Leadership musings and hackery from the Perl generation...
When delivering messages to people using email, companies and website owners have fallen into a common fallacy about the internet: believing its OK to show contempt for our readers by not caring for their reply. We do this every time we send an email, however important, that comes from noreply@mywebsite.com. Like a number of life’s oddities this doesn’t make sense – let’s look at why and how we can change it.
When placing audio and video elements on a web page I’ve worked on a number of pieces of work where, for one reason or another, clients want to have their media Autoplay. To us nerds it may seem like common sense that Automatically playing media to a visitor is a bad idea for accessibility. The W3C has made this clear with it’s WCAG guidelines – we’re nerds; we care about these kinds of things. It’s worth mentioning that as with most accessibility features though, proper use of Autoplay also does a lot for usability and visitor sanity for the rest of your audience as well.
If you’re developing on the ASP.Net web stack you’ve probably used either the WebForms FileUpload control or the MVC HttpPostedFileBase model binding parameter many times before. On a badly configured website this can create a perfect storm of insecurity potentially exploited by anyone who uploads malicious files. As this very attack can be your website’s undoing let’s take a look at why it’s a problem and what you can do to fix it.
Next Saturday at 9am sharp, I will be first cab off the rank in the developer skills stream at DDD Sydney presenting my talk “A few things developers should know about the internet (but probably don’t)”. I’d love for you to come along and say hello on the day, so if you haven’t already bought tickets, please do from the link above. Sydney has many conferences throughout the year, but few are as straight talking as DDD, with a good range of subjects on not only the Microsoft stack, but general web and development as well – not only how Microsoft would recommend it, but the very people who’ve been in the trenches with you.
Running Apache and IIS on the same web server might seem like sacrilege to some folks, but like a lot of things in life there is a time and a place for everything. I’ve overseen some quite successful deployments that have had the two running side by side on the same machine, and the flexibility that Apache can bring to an application as a value add can be really exciting. For both future keepsake and to share with all of you folk, here is a quick how-to guide so that all you have to do is follow the bouncing ball.
No matter what your chosen career path society places constraints on what is an acceptable amount of interest you are allowed to show to a subject before you become *weird*. People working in IT face this more than most. In my life I have known a lot of really smart people,who are obviously in love with what they are doing, not sharing their excitement with others for fear of being thought of as uncool. However crazy this sounds from the outside one thing is true; they are holding themselves back from success.
I’ve been lucky enough to have access to a brand new Surface 2.0 (Samsung SUR40) recently, and wanted to try my hand at developing for the platform. As with most things, the easiest way to learn something is to set yourself up with a little project – I’m going to build a very simple Image “Attractor” to start. This will allow you to move, resize and rotate images and videos on the screen of the device. The Surface development community appears to be a little cloak and dagger, with very little information being shared; something hopefully I can positively contribute towards changing by documenting my journey.
The "www." prefix in a website's address was originally thought up by Tim Berners-Lee (The creator of the interwebs) to help us differentiate between a website’s address and that of a mail server, FTP, or Gopher server (remember those kiddies?). The world has moved on from gopher servers and the like, but for different reasons has continued using this prefix without much purpose or reason. In the last few years many people have commented on their religious decision either way to support or ditch it. I put it to you: do you www. or not?
Microsoft developers hear a lot about tools that will make them write faster, more efficient, more refactored, more unit tested code all the time. People don’t often talk of tools that help you to visualise your project’s growing code smell though – among other reasons, everyone’s inner sense of pride may be a behind this, however unless you or your employer has forked out the $11,879 odd dollars for Visual Studio Ultimate Edition you don’t have much to go on without more than the basic reporting on Cylcomatic Complexity, Dependency Depth and Class coupling reports that come in the pro and premium editions. These don’t really help you pin point any of your architectural problems that well – something where NDepend proves itself to be a diamond in the rough.
I’ve written about local conferences a few times before, but DDD Sydney is one of my favourites. There are few conferences that are so “For Us By Us” as DDD Sydney as it’s organised by Lewis Benge and contributed to by a whole swath of the local developer community from a number of different user groups, so it’s a great place to come down and meet a number of your local devs, learn something new or take part in the discussions – and for $25 it’s one of the cheapest conference tickets around!