Short-term benefits in the Information Service business

It’s a fact that companies and their management have money in mind. However, they’re many ways to achieve this goal. In my short career as an employee, I’ve been faced with two strategies, the short-term one and the long-term one. Here are some examples I’ve been directly confronted with: A manager sends a developer on an uninteresting mission a long way from home. At first, he tells the developer it won’t last more than 3 months but in effect, it lasts more than

elearning

The cost and value of knowledge

I was a student in France when I discovered the Internet and the World Wide Web. At that time, I didn’t realize the value of the thing, even though I taught myself HTML from what was available at the time (even if I don’t remember the sites - they probably have disappeared into Limbo). When I began my professional life,  a project director of mine joked about the difference between the developer and the expert: 'The expert knows about the cabinet where the documentation is'. Some ti

blog jekyll

Drupal 7 to Jekyll, an epic journey

There’s a recent trend in blogging that consists of dropping PHP platforms such as WordPress and Drupal in factor of static HTML pages generated when needed. Static blogs have many advantages over PHP engines: They’re much faster since there’s no computation overhead at runtime for composing the rendered pageThere’s no security issues regarding SQL injectionFinally, generating the site removes the need for a staging area with possibly mismatched configurations morevaad

devoxx

Devoxx 2012 - Final day

Devoxx last day, I only slept 2 hours during the previous night. Need I really say more? Clustering your applications with Hazelcast by Talip Ozturk. Hazelcast is an OpenSource product used by many companies (even Apple!). HashMap is a no-thread safe key-value implementation. If you need thread safety, you’ll use ConcurrencyHashMap. When you need to distribute your map against distributed JVMs, you use Hazel.getMap() but the rest is the same as for the Map interface (but not interface itsel

devoxx

Devoxx 2012 - Day 3

-- the last evening was a little hard on me, shall we say. I begin the day at noon, which suits me just fine -- Securing the client-side by Mike West If you want the largest possible audience, chances are you’ll use HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Native hasn’t (yet) the same traction as those traditional technologies. Business logic is slowly moving from those big backends toward browsers. A prerequisite to anything is to send data securely, using HTTPS. There’s no reason today

coursera scala

My view on Coursera's Scala courses

I’ve spent my last 7 weeks trying to follow Martin Odersky’s Scala courses on the Coursera platform. In doing so, my intent was to widen my approach on Functional Programming in general, and Scala in particular. This article sums up my personal thoughts about this experience. Time, time and time First, the courses are quite time-consuming! The course card advises for 5 to 7 hours of personal work a week and that’s the least. Developers familiar with Scala will probably tak