Javalobby
• An introduction to containers, Kubernetes, and the trajectory of modern cloud computing | Google Cloud Platform Blog
• I (Don’t) like Big Buffers | Javalobby

Security, Encryption and Cryptography

• Light Clients and Proof of Stake | Ethereum Blog

Link Collections

• Dew Drop – January 9, 2015 (#1930) | Morning Dew
• Double Shot #1458 | A Fresh Cup