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.
A 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.
Last week, Tony asked me about the technological stack behind my website.
It’s a subject I wanted to write about once the website was stable, but I keep tinkering with it.
As such, it’s far from finished and I still have many ideas, but let’s talk about it now nonetheless.
When you develop a Java program that accesses a database, you’re likely to need a JDBC driver.
When that database is an Oracle product, you keep that O for OJDBC.
For years, I just used the version an architect had selected.
Then, I became the architect and I had to understand which version to choose.
It’s not that complicated, just not really well explained.
Let me try to contribute…
To conclude this series about sustainable IT, I wanted to write a bit about some impacts of software creation that we rarely think about.
We’ve all seen movies where a mad scientist creates something that they think is awesome until it escapes their control and threatens life as we know it.
Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab.
We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.
David Cronenberg
That’s especially true about us software creators: we innovate, create new technologies for thousands or millions of people.
If we’re not careful about those creations, they may transform the whole society, though not necessarily in the way we assumed they would.
Every project we hear about these days seems to be about data—or artificial intelligence, which is mainly the same.
Data is not something new, but the enthusiasm about it is growing rapidly.
People are not always aware of how much a website or an application is collecting about them, pushing legislators to write laws about what a company can and can’t do with a user’s data.
Why is that the problem of software creators?
Well, the mere amount of data we now collect could never be processed in a lifetime without our digital skills.
That makes us at least partly responsible for what is done with it.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.