The blog

Last week, I posted about the environmental footprint of digital. Most of it may have seemed pretty hardware considerations—and several companies or associations fight for more modular, repairable and globally speaking sustainable electronics.

Now, you're willing to help, but you can't see how you can make a difference because work on software exclusively and have no say about the hardware that it'll run on? This post will give you some hints about how to include these considerations into the design of your application.

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Last month, I had the opportunity to talk about a topic I hold dear: how to make our job part of something sustainable. This is something I've planned to share and I thought the period of the new year's resolutions may be a great time to do it.

So, before going any further, let's begin with why the idea of sustainable development should even be a question in the digital field.

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The end of the year is a good time for assessments. A good one is, “what have I learned this year?” IT is a field that keeps moving, and we need to stay up to date if we don't want to drown. In our culture, most of our knowledge is stored and shared through writing, so a part of my question becomes, “what have I read that was enlightening this year?”

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I've discussed with several people, this year. Technical leads, technical supervisors, architects… You get the gist. Among those discussions, I heard a recurring complaint, which I previously feared to be my demanding nature expressing itself.

But no! Other people noticed it too, and it basically boils down to something like this: we're facing a new generation of developers, who like to do things fast and don't care much about how things work deep down, and we're living in an era proposing a new framework to help them go faster and not understand. The two together won't make for great developers. Good developers, maybe, but not great ones.

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We developers often spend a great deal of attention choosing our tools: computer, editors… Yet, we often fail to see the gain of choosing an appropriate font.

Here is some food for thoughts on this topic, and some of my favorite coding fonts.

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More than once in my—no-so-long—career, I've had to work on machines that were not appropriate to my development needs. These were most often the result of company policies designed to reduce the cost of machines to a reasonable level, but that doesn't take the specific case of developers into account. In the (not-so-)long run, it's actually often money sent down the drain nonetheless.

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Many people I know have abandonned RSS and Atom feeds and prefer to use social network to keep up-to-date. For those who haven't, I know no system is perfect but I can think of at least one frequent irritation I don't want to reproduce on this site.

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I always wished I had an artistic talent of some sort. Some friends once diagnosed me to be a “latent artist.” The truth however is that I've never found myself any sort of skill, but maybe that's because skill comes from hard work.

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This website has been dormant for a few years, now—3.5 years, actually. Today, I wish to resuscitate it, and hopefully see it a bit more alive than in the past.

This first post is the occasion to introduce Keyboard Playing and what I hope it'll become in the coming weeks. It may also explain why you haven't found the post your search engine pointed you to.

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