The Insider News

Google[^]:

Technology offers so many opportunities to help improve users’ lives. This means it is really important to focus or we end up doing too much with too little impact. So today we’re winding down a bunch more features—bringing the total to nearly 60 since we started our “spring” clean last fall.

8th Light[^]:

If you've read The Clean Coder, you probably know that writing clean code is one of the marks of a professional developer. However a true professional doesn't stop with the code, but keeps everything around the code clean, including Git history.

Ars Technica[^]:

With a little time and energy, it's possible to put together the right combination of hardware and software to provide a great SOHO server. For those without the inclination, though, a NAS box can provide a great alternative. NAS makers have done the hard work of building compact, energy efficient hardware, and putting an interface between you and the operating system that makes configuring the server a relative snap.

Vimeo[^]:

Self explaining method names, fluent interfaces, DSLs, helpful frameworks... We are always looking for ways to make our code more readable. But in our quest, we seem to have forgotten something. The most effective way to make any code more readable. I wish to demonstrate this long lost secret.

ferd.ca[^]:

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone to have lived this experience. It's long hours of trying to figure out what the old code is doing, mostly, and then fixing things with hopes of not breaking some undocumented behaviour someone was relying on, possibly in a completely unrelated part of the system. And most of the time you're not even fixing things, you're just keeping them up to date with changing rules. You're adding to the number of things that may fail, rather than improving it.

PCWorld[^]:

When it comes to business-friendly webmail services, Gmail has been the go-to tool for as long as anyone can remember. Outlook? That was purely a desktop mail client. Hotmail? Most business users wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot spam filter. But, now, here comes Outlook.com, Microsoft’s new webmail service. And you know what? It’s pretty good. So good, in fact, that it deserves a chance to challenge Gmail head-on. Call it the elephant in the room versus the 800-pound gorilla.

The Register[^]:

Open ... and Shut It's hard to believe it now, but not too long ago the web was dangerously close to being owned by one vendor: Microsoft. As mainstream users came to equate Internet Explorer's logo with the Web, Microsoft worked to lock in its advantage with increasingly proprietary technology like ActiveX. It surely would have done so, too, but for the seemingly futile Mozilla browser, née Firefox. Born in the ashes of Netscape's failed browser business 10 years ago this month as Phoenix, Firefox 1.0 is arguably the most important technology developed in the last 50 years.

Wired.com[^]:

What we learned is that you have to sell out (a little) to sell (a lot). I’d argue that many makers have to do this when they want to scale. Going from 0 to 1 million units projected in just our first year meant we had to make a number of tradeoffs – from where to manufacture and how to work with partners without alienating our core community, to what features we chose (or didn’t choose) for the Raspberry Pi in the first place.

The Verge[^]:

Of course, spending a lot of time in Chrome isn’t enough to justify buying a Chromebook — I could easily have continued running the browser in Windows or Ubuntu. But as the idea of switching to Chrome OS matured in my mind, I became increasingly impatient with the extraneous features and restrictions full-blown operating systems forced on me. Even Windows 8 Consumer Preview, which I ran on my work laptop, took a good 20 seconds to boot, then required four or five clicks to get to the browser.

Mozilla[^]:

For the past year Mozilla has been working on an experimental login system that completely eliminates passwords on websites while being safe, secure, and easy to use. Persona is ready to use for authentication: it works in all major smartphone, tablet, and desktop browsers, the user experience has been thoroughly reviewed and polished, we’re committed to the core APIs, and its infrastructure is highly available and stable.