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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

  PaaS vs. SaaS: The Differences And How To Pick The Right Option

Platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) are two kinds of cloud computing products that enable businesses and their clients to deliver and use various services, respectively. Before diving into the differences between the two concepts, it’s important to take a step back and understand what a cloud service really is. Cloud computing primarily refers to large storage of data, programs, and operations that are accessible via the Internet and are not stored on a user&rsquo...

   CLOUD,PAAS,SAAS     2020-04-06 06:30:32

  True Scala complexity

Update 2: Sorry for the downtime. Leave it to the distributed systems guy to make his blog unavailable. Nginx saves the day.It’s always frustrating reading rants about Scala because they never articulate the actual complexities in the core language.Understandable—this post is intended fill that gap, and it wasn’t exactly easy to put together. But there’s been so much resistance to the very thought that the complexity exists at all, even from on up high, that I thou...

   Scala,Complexity     2012-01-10 07:17:07

  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

  How multitasking really works on Android and iOS

As the horsepower packed into mobile devices gets ever greater, more full-featured forms of multitasking are possible. The market leaders have very different ways of going about things, and there are numerous misconceptions about what is going on behind the scenes. This isn’t all the fault of the user, though. In the interest of ease of use, sometimes the multitasking metaphor is overly simplified on both Android and iOS. iOS: It’s more complicated than it looksEver since iOS...

   Android,iOs,Multitasking,Task bar     2012-01-06 09:58:09

  Why developer-friendliness is central to API design

Today, APIs play a bigger role in software development than ever before. The evolution of computing has been dominated by ever-increasing levels of abstraction; the use of higher-level languages, of course, but also the development of platforms, libraries, and frameworks. Professor Douglass C. Smith claims the progression of this second category far outpaced the development of programming languages.  Developers are also noticing that difficulty has shifted from designing algorithms a...

   API,User friendly,Significance, Improve quality     2011-12-21 02:29:54

  The Web Is Wrong

The Analogies Are Wrong Originally, web pages were static documents, and web browsers were static document viewers; there was text, some formatting, and images—if you could pay for the bandwidth to serve them. Hyperlinks were the really big thing, because they were the main point of user interaction—but what a powerful thing they were, and still are. Then along came CGI and Java, and the web was transformed: all of a sudden, a web browser became a way to serve interactive co...

   Web,Feature,Static document,CSS,Text     2011-12-31 15:43:53

  Good programmer made bad designers

I got an email request to publish this article a few days ago.I was actually on the verge of moving the email to the trash when I noticed the first name of the author: Rand.For those of you not familiar with the Wheel of Time series, the main character’s name is Rand.I admit that it’s an embarrassing weak reason to respond to a strange email, but reading some 10,000 pages of a fantasy series obviously messes with your mind.Then again, it’s probably no stranger than...

   Programmer,Designer,Comparison     2011-08-29 22:06:33

  Why I switched from Ruby back to C++

After two months of Sol Trader development in Ruby, I took a difficult decision last Wednesday morning: I’ve decided to rewrite the game code from scratch in C++. Let me explain my reasons. If you'd like to receive announcements about Sol Trader or be part of the beta program, sign up at soltrader.net. Why I did it Slow frames: When working with Ruby, I use the excellent Gosu library to do all my game specific coding. This initially worked great, but occasionally I’d just...

   C++,Ruby,Advantage,Feature     2012-01-09 08:56:21

  File upload once again

File upload is one of the oldest operation of web design. After 20 years, it's still has no big change, difficult to handle, lack of interaction and poor user experience. Web developers have thought many methods to improve the experience of uploading file in web apps, they developed various plugins based on different JavaScript libraries. However, because of the difference among different web browsers, there is no common interface which makes these plugins work properly or easily on all web brow...

   Web design, File upload, Asynchronous,HTML5     2012-09-02 11:52:21

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