Month: August 2016

The traits of a proficient programmer

“The traits of a proficient programmer – Bridging the gap between competence and proficiency” is a good continuation of the recent “What is a Senior Developer?” discussion.  This time, the question “Do you know what the difference between competence and proficiency is?” is asked and answered:

Competence means having enough experience and knowledge to get stuff done; proficiency involves knowing why you are doing something in a certain way, and how it fits into the big picture. In other words, a proficient practitioner is always a competent practitioner, but the opposite may not be true.

There are also some tips on how to become proficient.

FormSwift – create and sign legal documents for free

FormSwift

More and more paper work is moving into the digital domain, including legal documents.  I’ve previously linked to Docracy – a service that provides a collection of legal documents, as well as tools to negotiate and sign them.  Today I was made aware of another service – FormSwift. Some might find it to be more comprehensive, up-to-date and user friendly than the alternatives.

Have a look at the FormSwift’s collection of the free legal forms, which cover such categories as business, family, financial, life planning, real estate and other.  Their tools are pretty sweet too, with support for Word and PDF files, and an online editor for PDF – not something you see every day.

what3words – addressing the world

what3words is an interesting solution to the problem of the global addresses.  What’s the problem, you ask?  Well, according to their website:

  • Poor addressing costs businesses billions of dollars and hampers the growth and development of entire nations.
  • Around 75% of the world (135+ countries) suffers from inadequate addressing.
  • 4 billion people are invisible, unable to get deliveries or receive aid, and unable to exercise their rights as citizens.

That doesn’t sound too far from the truth.  So, how do they solve it?

what3words_converter

what3words is a global grid of 57 trillion 3mx3m squares.

Each square has a 3 word address that can be communicated quickly, easily and with no ambiguity.

Our geocoder turns geographic coordinates into these 3 word addresses and vice-versa.

Using words means non-technical people can accurately find any location and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system like street addresses, postcodes, latitude & longitude or mobile short-links.

It’s a very elegant solution.  Obviously, it doesn’t solve all of the problems (for example, it does not take height into account, so if you have a 50-floor high apartment block, all 50 floors will share the same squares).  But this solution is still valuable and super easy to use.

And it’s fun too!  I live around crowbar.land.premises, and I work close to simply.approve.pretty.  See, I told you.

By the way, what3words has been recently in the news:

Mongol Post, the country’s largest mail provider, has licensed the system from What3Words, and starting in September it will offer customers the option of using the three-word codes. (The company added Mongolian to its first 10 languages; 14 more are coming.)

If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is.