The Difference Between a Professional and an Amateur Programmer

Mike Cohn: The professional programmer brings his or her full brain, experience and creativity to the job. When asked to develop a feature, the professional thinks about it: Are there gaps in what was asked for? Are there alternative and better solutions? Will it lead to later problems? And then the professional has conversations with …

Get HTTPS working on localhost, with green padlock

In On “Secure Contexts” in Firefox, HTTPS for local development, and a potential nice gesture by Chrome I said: One of the things that’s still not really frictionless for your local development domains is the use of certificates. To circumvent the use of self-signed certificates I explained in said article how I have a dedicated …

Continuous Improvement as seen through the lens of Systems Thinking

Recording of a 1994 talk by Dr. Russel Ackoff on Continuous Improvement as seen through the lens of Systems Thinking. This talk really was way ahead of its time. It’s talking about Continuous Improvement long before I even heard this term in the business of web development; it’s expressed in a very clear and calm …

CSS Paint API (Houdini’s Paint Worklet) available in Chrome 65!

Oh yeah, the CSS Paint API will be enabled by default in Chrome 65: CSS Paint API allows you to programmatically generate an image whenever a CSS property expects an image. Properties like background-image or border-image are usually used with url() to load an image file or with CSS built-in functions like linear-gradient(). Instead of …

CSSGrid.io – Free Video Series to learning CSS Grid

Great new video series by Wes Bos, this time on learning CSS Grid. CSS Grid may seem a bit daunting with new syntax and layout ideas, but it’s fairly simple and can be broken down into a handful of powerful concepts that when used together will blow your mind and change the way you create …

Can (a ==1 && a== 2 && a==3) ever evaluate to true?

Is it ever possible that (a ==1 && a== 2 && a==3) could evaluate to true, in JavaScript? This is interview question asked by a major tech company. My answer was that it’s impossible. They said nothing is impossible. It happened 2 weeks back, but I’m still trying to find the answer. I know we …

SEDAC Population Estimator

The Population Estimation Service is a Web-based service for estimating population totals and related statistics within a user-defined region. It enables users of a wide variety of map clients and tools to quickly obtain estimates of the number of people residing in specific areas without having to download and analyze large amounts of spatial data. …