A week ago, everyone at 4PSA (well, almost everyone – as some of us had to stay in the office and keep an eye on things) were off to nowhere, i.e. Rucar, bonding with the team, trying to know each other even better, and cultivating that spirit of togetherness that makes things move, while having fun.
There is a common perception that collaboration is the universal solution to all issues that software companies encounter. A lot of effort is invested in improving collaboration between tech people, starting from tools that can be easily purchased and ending with programs that encourage collaborative behavior. The idea is quite simple: if people collaborate better, the output of the entire team, both its quality and quantity, will be better.
While I do not want to mitigate against collaboration, there are specific cases where it simply doesn’t work. I will exemplify that and suggest some solutions as well.
As promised in our previous article, this post will be about the ways to optimize the response time from a web service when a client needs to read a resource. We are going to achieve this by not reading information on a resource if it has not changed. This helps developers create faster web applications.
In one of our previous posts, we were introducing the VoipNow Team as one of the most complex teams at 4PSA. It handles marketing, sales, customer support, and product development for a product that has been on a continuous ascending curve. Since VoipNow has grown to be a very popular “child”, our team is in need of more people. We are now looking for Product Wizards, i.e. Clouders for whom VoipNow will hold no secrets and who will be able to decode any misunderstanding and solve any issue customers might experience while using it.
From the dust of old centuries until today’s computer-driven and smartphone-glued society, seven has always been considered a magical number. Many believe in the power of seven, be they sorcerers or mathematicians, historians or, in the past decades, even psychologists. Seven days in the week, seven wonders of the world, seven primary colors, seven notes in the musical scale, seven ages of man, Miller’s law on human brain’s capacity of processing information, and the list can go on and on.
This article aims at clearing up some of the misconceptions about the CSS display property and the way it affects the box model. It will only take into account the W3 specifications. To avoid blurring you with all sorts of details and exceptions, various browser inconsistencies will be swept and kept under the rug. The purpose is to give you a clear understanding of the matter, so that you shouldn’t be afraid of doing more than changing colors from a stylesheet picked up from who knows what source.
According to biographers, in the eighties, Steve Jobs was kind of obsessed about IBM. This is one of the reasons for which he approved the famous commercial below, one that was hardly liked by the rest of the directors. It was a bold move, mostly because Steve believed that stopping IBM was his messianic mission.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_d5R6Il0II[/youtube]
The truth is that, right now, the world is hundreds of miles closer to 1984 than it ever was in the eighties.
The Infrastructure Team handles the cloud back-end, i.e. the physical and software infrastructure that runs the SaaS platform. Technically, it handles everything from networking to databases. It may not seem very complicated, but it actually takes a broad range of knowledge to understand, operate, and maintain an infrastructure that deals with networking equipment, physical servers, virtualization, storage, databases, communication layers, load balancers etc.
One of the great benefits of dynamic-typed languages is that they are able to add functionality to an object on run-time. For example, you can create an object and then add functions to it, giving it the desired behavior, without a complex inheritance structure. Moreover, when calling the object’s methods, the client can determine whether the object supports a certain operation or not.
Static-typed languages do not come with this advantage. Creating objects that share some behavior can be done by inheritance, yet this restricts the combinations of behaviors an object can have (unless it relies on multiple-inheritance, which has some tricky effects).
Have you ever wondered about the purpose of browsers? And why are there so many of them, when they all seem to do the same thing?
Browsers are actually an essential part of the Internet. Without them, the whole world wide web would be meaningless. They are the entities that interface the work of web developers with the user experience. This is why browsers are so important.