Implements Developer {

It’s not a secret that I’m a fan of agile methods in general with a bias towards lean/kanban. Recently a friend who wanted to start on the agile path asked me about my experiences about common pitfalls and proven ‘good’ paths - and while I said to him that agile is not a set of stone-engraved commandmends rather a way of thinking, there actually are some golden rules to follow…

I’m still getting a lot of visits on my old 2010 post about top software development trends  - so I guess there is interest in this topic. I feel many of my points were fair in that post and many still stand, but the additions from the last years are clearly missing.

Here’s the list of new technology trends to follow based on my experience and prediction:

I strongly believe that every web developer should have at least a basic knowledge about SEO. Let me introduce you your next best SEO/SERP friend: the Meta Description tag. While it’s probably (technically) the easiest part of your SEO plan, there are guidelines and best practices.

http://coedit.me/

We developers are the masters of an ever-changing field. What programming is today usually isn’t the same as programming tomorrow. IT is improving, changing, trends arise and die, new languages, new platforms are born, better solutions come forth for old problems. We need to keep up with the changes and also constantly improve ourselves. This is not optional, this is crucial.

Below you can find a few tips which will help you walk the line, become a better developer.

Subtitle : A case study on why you should use HTTPS for all sites you have an account on.

So you want to know how to steal someone’s facebook identity. How to impersonate the poor victim. How to post embarrassing status updates, pictures in his/her name. Naughty, aren’t we? Let’s view this as a tech challenge instead, forget the nasty things we could do with it. This howto touches basic online security issues and some networking internals. Prepare for the journey, fasten your seatbelts.

Concurrency is a hard topic in programming with many advanced concepts. We love libraries and solutions which help us during our everyday simple tasks. The ‘parallel’ gem is one of these - well, gems -. You can find it at github . The author’s own description:

Run any code in parallel Processes(> use all CPUs) or Threads(> speedup blocking operations).Best suited for map-reduce or e.g. parallel downloads/uploads.

Let’s see some simple example of its usage.

Samurais are cool, but why? Is it that they wield sharp swords? No, it’s because they act cool. They act cool-headed, professional. They decide in the fraction of a second and they always get through their ways. They are zen warriors.

What is feature hell and how to escape it? Have you ever been on a project that just never seemed to get done because tons of features were planned (and added as the project went)? Well, my friend, then you’ve walked through feature hell. Feature hell is implementing features that will be rarely used, are not crucial and don’t deliver (much) customer value. Moreover these features can easy lead to overcomplication of the product, resulting in bad user experience and much worse maintainability. See the wikipedia entry for feature creep .

I’m sure you’ve been in the situation you had to test some ideas quickly, but irb itself was not enough because the code was too complicated for a simple run-while-typing scenario, so you’ve created your Nth test.rb and ran ruby test.rb for the gazillionth time. You must have wondered if there’s a better way. Aye. There is. It’s called interactive_editor and it’s a gem. In both meanings :)