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Terms of Service: do you read them?
May 15th, 2014
Boring legal texts. Yes, they make it boring on purpose, so you won’t dare reading it and just consent to give away your first-born. If only you knew what kind of stuff goes in there, you’d start reading too. Here are some examples of clauses I found that are unacceptable, followed by my personal comments. […]
What you need to know to become a speaker
April 26th, 2014
You don’t have to be super awesome to be a speaker. All the speakers you see at conferences are not rock stars. Most of them are just normal people who submitted an abstract and were deemed good enough to talk about some topic. There is plenty of room for someone who is starting out. It’s […]
For whom should you vote?
April 6th, 2014
No, I won’t tell you who is the better candidate in the upcoming Quebec elections. I just want to give you some perspective. Are you able to reduce your expenses while at the same time buying a new car and a perfect house? If you had the choice to do that by putting everything on […]
Inappropriate April’s Fools pranks
April 1st, 2014
If you think that someone who is offended at a joke has no sense of humor, I invite you to watch this scene from the movie The Lives of Others. The setting is East Germany, Stasi headquarters. Please watch before you read further. You probably all agree that this prank was cruel. Why? Because the […]
How to kill creativity, part 1
March 31st, 2014
Edit: I recommend reading this article first and then watching the video afterwards. It will make more sense in this order. I first viewed this enlightening lecture on creativity by John Cleese (Monty Python) a few years ago. Since then, I saw an incredible progress in my problem-solving skills and generated countless creative ideas. John […]
Unit Testing by Example @ ConFoo
March 2nd, 2014
I gave a talk last week at ConFoo. It was very well received and I had some amazing feedback. One person told me that he has been trying to write tests for two years but never had any success. With the advice gathered in my talk, he was able to write a few tests and […]
Raise the red flag
January 29th, 2014
All project failures can be prevented. There are countless reasons. Some technical and some non-technical. Some internal and some external. Some we can control and some we cannot. But there is one thing that they all have in common: we can raise the red flag. With enough experience, we can see things coming before it’s […]
Frameworks for everyone
January 8th, 2014
I recently read an article about the ecosystem of PHP frameworks. First, I don’t understand why the author puts Aura and Symfony in different categories. Symfony can be used standalone components or as a full-stack framework. Additional components are very easy to install through Composer. The way to describe the frameworks in that article is […]
What are business goals and why should you care?
December 31st, 2013
Business is for the management, programming is for the programmers, right? Wrong! Many aspects of the business must be understood by the programmer for the success of the project. How can you write a good accounting system if you don’t know a thing about accounting? The days where a programmer simply translated flowcharts into code […]
Software review: The Hit List
December 5th, 2013
If you’re a Mac user and seeking an easy way to manage your to-do list, I strongly recommend The Hit List. Here are some of the feature that I like most. Multitude of shortcuts Start entering a new task by simply hitting Enter on your keyboard. Once you typed the task name, hit Tab to […]