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What’s your backplane? (source: The Endeavour)
Understanding the context in which we string development tools together.
"Tools are used in a context. To understand how someone works, you need to know his or her backplane and not just a list of tools."
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Fix The (Mac OS X) Sandbox (source: Red Sweater Blog)
Apple's Gatekeeper is a major step for increasing security.
"Simply establishing the identities of software developers is a major step for increasing security, because bad actors can either be immediately shut down."
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The Heroes of Java: Ward Cunningham (source: Markus Eisele)
Meet the man who invented the Wiki.
"Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki and pioneered both design patterns and Extreme Programming."
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Don't Fall in Love With Your Technology (source: Programming in the 21st Century)
Imagine better alternatives. Then build them.
"It's bizarre to realize that in 2007 there were still people fervently arguing Emacs versus vi and defending the quirks of makefiles."
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Dear Developer, excuse me while I slap you silly (source: Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision)
Enterprise devs: tablets are your future. Deal with it.
"The end-user, and “the man” are going to demand Tablets. Those developers who resist will learn their true place in the hierarchy. And it’s not at the top."
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Anonymous can't DDoS the root DNS servers (source: Errata Security)
Why an attack won't cause a global blackout.
""Operation Global Blackout" promises to cause an Internet-wide blackout by disabling the core DNS servers. But the attack is no longer practical."
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Redesigning the Windows Logo (source: Blogging Windows)
It's not a flag. It's a window.
"Windows 8 is a complete reimagination of the Windows operating system. Nothing has been left unexplored, including the Windows logo."
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I think it may be because of the complete shift from Windows7.
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Microsoft's Biggest Miss (source: Minimal Mac)
Do you really need Office to get real work done?
"The iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done. Android came. People got things done."
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Is responsive design about more than screen size and flexible layout?
Source: Rob Flaherty
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When the compilation step is hidden, C# feels more like an interpreted language.
Source: The Endeavour
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It's starting to look like learning native application development is a great way to go.
Source: Michael Crump
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You can have your coding cheap, fast or good. Pick two.
Source: Ode to Code
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Being on the other side I can see the crowd that is working so i will say "Cheap" is the only benefit. "Good" is only if you are lucky and find good people to work and "fast" depends on how the mid level manager is managing the overall work (i have seen cases where managers dont let us deliver complete modules as more delay means more billing hours.
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Great insight Rahul. I think we'd all benefit from any suggestions you might have about good ways to find productive teams to work with and get the most out of the relationship. Have you seen this done well?
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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I am a technical guy and not much involved in management activities so i dont know how much i will be of help but i can surely tell about my very first project(or career). It was a great work place and we did pretty good work. The reason for this, I think is:
1. We were working offshore along with the team working onsite but we all had full access to each other. We can call each other anytime we want unlike in other projects where there is one person for client interaction and the technical team from both the side will have to use him to communicate. and the problem gets worse if the middle man in a not a techie.
2. Things here are very dynamic when it comes to manpower allocation. people get assigned and reassigned. so people dont get chance to become domain specialist but people do work hard to get things done. And we were lucky that the clients technical team provided us full support whenever we needed it and that really helped a lot.
3. I am a big fan of agile. we were using scrum and that tends to be developer centric. also it reduces a lot of useless documentation which is something managers like to use to create delays.
4. Frequent communication between developers from client side and offshore team keeps everyone on same page and make things very smooth.
5. lastly, i saw two kind of projects. one is fixed money where offshore company gets fixed amount for the work. and time based billing where companies get paid for time. for first type of projects managers usually try to quote less people and less time(which seems lucrative to clients) but the sole idea is to get work done for fixed money and with compromise on quality. The scenario is exact opposite for other kind of projects. for this i think the client company should discuss with their technical teams the time/resources the offshore company is offering and decide whether it is too less for the task to too much for the tasks.
I might be wrong and might have upset some people but this is purely my opinion and experience.
P.S. when i say manager i mean mid level guys who are only involved with money matters. project leaders and project managers, so far i worked with, are really dedicated towards work and delivery.
NO HARD FEELINGS IF I OFFENDED ANYONE IN ANYWAY.
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Interesting article. The company I worked at in 2009 outsourced a number of projects to you-know-where. Among other responsibilities they were also commissioned to run test scripts and regression tests, etc all of which were given to them as part of the knowledge transfer phase. About eight months later they applied a database update that ran incorrectly albeit successfully. I was told that about a week later the proverbial brown stuff hit the fan. It was proved that they never ran the test scripts or regression tests. It apparently took about two weeks to roll-back to the previous production copy and then apply the transaction updates. Needless to say, the company threw the book at them and lost a number of business deals during the downtime. They had to ask one of the redundant developers who worked on a key system to come back in and advise them. He did, at a take-it-or-leave-it daily rate which I believe was close to an eye-watering £900 a day which was passed onto the outsourcing company as part of the penalty condition clauses for poor delivery of service.
I'm sure there are many successful outsourcing initiatives.
When I buy power tools I buy only the best. I've learned from experience that if you pay less to buy cheaper it can cost you twice as much: the first time to realise that the reliability and quality were a mistake and the second to buy what you should have bought first time. Naturally I will not name the outsourcing company or the UK company involved in order to protect the innocent. 
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Tablet computing is here, whether you like it or not.
Source: AllThingsD
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AKA "Lion iCloud Edition".
Source: TIME
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The smart money is on Android, iOS... and Windows Phone?
Source: SRT Solutions
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