Everyone who is a regular Smashing Magazine reader will know that we have a traditional habit of regularly researching the latest resources, tools and services out there on the Web, as productivity is a crucial asset of professional Web designers and developers. We could, and should, all integrate workflow optimization into our working practices.
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Keeping each screen focused reduced confusion.
Design guidelines aren’t one size fits all. Sometimes you can improve a process by breaking a few rules. The trick is knowing which rules to break for a particular project.
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Swagger is a specification and complete framework implementation for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services. The overarching goal of Swagger is to enable client and documentation systems to update at the same pace as the server. The documentation of methods, parameters and models are tightly integrated into the server code, allowing APIs to always stay in sync. With Swagger, deploying managing, and using powerful APIs has never been easier.
Increasingly these days, when people get sick, they're announcing it to the world using Twitter. It might seem self-indulgent, but it's also a practice that may revolutionize public health research.
In an unprecedented study, Johns Hopkins computer scientists Mark Dredze and Michael J. Paul have analyzed 1.6 million health-related tweets to uncover health trends that are consistent with official government data, plus new findings about self-medication, localized disease outbreaks, and more. They collected 2 billion public tweets posted between May 2009 and October 2010 and used a new proprietary algorithm called ATAM+ to sift through the ones related to health by using keywords linked to various ailments, symptoms, and treatments.
Main tain ing con tact is key to a healthy rela tion ship with clients. While the project has come to an end, that doesn’t mean the work is done.
Blogs and newslet ters with valu able con tent and advice are a great way to remind clients of your exper tise and encour age return busi ness.
Pick up the phone and give them a call. Go out of your way to send them a tweet, direct mes sage or per son al email with infor ma tion about use ful tools, tips, and sug ges tions. Be their go-to advi sor when it comes to any thing and every thing web.
An Evans Data sur vey of 1,200 devel op ers, 400 of which are enter prise devel op ers, found that 56% of enter prise devel op ers already use schema less data bas es and 63% plan to use one in the next two years. Adop tion is par tic u lar ly strong in the APAC countries.
Among the gen er al devel op er com mu ni ty, only 43% of respon dents plan to use NoSQL in the next two years.
Leave Ego at the Door
One of the hardest steps to take towards being selfless in development is to not let yourself get in the way of making your apps better. You put a little of yourself into everything you make, but it’s extremely important to not let your infatuation with your first build lead you to viciously defend it like some kind of maternal nesting animal.
The first step towards becoming more selfless in development is to forget your ego and remember your purpose: to build applications that solve problems and do what they were meant to do. Everything else will ultimately be an extension of this concept.
The way you respond to criticism and feedback is a good gauge of how closely you cling to your ego. When people can’t figure out basic features or functionality of your application, it’s easy to get frustrated having to explain why you built something the way you did. Ego can get in the way here; many developers take on a condescending role as they explain simple functionality to “lesser” life forms. The important thing to remember here is that if those close to you (coworkers, friends, bosses, etc.) can’t figure out how to use your application, chances are the end user will have an even more difficult time. Learn to take any and all feedback gratefully and respectfully; you need to foster an environment where criticism is a positive thing, another chip off the stone block that will one day become a masterpiece sculpture.
Another indicator of whether ego is getting in the way is how much you resist change. When new features are required or new technology is mandated, the easiest but least helpful reaction is to search for reasons why these changes aren’t as critical as everyone seems to think they are.
Finally, remember the hard truth that you have an extremely limited perspective as a developer. As much as you might think you can place yourself in the shoes of your users, it’s extremely difficult. In fact, it’s impossible. There are companies and job titles dedicated solely to figuring out what users are thinking. That’s not really your job, but realizing that you don’t have all the information is a step towards taking yourself out of the way of progress.
Many people focus purely on the speed of search, often neglecting the quality of the results produced by the system. In most cases, people test out some small set of queries, eyeball the top five or ten and then declare the system good enough. In other cases, they have a suite of test queries to run, but they are at a loss for how to fix any issues that arise.
To solve this relevance problems takes a systematic approach, a set of useful tools and a dose of patience. This article will outline several approaches and tools. The patience part will come from knowing the problem is being looked at in a pragmatic way that will lead to a solution instead of a dead end.
I'm working on Lucene integration and thought this might be a good guide when improving the relevancy of the test results. ATM I'm still on the level of 'good enough' and came across this write while searching for Lucene scoring.
