Up until quite recently, I used LastPass for storing my passwords. The announced changes to the free plan are, however, a big showstopper for me and, like many users, I chose to move away. Still, since my faith in service providers has been (once more) shaken, I’ve looked to an open source that I’ll be able to fully manage.
Read moreIn my not-so-long career, I’ve often been at odds with one of my directors about one topic: quality. We’re both of the mind that it’s a necessary thing in our projects but, basically, our perception of what’s “good enough” is different. Here are some thoughts.
Read moreYou may or may not have noticed it, but I try to avoid the terms “developer,” “coder” and “programming” on Keyboard Playing, except maybe when I’m focusing on the activity of writing code. There’s a reason to it: in our field, it’s common to use these words to describe a variety of jobs. Actually, about anyone who writes or edits code may be called a developer.
Read moreThere’s an image I like when I speak about software development: the construction of a house. Like any metaphor, it has limits, but it helps non-technical people understand what their requests mean to us by comparing them with something they can understand.
Read moreSocial and share buttons seem to be a must-have nowadays, but following the official docs for these may not be the best option for an efficient solution.
Read moreRecently, a colleague of mine came with a wide smile and said, “I have a candidate to interview. There’s J2EE on his resume, but he’s too young to have worked with it. I might have, not him.”
That’s a recurring joke among senior Java technicians: it’s not uncommon for candidates to hear J-2-E and write it J2EE when they should simply use JEE. It’s not completely incorrect, but it may cause some confusion.
Read moreKeyboard Playing has been calm for some months in 2020. It was, however, not forgotten. It’s alive again and some changes were made in the last weeks.
Read moreIf you’ve been using Spring for a while, or copy-pasting some web tutorials or examples, you’ve probably put some @Autowired annotations on private fields.
This does work, but it’s not the best way to do it.
As a developer, I’ve had my share of side projects but, being the lone wolf I am, I always worked alone on those. This year, the creative community I’m part of decided on achieving something that would require some work. I thought I had a quite clear vision and decided to manage this project.
Here’s what I take away from it.
Read moreAs I’m preparing for my first attempt at NaNoWriMo, I know I must have my writing software ready. I used Scrivener in the past and know it’s a solution I love to use. My only problem was: my mobility OS is Linux, which Scrivener doesn’t provide support for.
But that’s no longer a problem as Thomas Pletcher proved that the latest betas of Scrivener 3 work with Wine. Here’s how.
Read moreIf you like to deliver clean documents, you probably sometimes display invisible characters in Word.
In such occasions, you may have seen lines or paragraphs ending with ·¶.
Yes, because a document is not only written but also manipulated and changed a number of times, having trailing spaces is not a rare thing.
One of my development reflexes is to trim those, but Word does not provide any tool to do that automatically.
Or does it?
Sometimes, I don’t understand something, so I search the answer and sharing it is natural. Sometimes, I don’t think sharing it will be any use, until I realize that some people, even in my team, struggle with the same thing. This post is in the second category.
If you use NPM regularly, you must have noticed it adds tildes (~) or carets (^) in front of your dependencies’ version number.
You may also have noticed it creates a package-lock.json file.
If you don’t know what any of these are, this post will shed some light.
Following the usual rules when writing a dialogue in a piece of fiction makes it so much easier to read. Fortunately, those rules are quite straightforward. Much more so than their French equivalent.
Read moreLast week, Tony asked me about the technological stack behind my website. It’s a subject I wanted to write about once the website was stable, but I keep tinkering with it. As such, it’s far from finished and I still have many ideas, but let’s talk about it now nonetheless.
Read moreWhen you develop a Java program that accesses a database, you’re likely to need a JDBC driver. When that database is an Oracle product, you keep that O for OJDBC.
For years, I just used the version an architect had selected. Then, I became the architect and I had to understand which version to choose. It’s not that complicated, just not really well explained. Let me try to contribute…
Read moreIt’s been a while since I last posted an update about the website. Not my favorite kind of post, but you’ll see I’ve not been entirely idle.
Read moreToday’s Valentine’s day, the best day in the year to tell you how I fell in love with editorconfig.
Read moreTo conclude this series about sustainable IT, I wanted to write a bit about some impacts of software creation that we rarely think about. We’ve all seen movies where a mad scientist creates something that they think is awesome until it escapes their control and threatens life as we know it.
Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos. David Cronenberg
That’s especially true about us software creators: we innovate, create new technologies for thousands or millions of people. If we’re not careful about those creations, they may transform the whole society, though not necessarily in the way we assumed they would.
Read moreEvery project we hear about these days seems to be about data—or artificial intelligence, which is mainly the same. Data is not something new, but the enthusiasm about it is growing rapidly. People are not always aware of how much a website or an application is collecting about them, pushing legislators to write laws about what a company can and can’t do with a user’s data.
Why is that the problem of software creators? Well, the mere amount of data we now collect could never be processed in a lifetime without our digital skills. That makes us at least partly responsible for what is done with it.
Read moreLast week, I posted about the environmental footprint of digital technology. Most of it may have seemed pretty hardware considerations—and several companies or associations fight for more modular, repairable and globally speaking sustainable electronics.
Now, you’re willing to help, but you can’t see how you can make a difference because work on software exclusively and have no say about the hardware that it’ll run on? This post will give you some hints about how to include these considerations into the design of your application.
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