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  The business of software

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...

   Software,Design,Business,Software design     2011-10-29 07:22:09

  Amazon unveils 8.9" Kindle Fire HD

Amazon today unveiled 7 products of Kindle family, including the $69 new Kindle; Kindle Paperwhite WiFi/3G, priced at $119 / $179; 7-inch Kindle Fire regular edition/HD version, $159/$ 199; 8.9inch Kindle Fire HD with WiFi/4G Edition at $299 /$499. However, the Amazon phone did not show up. The 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD is today's highlight, because it looks real similar to iPad. Kindle Fire HD has the following features: 1920 x 1200 resolution, 254PPI Texas Instruments OMAP 4470 proce...

   Amazon,Kindle Fire HD,tablet     2012-09-06 19:12:05

  The Programmer Salary Taboo

Salary is an interesting topic. It's certainly one everyone has an opinion on. It's also a uniquely taboo subject among members of the working public. Since I'm about a month away from being done with University and entering the programmer workforce, I've taken to asking my classmates what type of starting salaries they're getting at their first jobs. The first thing I discovered is that not everybody is very comfortable with this question, and many companies are even less so. Microsoft requests...

   Salary,IT company,Taboo,Google,Microsoft     2011-04-18 00:19:03

  Stub Mixlib::ShellOut and shell_out in Ruby unit testing

Unit testing is part of software development to ensure the tiny component of a function can work as designed. Different frameworks and tools can be used to run unit testing for different programming languages. In Ruby, one popular unit testing framework is Rspec, or Chefspec if you are writing Chef recipes. While writing Chef recipes, some low level commands(DOS commands or shell commands) need to be executed on the managed resource to perform actions or gather information. For example, lis...

   RUBY,UNIT TESTING,RSPEC,CHEFSPEC,SHELL_OUT     2016-11-11 00:14:46

  Programmer professionalism

Programmer is a lifetime occupation. But first, as a programmer you need to love programming, rather than just an occupation to achieve other goals in life.Now if you plan to spend decades of life on programming, then you should continue to think about what is more efficient. In other words, how are you different from who you were a decade ago and how will you be better than who you are now a decade later?In my opinion, a programmer, regardless of his work, should improve himself in three aspect...

   Programmer, Idea     2012-12-10 12:05:24

  Benefits and Drawback of a Layered Architecture

Most enterprises today are application centric. But the problem with the application is that their database schemas, user interfaces, programming interfaces and object models are tightly coupled and difficult to change. If you want to add a new field to a database table and you’re lucky, the change will reflect through the entire system. But often the change needs to be replicated manually across the entire system. And as applications are difficult to change, adding business rules or proce...

   JAVA, PROGRAMMING,WEB DEVELOPMENT,ENTERPRISE APPLICATION     2017-05-04 08:19:34

  Why are ugly websites so successful?

“Techmeme has redesigned,” Gabe Rivera founder of the popular technology news site wrote in January 2012. “Drudge Report is now indisputably the web’s ugliest news site.” I use Techmeme all the time. I find it an excellent news website. It’s a collection of well-selected links to important issues in the technology industry. It doesn’t look pretty but it works fine for me. Asides from the quality of its stories it also has black text on white bac...

   Website design,Ugly,Success,Analysis     2012-02-13 05:27:56

  Slow Datagridview... Oh No!

So we all have been here, I had finished a project using VS2008, implementing  Datagridviews on litterally each and every form of the system. This had been a requirement from the onset as to ensure easy searching,navigation and capturing of data. So the data capture ladies start doing their thing and low and behold the dreaded call... they are unhappy with the speed of the DataGridView. I had to agree with them, the repaint of the and overall perfromance of the grid is ...

   C#,DataGridView,Slow,Solution     2012-02-07 07:12:26

  The world's first HTML5 SIP client

This is the world's first open source HTML5 SIP client (May 12, 2012) entirely written in javascript for integration in social networks (FaceBook, Twitter, Google+), online games, e-commerce sites... No extension, plugin or gateway is needed. The media stack rely on WebRTC. The client can be used to connect to any SIP or IMS network from your preferred browser to make and receive audio/video calls and instant messages. The protocol parsers (SIP, SDP...) are highly optimized using Ragel loo...

   HTML5,SIP,CLient,Google     2012-05-21 06:18:34

  What is cache penetration, cache breakdown and cache avalanche?

When designing and developing highly available system, cache is an very important consideration. It is useful to cache some frequently accessed data so that they can be accessed quickly and also cache can protect the downstream system like DB from being hit too often.  To provide better cache design in large systems, some problems may need to be considered first. In this post, we will talk about some frequently discussed cache problems and mitigation plans. Cache penetration Cache penetrati...

   SYSTEM DESIGN,CACHE PENETRATION,CACHE BREAKDOWN,CACHE AVALANCHE     2020-04-10 08:43:00

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