Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Stop

  Backend-as-a-service?

As the list of *-as-a-service’s continues to grow, I thought I’d throw one into the mix. What about the idea of a backend-as-a-service (BaaS)? The recent surge of client side Javascript frameworks along with the attractiveness of simple RESTful APIs has created an environment where server-side interaction can be reduced to simply database interaction (including validation and some computation). But why stop there? What if the server-side of the equation was simply a RESTful, ...

   Web design,Backend,Service,BaaS,Client JavaScript     2011-12-29 09:07:38

  In 2012, let’s stop talking web design and start talking product design

“My hope for 2012 is that some of the old guard of well-respected web gurus stop talking HTML and CSS and start talking serious development. I love the way many of the old guard write and evangelize, but I’m tired of discussing basically the same stuff we were in 2006.” I wasn’t specifically referring to Jeffrey Zeldman, but he (somewhat arrogantly) assumed I was, and responded with a sarcastic, “And a merry Christmas to you, sir.” ...

   Web design,Model,Module focus,2012     2011-12-26 08:49:03

  That’s Not TDD

A few months ago I was visiting a client who was having a lot of problems using TDD. “It takes over half an hour to run our unit tests,” he said. “You are not doing TDD,” I said. “In order for tests to be valuable all of them must run fast—within a few seconds, or developers will stop running tests frequently.” “But how to I make them run fast?” he asked, “Just connecting to the database takes 30 seconds” So I showed him a techn...

   TDD,Driver,QA,Model,Uncontrol,Method     2011-08-25 02:26:29

  How to forcibly eject a CD/DVD from a MacBook Air USB SuperDrive

So you've got a DVD stuck in the external USB SuperDrive that connects to the MacBook Air? And you've tried hitting the magic Eject button on the keyboard to no avail?And you've tried drutil tray eject at the command-line? And you've tried booting with Option held down and clicking eject? And you've tried plugging the drive into other machines (Macs, Windows PCs, Linux machines) to no avail?What do you do?Clearly you hit the physical eject button, right? Every DVD drive has one of those. On the ...

   Apple,Macbook,USB Drive,Ejection     2011-11-17 08:39:56

  Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb

I realized that, paradoxically enough, good programmers need to be both lazy and dumb. Lazy, because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Lazy, because only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code – thus avoiding redundancy, the enemy of software maintenance and flexible refactoring. Mostly, the tools and processes that come out of this endeavor fired by laziness will speed up the production. This ma...

   Good programmer,Lazy,Reason,Dumb     2012-04-18 07:15:23

  Are older people better programmers?

Peter Knego states something interesting: “It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.”. He uses reputation and other metrics from StackOverflow to corroborate his point. His summary is: Number of coders drops significantly with age. Top developer numbers, at age 27, drop by half every 6-7 years.Developers in their 40s answer roughly twice as much and ask half the questions compared to colleagues in their 20s. It seems younger generation learns and older generatio...

   Programming,Age,Experience,Skill,Advanta     2011-07-28 09:02:23

  Networking Terminologies

Portmaps sudo apt-get install -y portmap Portmap is a part of ONC RPC (Open Network Computing Remote Procedure) collection of software for implementing remote procedure calls between Computer Programs. It is widely used by NFS (Network File System) and NIS. Portmap is a server that converts RPC program number to DARPA protocol port number. It must be used in order to make RPC calls. Network Infomation Service (NIS) sudo apt-get install -y nis NIS is a client server directory service provi...

   Linux,Network programming,Network file system     2012-02-16 06:22:30

  STOP WRITING GOOD CODE; START WRITING GOOD SOFTWARE

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 de...

   Good software,Standard,Good code,Deadline,Tradeoff     2011-11-20 06:56:06

  Using Fabric to deploy web app

Many people may use FTP and rsync to synchronize codes to server, this way is fine but it may be troublesome when you need to deploy many times a day, actually there is a simple way if you can spend time on finding the fast way. We introduce Fabric today for deploying web app to remote server. Fabric is a deployment tool written with Python, the biggest feature if it is you no need to login to remote server, you can execute remote commands locally. Here is s simple deployment script written with...

   Fabric, Web deployment,SSH,Python     2012-12-08 03:16:00

  Australian software engineer got asked algorithm question when entering US

The whole world knows that security and background checks get tighten for people to enter US since Donald Trump took office. But have you ever heard about getting algorithm question asked during the immigration check interview while entering United States? Recently an Australian software engineer David Thornton had such an experience when he tried to enter US. (Image from kaytlentravels.wordpress.com) David is a software engineer from Sydney and he is a 24-year-old studied computer sci...

   NEWS,DONALD TRUMP,UNITED STATES     2017-03-04 12:07:54

RECENT