I'm starting a Friday Afternoon Rant-as-a-Service (FARaaS) because I can't take any more "as-a-Service" acronyms. Things have gone too far. Every time I see a new one, I cringe.
Today I cringed in learning about a Proof of Concept-as-a-Service (POCaaS) offering from InterCloud Systems, referring to a new service to test software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies.
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Posted by David Ramel on May 29, 20150 comments
If you've got some heads-down coding on your plate, you'd best avoid the new Stack Overflow developer survey, for you might get bogged down in minutiae ranging from how many caffeinated beverages are consumed in various countries to indentation preferences to average salaries broken down by technology and other criteria.
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Posted by David Ramel on April 14, 20150 comments
The first Spark Summit East conference concluded yesterday, just a month after Apache Spark practically stole the show at the Strata+Hadoop World conference, reinvigorating the debate about where the upstart technology fits in with the maturing Apache Hadoop ecosystem.
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Posted by David Ramel on March 20, 20150 comments
Who would have foreseen the ongoing transformation of the lowly JavaScript Web scripting language to the go-to coding choice for native mobile apps and maybe even the desktop?
Coders from Facebook to Telerik are joining open source enthusiasts and traditional JavaScript-oriented vendors such as Appcelerator (Titanium) and Adobe (PhoneGap) to apply JavaScript in new and innovative ways for native mobile app development.
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Posted by David Ramel on March 11, 20150 comments
When I'm flailing about in code, I often quickly slap something together just to get it working and then go back to clean it up with simpler structures.
Real developers commonly refactor their code in this way to improve quality, readability, reusability and so on.
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Posted by David Ramel on March 3, 20150 comments
Being a hobbyist programmer, one of the things I found most interesting in a recent mobile dev survey is the high percentage of my ilk among Windows Phone developers, which perhaps provides a starting point for a resurgence of the struggling OS as Microsoft looks ahead to Windows 10 for a mobile rebirth.
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Posted by David Ramel on February 27, 20150 comments
"iOS owns the premium segment, Android almost everything else, Windows and the browser fight for the scraps."
That's the conclusion of the latest comprehensive VisionMobile developer study, wherein more than 8,000 developers were surveyed about their OS targets of choice and myriad other details.
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Posted by David Ramel on February 26, 20150 comments
I never thought I'd see this day: Microsoft is proposing Java as a cross-platform mobile development language.
For almost a month, Microsoft JUniversal tooling has been in public preview as the company seeks to smooth out the rough edges in its project to translate Java code into C#, with iOS translation on tap.
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Posted by David Ramel on February 24, 20150 comments
One of the coolest data visualizations I've seen in a while shows JavaScript rules the repository roost on GitHub, by a pretty big margin.
GitHut is "a small place to discover languages on GitHub," but it supplies a large amount of information, measuring active repositories, total pushes, pushes per repository, new forks per repository, opened issues per repository, new watchers per repository, the year the language appeared and much more. It hooks into the public GitHub API to grab data from the universe of some 3.4 million users and 16.7 million repositories on the GitHub Archive.
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Posted by David Ramel on February 11, 20150 comments
What in the heck is going on over there in Linux-land? First, a prominent kernel developer reveals a movement to hire a "hit man" to deal with him, prompting him to pen an expose revealing that the open source community is "quite a sick place to be in."
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Posted by David Ramel on November 13, 20140 comments