The agile family of software development methodologies is now pretty firmly established. Developers have always been some of the most firm supporters of these approaches. And as developers, we like to focus on the good practices that produce better software: testing, story driven development, continuous integration, etc.
And these are all wonderful things. But, from the [...]
George Orwell’s 1984 is rightly a hugely famous novel of the twentieth century. His depiction of a totalitarian future was so griping and compelling that the words and phrases he coined in the creation of his vision have embedded themselves in popular language and culture. I wonder how many teenagers watching reality TV understand where [...]
RFC 2806: a URL scheme for describing phone numbers. A URL looks like tel:+1-312-555-4589. Cute. I didn’t know this existed. But Mobile Safari on the iPhone does. It seems more immediately useful than hCards (browsers already understand it!) But much more limited in scope: its scope is expended on standards for modem and fax calls. [...]
Previously, I’ve mentioned that I’ve written a script that will show a Twitter user who they and another Twitter user both follow.
Well, a script isn’t much use to me or anyone else: you can’t run a script on an iPhone. So like all software wants to be, this script is now a simple little web [...]
When you’re a Twitter’er you will often be in a situation where someone follows you, and you’re wondering, ‘Who is this person? Do I know them?’ Well, I can’t answer that question for you. But, I have found that one thing that tells you about your new follower is who they follow that you also follow. Follow?
I want to [...]
Say you’re a bright young kid at Univeristy and you’ve decided that computer science is what you want to do with your life. What should you start doing with yourself to live that dream? One piece of advice you will frequently hear is ‘Get involved with an open source/free software project.’ Should you?
Short answer: yes, with an if. Long [...]
Working on projects or working on products? Which is for you? Both provide for interesting, stimulating work with difficult problems to solve. Which are you personally going to derive the most satisfaction from? Well, I have a theory, or, a way of phrasing the question that has helped others in the past and might help you.
When you are working [...]
For the Rails applications we’re building at work, as well as all the standard continuous integration features, we also automatically deploy our applications. That is, every time we submit code a central server is automatically updated with a new release. Before running tests.
We’re pretty happy with this set up. It’s already found a couple of bugs in some plugins [...]
Previously, I’ve been a Google Reader fan for my RSS news reading needs. Now that I’m a proper Apple fan boi with an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, I’ve switched to NetNewsWire. Waaay better. The Google Reader iPhone app was what really drove me away. I’m probably going to have to turn off my blog for this, but desktop [...]
Currently at work I’m designing a large-scale system that will be susceptible to a certain kind of denial-of-service attack. By way of analogy, imagine that Gmail didn’t bother to prevent robots from creating accounts. By the time the first human went to create an account all the reasonable combinations of the top 10,000 human names would have had already been [...]
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