Month: September 2011

SlideShare moves from Flash to HTML5

SlideShare is a social network where people share presentations and other documents.  If you ever attended any conferences, talks or group meetings, chances are the slides for that were uploaded and made available on the SlideShare.  Until now, though, using those slides was a bit awkward, since they were always converted to Flash.  Your browser had to have a plugin, it was difficult or impossible to copy-paste text from slides, search was weird, and access from the mobile was very limited.  Gladly, SlideShare announced that they are moving from Flash to HTML5 which by itself should fix all those nuances and provide for some more useful features.

Here are their reasons for switching:

  1. The exact same HTML5 documents work on the iPhone / iPad, Android phones/tablets, and modern desktop browsers. This is great from an operations perspective. This saves us from extra storage costs, and maximizes the cache hit ration on our CDN (since a desktop request fills the cache for a mobile request, and vice-versa). It’s also great from a software engineering perspective, because we can put all our energy into supporting one format and making it really great.
  2. Documents load 30% faster and are 40% smaller. ‘Nuff said on that front, faster is ALWAYS better.
  3. The documents are semantic and accessible. Google can parse it and index the documents, and so can any other bot, scraper, spider, or screen-reader. This means that you can write code that does interesting things with the text on the slideshare pages. You can even copy and paste text from a SlideShare document, something that was always a pain with Flash.

Read the full story to learn about some of the difficulties they experienced during this migration.

Happy birthday, CloudFlare! Thank you for IPv6

Yesterday I received some very good news from the service that makes this website faster for people all around the world – CloudFlare.  In summary: it is CloudFlare’s first birthday since they went public, and to celebrate this they implemented an extremely easy to setup IPv6 gateway service.  Anyone using CloudFlare can enable the IPv6 gateway either for the whole domain or for specific hosts, and it only takes a couple of clicks.  Of course, I’ve done so and used a few testing tools around the web to confirm that my website is now accessible via IPv6 also.

Thank you, CloudFlare!  Happy birthday!  And please, by all means, keep doing what you are doing.

Continue reading Happy birthday, CloudFlare! Thank you for IPv6

Day in brief – 2011-09-27

Average salary for programmer in Togliatti, Russia

Yandex, also known as “Russian Google”, recently introduced a service for salary comparisons across Russia, based on the known job vacancies. This is a handy little tool that provides a lot of insight into how things are in Russia and across. For example, I immediately checked the average salary for a computer programmer in Togliatty – my hometown.

23,000 Russian Rubles approximately equal to 530 Euros. On the same graph, average salaries for Moscow and Saint Petersburg are also indicated – 1,200 EUR and 1,500 EUR accordingly. Unfortunately I don’t have an equal or reliably objective resource for Cyprus, but based on my own knowledge and experience, I’d say at least in Limassol the average salary for a programmer would be somewhere around 2,000 EUR. Moscow’s 1,500 EUR is roughly the minimum, I’d say.

First of all, this graph once again confirms that Moscow and Russia are two different things.  Prices, salaries and opportunities are very different.  Even Saint Petersburg, which is the second richest city in Russia is obviously behind here.  Togliatt’s average salary being almost 3 times less than the one for Moscow clearly indicates the huge difference.

Secondly, this makes me question (not that I haven’t before) all those bright and brilliant mass media reports of how fast the Russian economy is growing and of how well things are improving in the regions.  With 500 EUR being an average salary for a qualified professional – economy has a very long way to go.

Thirdly, it is sad to see how stale the IT industry is in my hometown. The city of almost a million in population has only 55 vacancies for a programmer (according to Yandex only, of course).  And out of those most are C++ and 1C (popular accounting software package) vacancies.  There are a few web developer positions available, but for the city that large these are too few.