One of the ways through which Apple has posted new records in their services revenue is by having you buy a developer account and then forcing you to make other people buy developer accounts. How does that work? Well, let's turn this around and say that you're not a developer in any shape or form. Your job is, I don't know, geologist o...

Back at the day job, we have your usual PHP code base that runs a lot of the business and we needed an upgrade from 5 to 7. Business involves a variety of small to large services plus different one-time projects that may require maintenance. So, upgrading had to be a gradual process of isolating a domain that could be upgraded, making/...

Playable on-demand broadcasts (podcasts) are a simple case of people using open technologies to come together over a new medium that should be accessible to everyone. They are my favorite example not only of how useful RSS feeds can be but also of the evolution towards audio files that are small, sound good and can be easy to catalog. ...

It's an understatement to say that humans are complicated creatures. How we function depends on more than facts and feelings. We also respond to what is left unsaid and we act according to how we imagine that we'll be perceived by others. Even without other people, we still don't exist in a vacuum, inevitably we are influenced by time ...

If we could start counting mobile apps in the stores, we would probably see that many of them are, first and foremost, a branding exercise that the open web cannot satisfy. Institutions want you to have their icon on your pocket and to push notifications into your lock screen. And given how the adoption of the internet has been based o...

One of the best things about JavaScript nowadays is that you can just type "MDN" next to whatever you want to know in your search box and you will get very nice documentation from the Mozilla Developer Network. However, if you go through Array.prototype.reduce(), your initial impression may be "I guess I understand how it works, but wh...

About half a dozen years ago, I was between jobs and had a whole month of August to invest in whatever I wanted to do. So I decided that some of that time should go into learning some coding tool, some skill that could pay off in the long term. I chose Vim for several reasons, the main one being ergonomics. For me, this is the question...

Despite having its flaws, real-time chat has become an essential part of my day job. In particular, the mix of features Slack offers was there for us when we needed them. However, it's software is aimed at corporations, specially in terms of pricing. Small companies frequently need to involve outside contacts and getting priced per use...

Adjacent problems that weigh you down as you tackle some tech challenges are often as important as that specific tech. I have a PHP upgrade story from version 5 to 7 that illustrates this, showing just another way legacy code can cause issues for years. But it's not really about PHP code, as the codebase was mostly compatible to make t...

“Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet.” Douglas Adams Computers became a passion for me since I got a ZX Spectrum as a kid, which doesn't mean I'm very good with them, but exploring their huge potential is a thing I've enjoyed doing for some decades now. The same thing goes for the internet. For me, netwo...