What’s Up? (May 2021)
Two months since the last update. What’s changed since then?
Read moreTwo months since the last update. What’s changed since then?
Read moreWhen designing a website, we’re often tempted to use custom webfonts to make it stand out. Yet, the French collective for a responsible design of digital services provides one simple rule in their referential for web ecodesign:
Use standard typefaces
translated from Référentiel d'écoconception web (FR), Collectif Conception responsable de service numérique
Let’s have a look at what’s behind this rule.
Read moreA few weeks back, I reviewed code from a young developer.
It was impressive work for a topic he didn’t know beforehand, except on one aspect: every output used System.out.println().
That’s understandable: that’s how Java developers learn to code, just like Python developers do their first tests with print.
But that’s not something that’ll be handy for a live application.
When I started this website, I wanted my personal illustrations to feel handdrawn. After two years, those illustrations were a collection of charts and graphs. There are more precise ways to convey that type of information. SVG is one of them, with a generally lighter footprint and better accessibility, so I went for it.
Read moreIt’s been two months since the last “What’s Up?” post, time to see the main changes since then.
Read moreUp until quite recently, I used LastPass for storing my passwords. The announced changes to the free plan are, however, a big showstopper for me and, like many users, I chose to move away. Still, since my faith in service providers has been (once more) shaken, I’ve looked to an open source that I’ll be able to fully manage.
Read moreIn my not-so-long career, I’ve often been at odds with one of my directors1 about one topic: quality. We’re both of the mind that it’s a necessary thing in our projects but, basically, our perception of what’s “good enough” is different. Here are some thoughts.
Read moreYou may or may not have noticed it, but I try to avoid the terms “developer,” “coder” and “programming” on Keyboard Playing, except maybe when I’m focusing on the activity of writing code. There’s a reason to it: in our field, it’s common to use these words to describe a variety of jobs. Actually, about anyone who writes or edits code may be called a developer.
Read moreThere’s an image I like when I speak about software development: the construction of a house. Like any metaphor, it has limits, but it helps non-technical people understand what their requests mean to us by comparing them with something they can understand.
Read moreSocial and share buttons seem to be a must-have nowadays, but following the official docs for these may not be the best option for an efficient solution.
Read moreRecently, a colleague of mine came with a wide smile and said, “I have a candidate to interview. There’s J2EE on his resume, but he’s too young to have worked with it. I might have, not him.”
That’s a recurring joke among senior Java technicians: it’s not uncommon for candidates to hear J-2-E and write it J2EE when they should simply use JEE. It’s not completely incorrect, but it may cause some confusion.
Read moreKeyboard Playing has been calm for some months in 2020. It was, however, not forgotten. It’s alive again and some changes were made in the last weeks.
Read moreLast year, I posted about the v2.0 of the Download Proxy. At the time, the main event was the change of the technological stack and a restricted set of transformations. Today, I happily publish a version 2.1. Here are the main changes.
Read moreIf you’ve been using Spring for a while, or copy-pasting some web tutorials or examples, you’ve probably put some @Autowired annotations on private fields.
This does work, but it’s not the best way to do it.
As a developer, I’ve had my share of side projects but, being the lone wolf I am, I always worked alone on those. This year, the creative community I’m part of decided on achieving something that would require some work. I thought I had a quite clear vision and decided to manage this project.
Here’s what I take away from it.
Read moreAs I’m preparing for my first attempt at NaNoWriMo, I know I must have my writing software ready. I used Scrivener in the past and know it’s a solution I love to use. My only problem was: my mobility OS is Linux, which Scrivener doesn’t provide support for.
But that’s no longer a problem as Thomas Pletcher proved that the latest betas of Scrivener 3 work with Wine. Here’s how.
Read moreIf you like to deliver clean documents, you probably sometimes display invisible characters in Word.
In such occasions, you may have seen lines or paragraphs ending with ·¶.
Yes, because a document is not only written but also manipulated and changed a number of times, having trailing spaces is not a rare thing.
One of my development reflexes is to trim those, but Word does not provide any tool to do that automatically.
Or does it?
Sometimes, I don’t understand something, so I search the answer and sharing it is natural. Sometimes, I don’t think sharing it will be any use, until I realize that some people, even in my team, struggle with the same thing. This post is in the second category.
If you use NPM regularly, you must have noticed it adds tildes (~) or carets (^) in front of your dependencies' version number.
You may also have noticed it creates a package-lock.json file.
If you don’t know what any of these are, this post will shed some light.
Following the usual rules when writing a dialogue in a piece of fiction makes it so much easier to read. Fortunately, those rules are quite straightforward. Much more so than their French equivalent.
Read moreA few years back, I had problems downloading files I needed in order to work. It’s not uncommon for developers to have higher access rights on their machine, but this almost never applies to the firewall. So, you may have the right to install all software you need and yet still be unable to download it without a two-day-long exchange with a security service located in another city. That’s annoying. And that’s when I came up with the Download Proxy.
Read more