Worth reading if you work on or with APIs at any level.
programming
All That’s Programmed is Not Code
We’re all programmers now. We all have to decide what to post next, what to point to next, what to launch next. Is there a skill in dreaming up Must-See Thursday nights, or in establishing a season of Shakespeare or even in deciding what’s on the special list at the restaurant? I think there is.
This is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over these last few years working at a high-tech media company. Crafting, combining and scheduling content is just as important as, and not that different from, writing code and designing interfaces.
If your work hits the screen, you’re programming at some level.
ProgrammableWeb
A “database of over 2000 open web APIs and thousands of applications people have built with them “
Branches in Space, Time and Code
For anyone involved in development, whether for the Web or a computing platform, Jeff Atwood’s entry, Software Branching and Parallel Universes provides an excellent description of branches and their importance within a version control system and the larger software development cycle.
Perhaps the most accessible way to think of branches is as parallel universes. They’re places where, for whatever reason, history didn’t go quite the same way as it did in your universe. From that point forward, that universe can be slightly different– or it can be radically and utterly transformed. Like the Marvel comic book series What If?, branching lets you answer some interesting and possibly even dangerous “what if” questions with your software development.
Using the concept of parallel universes and a healthy smattering of comic book industry practices, Jeff presents a very readable case to utilize the power of branching more often than many of us do.
On Balance and Layers
Jeff Croft has posted a very interesting article, The new layers of web development, presenting a view of the Web development landscape that’s been simmering in the back of my head, but that I’ve never been able to articulate in any coherent manner. Ultimately, my view that balance is good, all the more so when developing in the real world of corporations large and small, is based on discussions such as the one that has formed in the comments of the article.
HTML isn’t built for purity. So we might as well stop saddling it with those expectations. When the “pure” structure is stored somewhere else, the markup is just a translation. Use the best-available language to capture the essence of the structure in a medium-appropriate presentation. And if some of the subtler semantic nuances get lost in translation, well that just comes with the territory.
Damn right!