Downdetector – a weatherman for the digital world

Downdetector is yet another one of those services that monitor major web services and provides and lets you see if any of them is experiencing any issues or outages.

You can search for specific providers or browse by company or issue type.  There’s also a weekly top 10.  What I like in particular are comments for each report, where you can get some feedback from other users experiencing the problem.

 

Software Engineering at Google

Fergus Henderson, who has been a software engineer at Google for 10 years, published the PDF document entitled “Software Engineering at Google“, where he collects and describes key software engineering practices the company is using.

It covers the following:

  • software development – version control, build system, code review, testing, bug tracking, programming languages, debugging and profiling tools, release engineering, launch approval, post-mortems, and frequent rewrites.
  • project management – 20% time, objectives and key results (OKRs), project approval, and corporate reorganizations.
  • people management – roles, facilities, training, transfers, performance appraisal and rewards.

Some of these practices are widely known, some not so much.  There are not a lot of details, but the overall summaries should provide enough food for thought for anyone who works in the software development company or is involved in management.

 

Presentation slides with HTML5 systems

In the last few month I had to prepare quite a few presentations and slides.  This is not something that I’m very familiar with, so every time I end up with either LibreOffice or Google Slides or some other overpowered tool.  Clicking around, formatting and reformatting, and having absolutely no version control that I am so used to for my programming and system administration needs – I thought there must be a better way.

Looking at some of the technical talks and presentations around, I discovered that the world is indeed a better place than what I think of it after spending hours in the fight with fonts and pictures.  Apparently, there are quite a few systems now that utilize the power of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to help a semi-technical person keep his sanity.

Sitepoint has a helpful list of “5 of the Best Free HTML5 Presentation Systems“.  Some of the links are broken, but even those that work have enough options to choose from:

I have a big and important presentation to prepare next week, so I’ll give these three a go and see which one I like the most.