What happened when Facebook hit the scene? In hopes of becoming Internet on Internet, it did exactly the opposite - it centralized all the services and locked its users within the walled gardens. It was good for members in a way, providing a do-all one-stop. [Continue]
Using nouns and verbs is a good way of introducing OOP. I think it is effective in breaking the mindset of procedural programming and changing the direction of thinking. It is also very effective in explaining some key concepts. [Continue]
Recently a UK agency warned the schools against deals with Microsoft. Problem is the way Microsoft is licensing the software being sold. In the recent times Microsoft has moved towards leasing than selling, so that their revenue keeps building up by that single sale. [Continue]
As I am reading more and more about Vendor Relationship Management, I am convinced that our future is going to go in the direction of more control and personalization for you and me, the user. But this also means that we will have to learn more, to be able to really convert the control and personalization into higher productivity. Simplicity is dependent on our perception, which is a function of our knowledge, experience and skills. [Continue]
I keep advocating that one must understand the programming concepts while learning a programming language, and not just be keen about the syntax. And it is not very convincing, especially because there are not visible benefits. Most of the times only the short term benefits are visible, the long term ones are either too far away or we do not have the vision at all. [Continue]
One of signs of maturity is that you start getting responses from unexpected quarters. The open source community has given a mixed reaction when they came to know that New York Times likes open source. While embracing the online world, New York Times are developing a web development team of their own and want to use the open source community to better themselves. [Continue]
Where else can you see continuous criticism, unfortunately, most of it not constructive! Actually we have seen this a lot with OOP as well. There are some common elements to such kind of criticisms: The subject gets compared to other alternatives feature by feature, without considering the context. [Continue]
Mozilla has announced Prism, an effort to bridge the gap between the Web and the desktop. Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur. WebRunner has been picked up as the first candidate for the experiments. [Continue]
Matt Assay points to Alan Cox’s talk - Dear Mr. Brooks, or: Software engineering in the free software world. There are not many talks that are informative and equally entertaining to engage you through their entire length. [Continue]
We do test a lot of our code to make sure that the software behaves as it intends to. But do we test our designs? A sturdy design can instill confidence in the team, much before we try to see the output or the results. [Continue]