Podcasts are a great way to get educated and entertained. As a developer we are lucky to have a choice of some fine podcasts from industry leaders. If you commute, jog, travel, you can easily use that time away from the computer to get better informed and reflect about our field.
Decoupling the User Interface from the underlying code has been one of the holy grails of application development. Layers of indirection and new patterns have been invented over time to try to separate what the user does from the back-end data. It’s been a long and difficult journey but WPF is the last attempt at... » read more
What does 04/05/01 mean to you? Let’s make it easy: is that date in 2001 or 2004? And if I write it like 04/05/2001, is it really better? are we in April or May? And the answer is… If you are from North America and a handful other countries 04/05/01 would mean 5th of April... » read more
I’ve been tired of spam on my websites. The few hundreds messages spammers leave everyday are a bit of a nuisance. Now though, I’ve decided to make them work harder to get their messages ignored. Last week, reCAPTCHA came online. It’s an effort inspired by none other than Luis Von Ahn, so you know it’s... » read more
[LAMP][1], Zend, .Net, [Struts][2], [Ruby on Rails][3], [Catalyst][4], and a hundred other development platforms all compete for you attention, all pretending to be the only thing you’ll ever need to satisfy your every needs in web or UI development. Making a decision is really hard: you want the best for your new project and want... » read more
In a past life, working as a project manager for a manufacturer of railway equipment, I had to deal with detailed specifications and conditions of contract that would be big thick documents of hundred of pages each.
Refactoring code is a necessary thing. Unless you work in some very specific environment where casual refactoring is not allowed (like in some safety-critical applications where the most minute change has to be pondered upon by teams and committees for weeks), you cannot code perfectly on the first shot.
More often, you end-up reviewing code and making it clearer, merging parts that are too similar, removing what turned out not to be useful, cleaning up the names, moving things around, etc... there are dozen of refactoring cases that usually help remove the stink out of it.
I installed a beta of IE7 last week and was quite pleased at the new interface and tabbed browsing, which has been available to Opera and Mozilla used and many other browsers for years.
However, looking good and being slick and more standard-compliant hasn't been enough to keep it on my machines.