#1: Mermaid
Mermaid is the whimsical name of a simple markdown-like script language for generating charts from text using JavaScript. Developed by Knut Sveidqvist, Mermaid simplifies documentation by rendering code as simple charts and graphs, styled in different shapes, nodes and classes.

#2: Rocket is a new container runtime from CoreOS. Read all about Rocket and what it means for Docker in senior editor Alex Handy’s blog post.

#3: io.js
What began as a GitHub fork of Node.js developed by Joyent has evolved into its own project: an evented input/output for V8 JavaScript. The contributors behind the spun-off io.js aim to ship regular releases of the asynchronous I/O compatible with the default npm package manager for Node.js application development on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime.

#4: NeuralTalk
NeuralTalk is an open-source project combining Python and the NumPy scientific computing package for learning multimodal Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) that describe images with sentences. Created by Andrej Karpathy, a Stanford researcher and graduate student who is working with Google on computer vision software, NeuralTalk takes an image and predicts its sentence description with an RNN, an artificial neural network coded in Python 2.7 and NumPy.

To learn more about Karpathy’s work and the advancement of artificial neural nets, check out our columnist Larry O’Brien’s recent, “Code Watch: Can we code conscious programs?”

#5: Regulex
Developed by Jex Cheng, Regulex is a JavaScript regular expression parser and visualizer. Regulex generates graphs and visual representations of JavaScript code, exportable and embeddable through HTML iFrame elements.