From the outside, writing code can seem closer to the practice of mathematics than something like painting or sculpture. Not so. Developers are inherently creative types – driven by the desire to build out their visions, taking an idea and turning it into a tangible thing of beauty, utility, and even mystery. This is nowhere more obvious than with game developers.

Simple benchmarks show that the upcoming Vert.x 2 Framework with Yoke as the middleware layer can provide better performance than Express JS on Node.JS

Web usability is something that most online publishers spend time on, but few spend enough time on. Design and usability – like traffic building or social media marketing – need to be an ongoing task, rather than something considered when launching your website and then forgotten about. Over the years, new features get added, you tweak this, you tweak that, and before you know it, your site’s becoming visually confusing.

Singletons have some use cases, but it is generally considered poor form to use them. They are especially bothersome when you start trying to unit test your code. They effectively create global state, and shared state is a real pain to manage when you are writing unit tests.

None of us would be very good developers if we never had arguments about The Best Way to Do Things. But I've had enough silly arguments about tabs-versus-spaces to last me the rest of my life. When should we stop arguing and start writing code?

Working with the Arduino is usually seen as a hardware problem, but what about the software? This book aims to educate you about the C language as used by the Arduino.

You have heard people say it: “App X is a good app”. You didn’t think about it at the time, but it begs the question. What makes a good Android app? How can you determine if the app you are writing will be good or not? It seems like a subjective thing but there are some areas that all apps could focus on that would make them better. In this article, I will explore the factors that you need to consider when creating an Android application to ensure that you also end up on the list of “good” apps, instead of the other way around.

Joel Cochran experiments with a few standing desk strategies and settles on a desk that moves up and down. You should check out the pics. It's pretty cool.

Measuring something meaningful is hard, so let’s measure something that is meaningless but easy. Like your hours at work!

From the OpenStack summit comes a lightning talk presentation on an implementation within the OpenStack IaaS software using the ZeroMQ message broker and Grizzly, the NIO Event simplifying framework.

I’ve started work on some new videos and this time it’s all about Agile Estimating, Planning and Contracts. This is the obvious next step having completed Scrum101, and I’m apply some of the lesson that I learned.

The moments when excitement builds throughout the whole team at the delight of discovery and creativity are precious. These moments feel like play rather than work and they breed openness and courage. So what conditions must exist for these moments to happen? Here’s some ideas...

I’m thrilled to announce the availability of CloudHub in Europe. With this announcement, we’re extending the industry-leading CloudHub platform to address the needs of our European customers with dedicated computing resources located in the European Union.

After reading Tao of Twitter and Return on Influence written by Mark, and Stanford’s reputation, my expectations were high.

Presenting content of varied size can often be tricky. For example, displaying names of metro stations with fixed font size, and it always is a fixed font size, can result in a part of the text being clipped off. Or if you use text wrapping, a large block of text can extend way beyond your intended design.