The Insider News

Smashing Coding[^]:

The personal nature of coding style is a challenge in a team atmosphere. Oftentimes, seeking to avoid lengthy arguments, teams defer creating style guides under the guise of not wanting to “discourage innovation and expression.” Some see team-defined style guides as a way of forcing all developers to be the same. Some developers rebel when presented with style guides, believing that they can’t properly do their job if someone is telling them how to write their code.

Open Source Hacker[^]:

SSH keys are useful to login over ssh (secure shell) without typing a password. They are also used by Github and other version control systems for passwordless authentication. Here is some basic information from the software developer point of view how to use SSH keys for maximum comfort and security.

Vimeo[^]:

Rob Pike is a software pioneer. His influence is everywhere: Unix, Plan 9 OS, The Unix Programming Environment book, UTF-8, and most recently the Go programming language. He recently gave the closing presentation at Heroku's Waza conference. Check it out.

Brian Harry[^]:

A couple of months ago (before it was even announced), we made the decision to convert all of our Javascript to Typescript. We finally got around to doing it a few weeks ago and this week I was trying to assess what measurable benefits we got for it. The first way I've looked at it is how many bugs did we find in the code that were uncovered just by getting Typescript compiler errors after the conversion. If the premise that large Javascript programs are difficult to get right and hard to validate and Typescript is a good tool for helping write more "correct" Javascript holds, you'd expect to find some bugs in a large code base you migrated. And sure enough, we did...

Martin's Programming Blog[^]:

F# 3.0 is about to be released, bundled in with the new all-grey, ALL-CAPS Visual Studio 2012. The biggest new feature is type providers, bringing some of the benefits of dynamic languages into type safe world. Innovations like type providers deserve more industry attention. I really hope these ideas will spread and hopefully languages like Scala will pick them up pretty soon so more developers (including me) can enjoy the benefits. OK, that's cool, but how is good old F# doing? Well, about the same. It lumbers on in obscurity under the massive shadow of Microsoft and whatever crazy idea the company is currently peddling.

Kitchen Soap[^]:

What does it actually mean to be ‘senior’ in this discipline? I certainly have an opinion of what it means, given that I’m charged with hiring, supporting, and retaining engineers whome are deemed to be senior. This notion that there is a bar to be passed in terms of career development is a good one, but I’d also add that these criteria exist on a spectrum, as opposed to a simple list of check-boxes. You don’t wake up one day and you are “senior” just because your title reflects that upon a promotion. Senior engineers don’t know everything. They’re not perfect in their technical knowledge, and they’re OK with that.

ThoughtWorks Social Impact[^]:

As software professionals, when was the last time we went to our bosses and said “No problem. I’ll build that brand new production system for you in 8-16hrs”? Probably never. Certainly not as often as we’ve freaked-out when the boss came to us with some impossible deadline. “You can’t expect me to build something effective, reliable, great in N-months!” we scream. “Be reasonable!” So why do we sell the myth of the 2-day app to non-profits and other mission driven organizations? Maybe we like the buzz of seeing ourselves as heroes able to jump tall-buildings with our nerd super-powers.

Clark's Tech Blog[^]:

I think in some ways Microsoft really is Apple circa 1999. There are some differences of course. IT for business simply isn’t going to shift away from Microsoft. There really isn’t a competitor in that space. However more and more users (such as salespeople) may find they don’t need traditional desktop operating systems. I think Win8 is primarily an attempt to show to IT departments that they can have it all. That is the “have it all” is oriented towards Microsoft’s primary customer. And it ain’t end users.

ISN[^]:

Stuxnet proved that any actor with sufficient know-how in terms of cyber-warfare can physically inflict serious damage upon any infrastructure in the world, even without an internet connection. In the words of former CIA Director Michael Hayden: “The rest of the world is looking at this and saying, ‘Clearly someone has legitimated this kind of activity as acceptable international conduct’.” Governments are now alert to the enormous uncertainty created by cyber-instruments and especially worried about cyber-sabotage against critical infrastructure.

The Game Bakers[^]:

In this article, I will present all of the post-mortems and figures I’ve found interesting, and I will also explain how SQUIDS fits into the overall picture. But first, I would like to quickly give my opinion on few of the App Store myths you may believe if you’re not an experienced iOS developer. There are plenty of ways to view the App Store, but my point is that you might be a bit surprised by what the App Store really means in terms of money.