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  Whatever works for you

In my earlier 20s when I knew everything, I was a much bigger evangelist for my technology choices. I’m accused of fanboyism a lot more these days, but only because Hacker News keeps sending huge waves of people here who tell me I’m an idiot. But I used to be much more annoying with pushing my choices onto others. I’ve naturally reduced such evangelism as I approach 30 and realize I don’t know anything, but I’m now making a much more conscious effort to s...

   Choice,Product,Usability,Fittability     2011-11-29 08:39:09

  Thoughts on Running an Open Source Project

I spoke in the unconference at PHPUK last week, on running an open source project. I thought I would collect together my thoughts into one place before I lose the scratty piece of paper I wrote them down on. I'm not sure I'm the right person to be giving advice exactly, but these are the things that, having been project lead on joind.in for a while, I think are important. Community I love it when people share their code, just make something and publish it, but to my mind it isn't an open...

   Open source,Management,Readme,Community     2012-03-06 05:25:27

  How deep should unit test go?

There is a question on Stackoverflow which says "How deep are your unit tests?". It is asked by a guy named John Nolan. The question is not too new, but what catches me is the Best Answer given by Kent Beck, who is the creator of Extreme programming(XP) and Test Driven Development(TDD). Let's look at the question first. The thing I've found about TDD is that its takes time to get your tests set up and being naturally lazy I always want to write as little code as possible. The first thing I seem ...

   Unit test,TDD,XP     2012-09-03 10:11:27

  "Simplicity" is not a simple concept

I've come to avoid using the word "Simplicity" or its variants ("Simple," &c.) It means too many different things to different people.For example, my original land-line phone was simple:It's simple by eliminating extraneous use cases. It only handles one user scenario, the one that was the most common when it was invented. If we think of the number of affordances and the number of uses, this kind of simplicity lowers the number of affordances by lowering the number of uses. I call this kind ...

   Simplicity,Software,Usability,iPhone,Phone     2011-11-24 09:21:09

  Products born for Cloud

Cloud computing has become increasingly popularity among companies. It greatly saves the investment of infrastructure and training with everything is running on cloud, it also improves the accessibility and flexibility of service provided by companies. With its popularity, many products are born or becoming popular to help build and move the apps to the cloud. Some well known names of these products are Vagrant, Docker/LXC, Chef and OpenStack. These tools can help create, test and deploy applica...

   Cloud,Openstack,Docker,Vargrant,LXC,Chef     2015-01-25 02:27:11

  Some lovely software design quotes

  Every time when I read technical books, I like reading the quote of a famous person at the start of a chapter(if any), usually they are very interesting. Here is a collection of famous quotes. Life’s too short to build something nobody wants – Ash Maurya, Running Lean author Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day; teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime. – David Leinweber There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is...

   Quote,Software design     2012-10-13 09:13:34

  How I Develop Things and Why

I've always considered myself a bit of a software junkie. Nothing excites me more than a great piece of new software. Some of my best childhood memories are our trips to Grandma's house, where I'd have access to a computer with a dial-up connection that I'd use to obtain freeware and shareware. I'd bring 4 or 5 floppies with me and try to cram all the games, waveform editors, and utilities that I could sneaker-net home. Luckily today, excellent software written with passion oozes out of ...

   Development,Software,Why,How,Experience     2012-01-28 07:01:34

  Open Source (Almost) Everything

When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were faced with an interesting question:Should we open source Grit or keep it proprietary?Keeping it private would provide a higher hurdle for competing Ruby-based Git hosting sites, givin...

   Open source,Benefits,Popularity,Advertisement,Advantage     2011-11-23 07:58:15

  What was the Internet like in 1995?

The Internet evolves very fast since its birth. In 1995, a TV program called Computer Chronicles made an episode about new technology "The Internet". Now let's check out what the Internet looks like in 1995 through some video screenshots. First the host Stewart Cheifet appeared in the video where he was in a network cafe. There you can meet the real people and virtual person. That's a good thing. The first guide of us is the technology journalist from New York Times John Markoff. He said his f...

   Internet,History,1995,Computer Chronicles     2013-04-10 06:30:28

  Apple's new patent for non-programmers

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week announced a new Apple patent called  "Content Configuration for Device Platforms" which they applied in December 2011. This patent describes a new border software that allows users who do not understand code to create applications  .The patent mentioned that computer programming language has become the obstacles to creating applications, because a lot of content writers and designers do not have knowledge of computer programming.Thi...

   Apple,New patent,Authoring tool     2012-04-15 01:16:17