Inspired by a talk I gave yesterday at the BOS conference. This is long, feel free to skip!My first real job was leading a team that created five massive computer games for the Commodore 64. The games were so big they needed four floppy disks each, and the project was so complex (and the hardware systems so sketchy) that on more than one occasion, smoke started coming out of the drives.Success was a product that didn't crash, start a fire or lead to a nervous breakdown.Writing software used to be hard, sort of like erecting a building used to be hundreds of years ago. When you set ou...

Good software trumps elaborate code. And unfortunately, you can’t usually have both. The real world has deadlines and ship dates. It’s a game of pick two:Ship on timeShip with elaborate codeShip with a fantastic productAlmost always, you should pick the first and the last when you’re building software applications for users (if you’re building API’s or open source libraries for other developers, then it’s a different story). Too often I have seen developers, when struck with a brilliant idea, no matter how small, plunk away at building an elaborat...

It might seem like it was only recently that we witnessed the release of Windows 7 by Microsoft but in reality it was initially released more than 9 years ago. Despite being ‘ancient’ according to the modern technology standards, Windows 7 still holds a special place in many people’s hearts. It is still widely used by people around the world due to its much more user friendly environment than its successors the Windows 8 and 10.However, many software companies do not care about your preference of the old OS and they like to release their products updated to work with the late...

Although many Open Source projects don’t require you publish the modifications of them, I still propose you should make the changes open. The reasons are as following:(1) For other people: the out-of-box Open Source projects save your time and money, and you get benefit from them. You should not only take, but also need to give! Only if everyone shares his code, document, or whatever related, the Open Source projects can grow up healthy.(2) For yourself: You release your code can actually make you “richer”. With more and more people use your code, more and more bugs will be f...

In a developer's daily work, it is frequent to see lots of commits made. It would be a headache if one cannot use git commands well especially when in cases where some fixes need to be made on existing branches. There are some frequently used command such as git pull, git merge and git push. Apart from these, there are some other practical commands which may be useful for real use cases. This post will try to list some of them.git grep It will lists all files containing the searched keyword. This is similar to the Linux command grep.git blameIt will list the author and change time of each...

Recently I encountered a weird behavior where a strange webpage showing up every time when I launched my Firefox.The first thought came into my mind is that my homepage of Firefox had been tampered. It might be changed because some software changed my browser settings to promote something.So the next immediate thing I went to check was to see my Firefox browser settings.To my surprise, the homepage setting was not touched. It would still open the Momentum screen which would display some beautiful pictures of nature randomly. I tried to reset them to default but it still had the same issue.Afte...

The front end web developers are the openers for the visitors to visit the web page. It is also known as the client-side development, works predominantly with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The tools and techniques are the important players of the front end web development. The developer must be aware of the updation of web technologies.The scope is evergreen with this technology as every company or business needs a website to showcase their profile. There are many objectives must be measured while developing the site which means there are multiple devices with various sizes and the developer must...

Virtual classrooms have become the new norm for education during the pandemic. Teachers from every school have to adjust to this new reality to ensure students keep learning even in the absence of a physical classroom setup. Thankfully, there are various digital solutions to help teachers conduct online classes without much hassle. One such tool that has revolutionized the online learning market is a Learning Management System (LMS).For schools, the in-house learning management department always looks for learning solutions that can be accessed both online and offline, so that students ca...