Category: General
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Innovation vs Invention
Innovation is the application of existing technology in new ways. In contrast, invention is the creation of new technology. While innovation is a constant in web development, we’ve seen a good deal of invention in the past decades. Here’s how you can put each one of these to work in your next web development project. Innovation By nature, innovation is incremental, interdisciplinary and healthy to the bottom line. It takes a village to raise a…
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Your Keyboard as a Bottleneck
It surprises me how many new developers fail to internalize their main development computer as an integrated system. They think that a computer is simply a collection of parts and routinely forget considerations about ergonomics when purchasing new hardware. Many of these recent grads are coding complex web applications using a laptop keyboard that is probably worth less than ten dollars; their use of portrait screens, secondary monitors, specialized track pads and voice recognition software…
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An Update on Web Assembly
Yesterday, I posted about the imminent release of Web Assembly in 2016. And guess what? Here it is! You can now test several experimental Web Assembly releases across browsers. See the quote below: WebAssembly is an emerging standard whose goal is to define a safe, portable, size- and load-time efficient binary compiler target which offers near-native performance—a virtual CPU for the Web. WebAssembly is being developed in a W3C Community Group (CG) whose members include…
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Web Assembly: A Tectonic Shift
Web Assembly is the next stop for bringing web sites closer to the speed and versatility of native apps. The new standard would provide an assembly layer of compiled code that can be executed as much as 20 times faster than JavaScript. Web Assembly is a W3C standard that will bring similar functionality as Java and .Net without the requiring any plugins. WebAssembly, or wasm for short, is intended to be a portable bytecode…
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Content Fragmentation Follows Device Introduction
If we map out the evolution of the Internet by device introduction we find very interesting dynamics. For one, every major device introduction has been preceded by a revolution in content production. We saw it with web browsers, mail list servers, iPhones, social networks, Bitcoin, the Internet of Things and now with wearables. Every new device category that is successful in the marketplace brings with it a fragmentation in the content production unit of your…
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Being Nice Works
I realized why directors are such horrible people – in a way – because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you, and there is no time to be nice to people, no time to be delicate. George Lucas It doesn’t cost a lot to be nice. Some self sacrifice, a handful of minutes per day or a quick and easy phone call. Yet many developers and executives aren’t…
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The New Apple TV is a Game Changer
Apps in your TV, games on your TV, websites mixed with TV stations. What a tour de force! This is the kind of stuff our industry needs, a new device that is interwoven perfectly into our daily habits while giving us more freedom to chose and interact with the digital world. The future of television is all about apps. That was almost verbatim what Tim Cook said to start the conversation about Apple TV. The…
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100x Web Development
In this day and age of social media, smartphones and on-demand services, web properties can perform faster and more efficiently than ever before. Your business can distribute information to millions of potential customers for cents. However, in order to make use of everything this new age has to offer, you need a 100x plan for your web properties. A plan to make things spread and respond to increased demand across all your products and services.…
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Ethereum is the Most Important High Tech Development of 2015
Ethereum is a platform for building distributed applications that benefit from consensus. Think of voting applications, social networks, ownership journals, banks, cryptocurrencies, etc. Simply put, Atheneum’s reach is massive and we’ll see a lot of Ethereum related news in the coming months. Although the platform needs several years to mature, version 1.0 is already out and many can benefit from the functionality that is already there. About Ethereum Ethereum is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency that includes…
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Back From Vacations
I’m back from my 2015 vacations and ready to talk about Windows 10 and Mac OS X El Capitan. In a nutshell, Microsoft and Apple have created very refined operating systems that will make your life easier. Windows 10 is a nice release that simplifies user experience while bringing back old features such as the Start Menu. The system is fluid and, so far, I’ve installed it without problems in a couple of machines. Sadly,…