They’re not just used by behavioural scientists: a Skinner box can be a useful device for training pets, especially pets with a reasonable amount of smarts, like parrots or rats. It can automate the process you may have already used with your pet, where “correct” behaviour is rewarded – walk to heel, get a doggy snack.

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Skinner boxes are also pretty expensive. So Katherine Scott, computer vision and robotics expert, electronics ninja and rat owner/trainer, has built her own, which she intends to release as an open source device when she’s finished refining it.

Skipfish is an active web application security reconnaissance tool. It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active (but hopefully non-disruptive) security checks. The final report generated by the tool is meant to serve as a foundation for professional web application security assessments.

Mock your HTTP responses to test your REST API.

Programmer and CMU PhD Tom Murphy created a function to “beat” NES games by watching the score. When the computer did things that raised the score it would learn how to reproduce them again and again, resulting, ultimately, in what amounts to a Super Mario Brothers-playing robot. The program, called a “technique for automating NES games,” can take on nearly every NES game, but it doesn’t always win. [Pretty cool. Reminds me of when I hex-edited saved games in Snake in the 1980s to simulate playing the game "perfectly".]

Welcome! Quantopian is building the world’s first algorithmic trading platform in your browser. We provide tools and infrastructure for you to learn, create, and test trading strategies - while protecting your intellectual property. Your algorithms are yours and kept private.

Docker encapsulates heterogeneous payloads in Standard Containers, and runs them on any server with strong guarantees of isolation and repeatability. It is a great building block for automating distributed systems: large-scale web deployments, database clusters, continuous deployment systems, private PaaS, service-oriented architectures, etc.

We all like to build software which is reliable, but every once in a while it seems like a good idea to demo something still in it's unreliable infancy. Google Chrome has a little known feature which can help. Record modes let you record every request Chrome makes. Playback mode serves requests out of that recorded cache just as if they were being loaded on the spot. It doesn't record where you click or what you open, just every request as it moves over the wire.

CasperJS is an open source navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript and based on PhantomJS — the scriptable headless WebKit engine. It eases the process of defining a full navigation scenario and provides useful high-level functions, methods & syntactic sugar for doing common tasks such as: * defining & ordering browsing navigation steps * filling & submitting forms * clicking & following links * capturing screenshots of a page (or part of it) * testing remote DOM * logging events * downloading resources, including binary ones * writing functional test suites, saving results as JUnit XML * scraping Web contents

Paul Butler, a self-described Data Hacker, recently published an article called “Make for Data Scientists“, which explored the challenges of managing data processing work. Paul went on to explain why GNU Make could be a viable tool for easing this pain. He also pointed out some limitations with Make, for example the assumption that all data is local.

We were gladdened to read Paul’s article, because we’d been hard at work building an internal tool to help manage our data workflows. A defining goal was to end up with a kind of “Make for data”, but targeted squarely at the problems of managing data workflow.

The basic idea of story branching (sometimes referred to as “issue-driven development”) is that you create a development branch for each and every JIRA issue you implement.

Bug fixes, user stories, spikes… they all get their own branch.

Madness, you say!

And I would agree with you if we were still using a centralized version control system like SVN.

But branching in Git is very lightweight and merges don’t lock up the entire repository, making this crazy idea quite practical.