Must Reads from our Publishing Platform: Open Sourcing, Accessibility and Diversity

The beauty of the LinkedIn Publishing Platform is that it gives professionals a way to share their opinions about topical professional news and interests and I love seeing how our engineers embrace this opportunity every week. This week’s round-up of my favorite posts by LI Engineers includes Kevin Scott’s post on why developing an open-source culture is good business, Sarah Clatterbuck’s post on the challenges of building an accessible single-page web app (and how she did it with Ember.js), and James Gatenby’s post on how teaching young people HTML can help bridge the tech diversity gap.

“The Business Benefits of Open Sourcing” by Kevin Scott, Senior Vice President of Engineering & Operations at LinkedIn Using open source software has obvious benefits, like low cost and easy scalability. But what motivates people to give back to the open source community? Accountability and recognition are just two key ways engineers and organizations can benefit from open sourcing their projects.

“Building an Accessible Ember App” by Sarah Clatterbuck, Director of UI Development, User Experience at LinkedIn It shouldn’t be necessary to compromise accessibility in any framework. Here are a few tips for overcoming apparent shortcomings to create an accessible app with Ember.

“A Blueprint for Inclusion: How HTML Can Solve Tech’s Diversity Woes” by James Gatenby, Manager of Web Development, Talent Solutions at LinkedIn Silicon Valley isn’t as diverse as it could be. But something as simple as teaching high schoolers about HTML could be a big first step toward improvement.

“Velocity 2015 - Highlights” by Ritesh Maheshwari, Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn Performance is a big concern for us at LinkedIn. We want to make sure that everyone’s experience with the site is as fast as possible. So we’re always excited to learn about new technologies that can help make that happen, like ServiceWorkers, HTTP2, and mobile image performance, all of which were discussed at this year’s O’Reilly Velocity conference.

“Fast But Not Furious: The Village Emergency” by Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos, Engineering Manager, Publishing Platform at LinkedIn While making an idea “go viral” is typically something that marketers are tasked with, a little bit of engineering work can actually help show how to get a message out in the world much faster.

“The Rift Between Oculus and Reality” by Scott Sheffield, Web Developer at LinkedIn Virtual Reality holds a lot of promise, but it's still far from being an everyday experience for most of us. This in-depth perspective clearly separates fantasy from reality when it comes to the current state of the virtual world.

“Don't Swap Coding Classes for Foreign Language” by Igor Perisic, Vice President of Engineering at LinkedIn An exploration of the difference between foreign languages and programming languages gets at the fact that communication, not coding, is ultimately what makes us human.