R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me. - Aretha Franklin I’m feeling a bit crabby this morning, perhaps because I had to deal with a take-home exercise that passed for an interview. But that’s another story. Today I want to focus on respect and how the software industry is mishandling it. To service the above quote, I also want to provide some insight into how I, just your average humble software developer, choose to define the term. ...
There are many ways to navigate a website these days, especially on mobile where you can swipe, pinch, and touch. But what about the people on Desktops that use keyboards? Let’s be nice to them. One trait of seasoned computer users that I’ve seen is that they start to use their mouse less often and rely more heavily on keyboard shortcuts. When it comes to reading websites, you can scroll with your arrow keys, but what about jumping to relevant sections on a web page? You could use the PgUp and PgDown keys on your keyboard, however many people now use laptops, and those keys are buried in a Control/Function-key combination, so I doubt they get much use (I don’t have data on this, it’s merely from my own experience). ...
One best practice that I rarely see used by companies is a version file that denotes what is currently in Production. Let’s step back a bit and use a real-life situation. A company released a new version of their Web application to Production from master (using the git-flow model). Some hours go by and its now late into the night when the application fails. Unfortunately, all of the developers are now at home and only the poor operator (who is on-call support) is left wondering what happened. The software didn’t fail in the test environment, what could possibly have gone wrong. ...
Today I want to highlight a bit issue with the tech industry, and that is the gathering of requirements from customers. I’ve seen far too many product and project managers gather requirements from the client, then pass them to developers to implement without batting an eye as to their feasibility. Let’s use a specific example pulled from my work today: users can post images but post needs to go through approval before going live ...
…at least, not in the traditional, hands-on-keyboard sense. This is one of the things that a lot of CompSci graduates don’t realize when they head out into the workforce. When I look back at all my jobs and put on my PHB’s hat, I would say that I spend less than 25% of time coding. Another 25% of the time is reading code, yak-shaving or searching for solutions. The rest of the time is spent talking with people; this is a skill that neither CompSci, nor most university courses teach. These numbers always fluctuate (some days, I put my head down and code almost 100%), but it says a lot about how much “coding” I do. Also note that I wrote “talking with people”, not “talking to people” because there is a big difference. ...
I am working with a client right now on their Web application. While creating an account to do testing, I noticed a glaring security issue that allows people to harvest usernames. This topic has been covered before, I am still surprised that it keeps popping up around the Web, but this time is a bit different. I should note that the client knows about the issue, but what I want to point out in this article is how insidious the issue becomes. ...
One of the things that I dislike seeing in an application’s database architecture is the use of booleans. They do not convey enough information to any party to be meaningful, other than to ask a question that expects a yes/no answer. Often, questions such as those as a follow-up question that the field cannot answer. For example, in many databases I see the following fields on a User model: User ==== id primary key username the user's username credential password_encrypted authenticates the username ... other fields ... enabled true if the user is active, false otherwise When a user has been banned for doing something inappropriate, an application simply sends this query: ...
Note: Contrary to what you are about to read, I am still against metaprogramming on the whole, as it adds an unnecessary amount of magic that may confuse other developers. That being said, I would hate working in a language without it. Use sparingly, like junk food. “With great power…” Yadda yadda. Enjoy the article. I am currently writing a gem to wrap the Cleanspeak API and I was using the JSON examples in my test cases that they supply in their API docs. I wrote the test cases like so: ...
I have been looking into Elixir and I am enjoying the language (mainly from both a readability standpoint, I haven’t done enough to form an opinion about its performance benefits). I read the chapter on recursion and then applied it to a quick and dirty Fibonacci implementation (my favourite way to learn recursion in a new language). It is as easy ascreating a new file called fib.ex and adding the following: ...
I was using BitBucket the other day for a new client, but I wasn’t able to use my standard BitBucket account (business reasons). I attempted to add my standard SSH key (id_rsa) to the new BitBucket account but SSH keys must be unique to the entire BitBucket system. I don’t understand the reason for this uniqueness but there is a way around it using a rarely used SSH technique. First you need to generate a new SSH key. You will name it something different than the default (id_rsa) because it will be used exclusively for the new BitBucket account. ...