Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

Choosing the “best software”

Julia Evans has a nice blog post about choosing the “best software”.  Here is my favorite part:

So, let’s talk about another way to think about making decisions than “what is the Best Thing in this situation”.

I run an event series called “lightning talks and pie”. At the most recent one, Ines Sombra gave a talk about capacity planning. In it, she said that there are 3 reasons you might want to change something about your system:

  1. It’s too expensive
  2. It’s too difficult to operate (humans spend a ton of time worrying about it)
  3. It’s not doing the job it’s supposed to

I find these 3 criteria a lot easier to reason about than the “Choose The Best Thing” framework.

She provides some examples on how to apply this thinking, as well as how to deal with tradeoffs and limitations.

HTML Canvas Tutorial

Skilled.co put together this HTML Canvas Tutorial, which covers the HTML 5 <canvas> functionality, that allows web developers to draw all sorts of graphics on the fly, using JavaScript.  The tutorial is available for download in PNG and PDF formats, as well as on the webpage, and it covers the following:

  • Shapes
  • Styles and color
  • Text
  • Images
  • Transformations
  • Compositing and clipping
  • Animation
  • Pixel manipulation
  • Hit regions and accessibility

It also provides a few useful tips, inspiration, and links to other resources.

What’s the best framework for building mobile apps?

It’s been a while (a few years actually) since I looked at building a mobile application.  I don’t have the need to build one now, but I like keeping an eye on what’s going on that domain.

Even back when I was involved with mobile applications, the better approach was to use a framework, rather than building the app from scratch.  The frameworks that existed at the time would help with building a cross-platform (Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, etc) application, and have a better integration with the mobile’s hardware and features (touchscreen, networking, vibration, camera, etc.)

As with many other cutting edge technologies, things move very fast and things get outdated pretty quickly.  So it was interesting to read – What’s the best framework for building mobile apps? – which covers today’s options.  Some of the solutions survived the last few years, some didn’t, and there are a few new ones.  The frameworks covered in the article are:

The article is a good quick overview of what’s out there and why to pick one over the other.

10 things to avoid in Docker containers

10 things to avoid in Docker containers provides a handy reminder of what NOT to do when building Docker containers.  Read the full article for details and explanations.  For a brief summary, here are the 10 things:

  1. Don’t store data in containers
  2. Don’t ship your application in two pieces
  3. Don’t create large images
  4. Don’t use a single layer image
  5. Don’t create images from running containers
  6. Don’t use only the “latest” tag
  7. Don’t run more than one process in a single container
  8. Don’t store credentials in the image. Use environment variables
  9. Don’t run processes as a root user
  10. Don’t rely on IP addresses

BitBucket : tag from source

BitBucket has implemented one of the most frequently requested features, which was outstanding for more than three years now – creating tags from the source browser (as in BitBucket web interface, rather than from the local repository, using git and then pushing it to remote).

I didn’t see the announcement in the BitBucket Blog, so I thought I’d post it here.

In order to create a new tag, navigate to the Commits page of your repository, then click on the hash of the commit that you want to tag, and then create the new tag from the upper right corner interface as per this screenshot:

It’s not the most obvious place to have this functionality, and the other feature – the equivalent of the GitHub releases – is still missing, but it’s better than having to use the local repository.

Update (January 23, 2017): BitBucket Blog carries the post now.