The Insider News

Jose Maria Arranz Santamaria[^]:

When Tim Berners Lee invented web he was looking for a system to publish scientific documents remotely accessible, visually attractive, easy to code and easy to use for a non-technical person. For these reasons the World Wide Web was conceived as a page (document) based system with hyperlinks. Page based development forces a style of coding weird, repetitive (plenty of includes) and inefficient (both bandwidth and computing power) not found in desktop development. Single-Page Interface programming fixes this.

BBC[^]:

Genuine scientific progress is usually collaborative even if the nature of fame, and fiction, is to single out individuals. When listing the world changers of the last 60 years, you might start with Watson or Crick for the structure of DNA – but while both did key work they also needed Rosalind Franklin and a host of other supporting characters. There is also far more to DNA than its structure.

Troy Hunt[^]:

It's no secret that China heavily censors the websites that can be accessed via the Internet. I work quite frequently with a number of people in China and I’m always conscious that there is certain material I’d like to share with them which they won’t be able to access. ’m talking about simple resources which software developers work with on a daily basis as part of their job. Or at least those outside China do. So what’s the experience like for them?

The Atlantic[^]:

Joe Paradiso, an associate professor at MIT's Media Lab and director of the Responsive Environments group, started building this analog music synthesizer in 1973. Now, it streams music live from the MIT Museum, and users can manipulate it remotely via the web.

Cerebral Mastication[^]:

There’s a charming little brain teaser that’s going around the Interwebs. It’s got various forms, but they all look similar. This problem can be solved by pre-school children in 5-10 minutes, by programer – in 1 hour, by people with higher education... well, check it yourself!

All Fuzzy[^]:

If your book claims to be a beginner’s book on a programming language, and is 800 pages, you are doing it wrong. Go back to your editor. Halve the book. I understand that by making the book large, you can justify the expensive price tag, but it certainly doesn’t help a beginner programmer.

Gregory Wieber[^]:

Now that iPad has a retina display, interfaces designed for the millions of new pixels will take up a lot more memory than before. If your app contains graphics for older generation iPads as well as the new, that's quickly going to add up. The result will be bloated app binaries. The problem will be worse for universal apps. It's going to mean that people downloading an app on their iTouch over a 3g network will have to download enormous iPad retina graphics that will never be of any use to them.

Coding the Architecture[^]:

Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of successful software yet it's frustratingly neglected by many teams. Whether performed by one person or shared amongst the team, the software architecture role exists on even the most agile of teams yet the balance of up front and evolutionary thinking often reflects aspiration rather than reality.

Maurits thinks aloud[^]:

Here is a collection of bad practices I have seen during many software development projects and some practical advice for acceptance testers on how to maximally help a software development team. I’m sure there are many more ways to improve the communication between testers and software developers. Don’t hesitate to share them!

Ray Wenderlich[^]:

It happens to the best of us: you’re working happily on your app and all is well, and then suddenly – POOF! – it crashes. Aaargh!! Fixing crashes doesn’t need to be hard. Here are some tips for finding the problem and correcting it. You’re likely to worsen the situation if you freak out and start changing things at random, hoping the bug will magically go away if only you utter the right incantations. Instead, you need to take a methodical approach and learn how to reason your way through a crash.

Jay Kreps[^]:

This was my reaction to the Scala macros proposal too. Not because there is anything necessarily bad about macros or the proposal, but just because—is this really the most critical thing? ... I think the Scala folks have done a good job of putting together something that is significantly better than Java as a language. It’s fast, concise, statically type-checked, and inherits a lot of the good operational properties of the JVM. But languages aren’t just, well, languages; and they aren’t even runtime environments for that matter. They are platforms and tool chains and libraries and bodies of documentation, and cultures, and practices. And here Scala does not yet do so well.