I am of the firm belief that code reuse is a personal responsibility, and should never be a corporate endeavor. Unfortunately, thousands of CIOs and project managers disagree. There is a pervasive attitude among out-of-touch higher-ups that the distribution and reuse of code among developers will instantly reduce man hours and costs. On the surface, the logic is sound, but in the trenches this attitude stifles the emergence of greatness. Continue reading.
Up-and-coming Web developers typically ask the same questions. What programming languages are important to know? What is a good entry level salary? Should I expect paid training from my employer? How do I estimate a new project? Although these are important questions, there is often a lack of interest in lessons learned by other developers. Generally speaking, it is because opinions abound with regards to how those lessons should be learned. Here are five such opinions. Continue reading.
Especially when it comes to jobs in Michigan (which are hard to find these days), I am more than happy to post the occasional job opening. Mark Mink over at OtterBase let me know they have a User Interface Engineer opening in Southfield, which is on the Southeast side of the state. It is a direct hire, and the details are below. Call the Metro Detroit Office and just ask for Mark. Continue reading.
There is a common misconception that all programmers enjoy fascinating solitary pursuits like solving a Rubik’s Cube or reciting Pi beyond one hundred decimal places. These impressions are perpetuated by entertaining, yet grossly exaggerated stereotypes found on TV shows like Beauty and the Geek. It is ironic though that these very same geeks, who are unwittingly at odds with the opposite sex, are extroverted enough to engage in social activities on national television. Continue reading.
Although Flash may be the disdain of some, there are instances where it can be used to help communicate the right message to users. Unfortunately, getting Google to index your Flash files is a gamble, and achieving good SEO is difficult. Instead, it is better to architect a solution that does not rely on Flash, but on PHP and Apache’s mod_rewrite capabilities. Continue reading.
DreamHost, my hosting provider, recently informed me that five “invitations” have been made available for me to give away. Essentially, these are special promo codes that significantly increase bandwidth and storage. That I know of they expire in about a week, and once used, can never be used again. I figured I would throw them out there for anyone in the market for a new shared hosting provider.
Just visit http://signup.dreamhost.com, and enter one of the following numbers into the promo code field on the page:
- 198107088120
- 231421413353
- 549711065916
- 803433866820
- 957719222222
If you do not like this particular promo, then you can also enter D3BUG as a promo code, which will get you a $50 discount on your first year of hosting. Let me know if you experience any issues and I will try my best to help.
If you ask most programmers about the progress of the open source movement, they are sure to tell you significant strides have been made in recent years. Even mainstream open source projects like OpenOffice, Ubuntu and Firefox, are putting a dent in the market share of closed source software applications. However, there is an ongoing propensity to believe among open source initiatives, that the very notion of being open source leads to a successful enterprise. Unfortunately, this is when open source fails. This truth is made even more apparent in Web applications. Continue reading.
Posted by Brian
July 21st, 2008
5 Comments
