This Week I Learned, TWIL, is a weekly series of posts where I collect any interesting bits I ran across in the previous week.

NOTE: This was another partial vacation week, so things are a little light this time around.

Technology

Introducing HyperDev
An interesting new tool (and hosting environment?) from Fog Creek Software. I’m not exactly sure who the target market is for this product, but it certainly has some neat ideas. If you need to prototype out a quick Node.js app, this could be pretty handy.

Running Your Own Open Source Email Server
I have a few domains that currently don’t have email, so I’ve been thinking about setting up an email server myself. I haven’t actually built out the mail server yet, but this tutorial didn’t make it sound too terrible.

So You’d Like to Send Some Email (Through Code)
It’s an old post, but still useful to remember lots of things you have to do to setup an email server that other email servers will accept as a real email server. The last time I setup an email server, most of this wasn’t required, so it’s good to have a quick overview of how things have evolved.

VAPOR – A Web Framework for Swift
Now that Apple’s Swift language is open source, it’s interesting to see new uses popping up. This is a new web framework based on Swift that looks interesting. Swift seems like a very capable language and I’m sure it’ll run great on the server, but it’ll probably be a bit before projects like this one are ready for prime time.

Health

Understanding Your Heart Rate Data with Gyroscope
I track a lot of health metrics about myself, but heart rate is one of the things I don’t track throughout the day (mainly due to not having a wearable that tracks it). Interesting points on how heart rate (specifically resting heart rate) may be an indicator or overall health. The Gyroscope tool also looks like it provides a nice way to correlate heart rate data with things like workouts, food, etc.