RIF Notes #25

“Most managers want good code, even when they are obsessing about the schedule. They may defend the schedule and requirements with passion; but that’s their job. It’s your job to defend the code with equal passion” – Bob Martin

• IE -Tracking Protection Lists- IE has the a bunch of tracking prevention providers.
• What’s the Problem with Mobile HTML5-“A recent research concludes that contrary to the general belief performance is not the main problem with HTML5 but rather the missing of profiling and debugging tools and the lack of certain APIs”
• Organization Antipattern: Project Teams – This post explored the “No Project” movement and compares the Project team vs. Product Team construction.
• Is College Worth It?
• The New Turbo Button - Balancing Power Management and Performance on Windows Servers-“Recently Mike Harder, a development manager, noticed that stuff he does every day was taking longer on the "Balanced" power option than the "High Performance" option”
• Consumer vs Business Apps – “So then is there any meaningful difference between consumer and business apps?….If I’m writing a business app (like something to manage my inventory or schedule my manufacturing workload) the cost to build software for each type of device continues to exist, but there’s zero increased revenue (well, zero revenue period). There’s no interest in delighting users, we just need them to be productive, and if they can’t be productive that just increases cost. So it is all cost, cost, cost. As a result, if I can figure out a way to use a common codebase, even if the result doesn’t “feel native” on any platform, I still win because my employees can be productive and I’ve radically reduced my costs vs writing and maintaining the app multiple times.”
• Everything you wanted to know about SQL injection (but were afraid to ask)
• Tell us about your shitty commute- More 37Signals advocating for remote work.

   

RIF Notes #24

-“The best way to motivate geeks is to not demotivate them”

• BoundedContext-Martin Fowler explains the concept of the Bounded Context.
• Clean Code Cheet Sheet- A cheat sheet for all of the principles and guidance for righting Clean Code.
• Applying the 80:20 Rule in Software Development- Various ways the 80/20 rule applies to software development.
• Technical Disobedience – “In software, it is far to easy to accept the system around you as status quo. It is harder to realize that software is soft, and that systems can be soft as well. There are many small rules you can try and hack around to get things done.”
• The future of the business desktop- Rocky’s thoughts on the desktop PC and its position within the enterprise and what that means as a platform for enterprise developers.
• Why teams don't work- Harvard Business journal about team dynamics.
• Victory Lap for Ask Patents – Joel Spolsky’s anti patent troll effort.
• Singing the Password Blues-“Passwords are so 1999, and dual-factor authentication is torture”
• 5 ways to tackle an insufficient HTTPS implementation – from Troy Hunt
• Scattered Meeting Day Syndrome – “I have observed that the most unproductive day would be to have scattered meetings all throughout the day”
• Cloud Server Performance: A Comparative Analysis of 5 Large Cloud IaaS Providers – “Though Amazon EC2 has the lowest price advantage over the other 4 providers at $0.12 per hour (tied with Windows Azure), the lowest cost does not always mean the best value for a customer looking for maximized performance. Also, while Amazon EC2 had the lowest performance, due to its cost, it did not score lowest on the price-performance value measurement, the CloudSpecs score; in fact, while Rackspace performed 1.5 times better than Amazon EC2 on the Unixbench tests, its higher price dropped it lower than Amazon EC2 in the CloudSpecs score.”

RIF Notes #23

“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” - C.A.R. Hoare (British computer scientist, winner of the 1980 Turing Award)

• On Types – Ted Neward makes in interesting suggestion about how types should be handled.

  As a suggestion, then, I throw out this idea: Ensure that all of your domain classes never expose primitive types to the user of the system. In other words, Name never exposes an “int” for Age, but only an “Age” type. C# makes this easy via “using” declarations, like so:

  using FirstName = System.String;
  using LastName = System.String;

• Web Developer Checklist – This is a very handy and thorough checklist of items to be checked on you website for quality, security, usability, etc.
• ';--have i been pwned? – Troy Hunt has set up a sight that allows you to see if you have an account that has been compromised in a data breach.
• Healthy benefits for the long run- 37Signals encourages employees to get out of the office.
  • “Instead we focus on benefits that get people out of the office as much as possible. 37signals is in it for the long term, and we designed our benefits system to reflect that. One of the absolute keys to going the distance, and not burning out in the process, is going at a sustainable pace”
• Monaco- Monaco appears to be some sort of Visual Studio Online tool.
• Yahoo Adopted One Of Microsoft's Worst Ideas, Just As Microsoft Killed It Off
  • ‘Microsoft told employees on Tuesday that it's ending its so-called "stack-ranking" system. Under Microsoft's infamous system, workers were ranked on a curve, and those at the low end would be fired or dealt with in some way. The goal in stopping these rankings is to focus more "on teamwork and collaboration…Stack ranking certainly didn't do Microsoft any favors over the years, breeding resentment and distrust among employees. "Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees’
• Good Windows 8 Sales – Rocky Lohtka perspective on how Windows 8 Sales will impact developers “In summary: good Windows 8 sales today means that betting on WPF for smart client development should be pretty safe, and will hopefully have a decent migration path to WinRT in 2-3 years.”
• What’s culture got to do with it? – Cooper asks “Does your work culture make it challenging for your team or organization to do great work? “
• Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think – A discussion of “black swan” projects.
  • A $5 million project that leads to an almost $200 million loss is a classic “black swan.” The term was coined by our colleague Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe high-impact events that are rare and unpredictable but in retrospect seem not so improbable