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  Designing Great API Docs

Writing documentation is one of those things that is dreaded by many developers. It takes a lot of effort and time to get right. And too often, people take shortcuts. This is sad, because well designed documentation is the key to getting people excited about your project, whether it's open source or a developer focused product. In fact, I argue that the most important piece of UX for a developer product isn't the homepage or the sign up process or the SDK download. It's the API documentati...

   API docs,Design API docs,Advice     2012-03-09 23:15:00

  Why developers need a Mac

I am by no means an Apple fan. For one thing, I find Windows (and Linux) stable and fast, so you are not going to hear me argue that my computing life was transformed once I made that Switch (with a capital letter). Admittedly that is partly because I am familiar with how to fix and tune Windows and remove foistware, but it is not that hard. For another, I am not an admirer of Apple’s secretive approach, or the fact that most requests for comment from journalists are responded to wi...

   Apple,Mac,Development,iOS,Windows     2011-12-07 03:12:17

  Learning Server-Side JavaScript with Node.js

Node.js is all the buzz at the moment, and makes creating high performance, real-time web applications easy. It allows JavaScript to be used end to end, both on the server and on the client. This tutorial will walk you through the installation of Node and your first “Hello World” program, to building a scalable streaming Twitter server.What is Node.js?JavaScript has traditionally only run in the web browser, but recently there has been considerable interest in bringing it to the...

   JavaScript,Server side,Node.js.Implement     2011-09-20 13:33:15

  Understanding lvalues and rvalues in C and C++

The terms lvalue and rvalue are not something one runs into often in C/C++ programming, but when one does, it’s usually not immediately clear what they mean. The most common place to run into these terms are in compiler error & warning messages. For example, compiling the following with gcc: int foo() {return 2;} int main() { foo() = 2; return 0; } You get: test.c: In function 'main': test.c:8:5: error: lvalue required as left operand of assignment True, this code ...

   lvalue,rvalue,C++,locator value,elaboration     2011-12-15 07:51:38

  Automatically Updating Charts for Additional Data in Excel

Excel shines at turning your data into charts—graphical representations of your data. You can easily create a chart based on a range of data in a worksheet. Normally, if you add additional data to your range, you will need to once again create the chart or at best change the range of cells on which the chart is based. If you get tired of modifying charts to refer to new data ranges, there are a couple of shortcuts you can try out. The first shortcut works fine if you simply need to...

   Excel,Graph,Auto update,New data,Automat     2011-08-13 04:36:53

  PHP Sucks! But I Like It!

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It's been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it's rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture. A Few Mistakes The post makes quite a few mistakes and odd apples to oranges comparisons. Let me point out the major ones that I saw. No Debugger - PHP has xdebug which works quite...

   PHP,Bad design,Like     2012-04-12 06:15:42

  Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?

The prevalence of free, open WiFi has made it rather easy for a WiFi eavesdropper to steal your identity cookie for the websites you visit while you're connected to that WiFi access point. This is something I talked about in Breaking the Web's Cookie Jar. It's difficult to fix without making major changes to the web's infrastructure. In the year since I wrote that, a number of major websites have "solved" the WiFi eavesdropping problem by either making encrypted HTTPS web traffic an accou...

   Web traffic,Security,HTTPS.Encryption,Wifi     2012-02-24 05:02:58

  WireGuard VPN: Setup WG_VPN client App on Android phone and connect to local WG_VPN server on VM

We will show the detail steps about how to setup the WireGuard VPN client on an Android phone/pad and configure the VPN client to connect a WG_VPN server in local network. The setup process contents three main steps: Install WireGuard and create a key-pair in WireGuard client. Add the Android client peer information in the WireGuard server’s config file. Config the Android WireGuard client to connect to the server. The test environment network configuration:  Step 1. Install Wire...

   WIREGUARD,VPN,TUTORIAL     2020-10-24 08:46:42

  Transparency in Cloud Services

37signals recently launched public “Uptime Reports” for their applications (announcement). The reaction on Hacker News was rather tepid, but I think it’s a positive development, and I applaud 37signals for stepping forward. Reliability of cloud applications is a real concern, and there’s not nearly enough hard data out there. Not all products are equally reliable; even within 37signals, the new reports show a 3:1 variation in downtime across apps. That said, ...

   Cloud,Transapency,37signals,Announcement     2012-01-10 07:24:02

  Why is Design the Body Language of the Web?

Good web design is not just about the looks. It is also about the message being delivered to the user and this is probably much more important that it being pretty. Designing a visual message which will contain text has to be easily understood by the people you deliver that message to.Given this, you have to master the method of connecting to the people that visit your website. Besides knowing what they want and what they are looking for, you will have to know how to make it comfortable for them...

   Web design,Body language,Visual,Connection,Focus,Communication     2011-10-26 03:24:53

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