5 Questions Good Web Developers Ask Themselves

5 Questions Good Web Developers Ask Themselves

Posted by Ziaullah on 11:40:00 PM in Science and Technology,

I don’t always ask myself questions, but when I do, I ask these five.

Front-end web developers have a heck of a job to do. It’s their job to make the internet awesome.

Seriously, you know all of the amazing things that you can do online? Things like upvoting pictures of cute puppies, sharing jealousy-inspiring vacation pictures with all of your friends, changing the world in 140 characters or less, becoming an internet sensation in your underwear or learning how to program a self-driving car could not possibly happen if it weren’t for incredible teams of front-end web developers who make the internet the most awesomest place on Earth (or space!).

But what do those front-end developers do all do all day? What questions do they ask themselves as they shape the landscape of the World Wide Web?

1. Is this going to break?

OK, the internet lies to you. You know how online tutorials and lessons (including Udacity’s) make coding look so easy? You see us type, type, type on screen (no typos, of course), press enter and voila! the code works perfectly. That’s because we’re using video editing technology to skip the part where everything is broken and ohmygod why is this $%^)@*$ script not working now!? (King Empire Corp blooper reels might or might not exist. And they might or might not be filled with words the FCC wouldn’t approve…)

Everything breaks. All the time. Good front-end developers are constantly, constantly, constantly testing their code to make sure everything is working the way it should. Errors and bugs are especially a problem for front-end developers because client-side JavaScript often fails silently, meaning there is no nice, clear error message and the only way you know something went wrong is because, well, something doesn’t look right. HTML and CSS bugs almost never produce errors either. Instead, the page just looks weird and it’s your job to hack and slash your way through the HTML and CSS jungle to find the source of the issue.

Front-end developers save themselves time and frustration by testing their code as often as possible.

2. How can I do this better?

Front-end devs encounter lots of speed bumps as they develop websites with features previously thought impossible. Speed bumps represent unnecessary steps or pauses in workflow. You want to go as fast as possible from point A to point B, but for some silly reason there’s a speed bump in the middle of the road despite the fact that there aren’t any children or other cars within hundreds of miles. So what should you do? Flatten speed bumps.

Front-end engineers frequently work with new technology and custom tools. Unlike the streamlined, polished workflows that they create for users, the process of building websites often involves clunky interfaces and repetitive operations. Write code. Save code. Restart server. Open browser. Navigate to site. Open DevTools. Paste script. Type command. See results. Refresh page. Rinse and repeat thirty times a day. Speed bumps aren’t just frustrating, they lead to lots of wasted time.

Good front-end developers think carefully about their workflows and try to smooth out speed bumps whenever they can. They recognize that a few extra minutes spent automating their work or removing unnecessary steps saves a lot of time and frustration in the long run.

3. How will people use this?

All front-end developers create products specifically made to be consumed by people. Other software engineers, who might find themselves building interfaces between application layers or writing kernal code running in the background, deal with perfectly logical computer interfaces. The interface between human and website offers a unique set of challenges.

As such, front-end developers must constantly ask themselves how people will react to their work. Sure, the button you may have just developed represents the pinnacle of well-written HTML, but will a person want to click on it? That’s a completely different challenge.

As front-end developers make websites come to life, they are forced to step back to consider how people, temperamental and impatient as they are, will react and flow through their work. Human focused fields of study like psychology, behavioral sciences, and design theory come into play as front-end developers try to shape and perfect website experiences.

4. What can I do with this?

There’s a massive landscape of front-end development technologies available. You’ve got AngularJS and BackboneJS if you want your websites to follow an MVC model. You can dive into web components if you want to introduce object-oriented principles to your visual components. CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation provide much, much more than just grid systems. And of course there’s the mighty jQuery, which makes DOM manipulation easy.

Once they decide to implement a technology for a project, front-end developers experiment, pore through documentation and get in touch with other developers using the technology in order to eke as much as they can out of it. Building a deep understanding of their technology allows front-end developers to not only build awesome sites but also push the limits of what front-end technology can accomplish.

5. What is this new thing?

Technology changes quickly. WHOA! Whoa! I know. Your mind is blown.

The tools behind the web are evolving just as quickly as the websites built with them. Front-end developers have to stay on top of the latest and greatest technology or risk falling behind.There are many reasons to learn new tech. There’s a good chance it’ll lead to performance boosts for your websites. You may find tools that let you probe into your sites in ways you hadn’t imagined before. You may find tech that simplifies your codebase or your workflow. Or it might open up new opportunities to simply make better websites.

Constantly experimenting with new technologies is the only way to stay current. The good news is that the internet is filled with free resources to help you learn new front-end tools (**cough**King Empire Corp!**cough**). Hear about something cool? Give it a shot because you never know how it may help your career

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Earth Quake in Pakistan

Earth Quake in Pakistan

Posted by Ziaullah on 8:34:00 AM in Science and Technology, Videos,

A 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck major cities of Pakistan, including the northern areas on Monday, leaving at least 200 dead and more than 1,000 injured due to building collapses, landslides, stampedes and other quake related incidents.

The earthquake struck the country at 2:09pm today (Monday).

The death toll could climb in the coming days because communications are down in much of the remote mountainous region.

Forty minutes after the first earthquake, an aftershock of 4.8 magnitude was reported in the same area. Aftershocks are expected to continue in the affected areas.

While the magnitude of today’s earthquake is close to the devastating quake of 2005, the epicentre of the 2005 quake was shallow, causing more destruction, said analyst Faheem Zaman.

The earthquake in 2005 was at a depth of 26 km, while today’s earthquake was at a depth of 196 km.

Here We Got A Video Of This Earth Quake

Earth Quake from Ziaullah Khan on Vimeo.

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Study says most "black hat" hackers don't believe what they do is wrong

Study says most "black hat" hackers don't believe what they do is wrong

Posted by Ziaullah on 8:21:00 PM in My Articals, Science and Technology,

A recent study has come up with some interesting numbers regarding the way black hat hackers think of themselves and thier arguably malicious activities. A password security software company known as Thycotic conducted a survey during this year's Black Hat 2014 that says 86% of hackers do not believe they will ever have to face repercussions for their actions.

While many of them believe they are above the law, over 50% of those surveyed said they aren't in it for the money, but rather just for the fun of it. Only 18% said they were motivated by financial gains and 29% claimed to be hacktivists driven by exposing the truth regarding various issues. Just recently a group of hacktivists attacked the St. Louis Police Department and leaked dispatch tapes regarding the Michael Brown case.

Thycotic says many of attacks being conducted still make use of tactics that were used 10 years ago or more. Nearly all of the hackers the company interviewed said that basic phishing and spoofing techniques are still effective, but 47% say users are learning to avoid these techniques.

Whatever the motivation and tactics may be, according to Thycotic the particular 127 different individuals interviewed do not believe what they are doing is wrong. However, they don't feel invincible either, 88% of these hackers believe their own data and privacy is vulnerable to attacks from fellow hackers.

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Dark side of the moon

Dark side of the moon

Posted by Ziaullah on 6:08:00 PM in My Articals, Science and Technology,

A camera aboard the NASA satellite has captured the dark side of the moon. This series of images were taken from NASA's deep space climate observatory and showed a view of the far side of the moon as it's lit by the sun and moves in front of the Earth. The images show the moon moving across the Pacific Ocean towards North America. Its far side is revealed, showing a crater.

Observers on Earth only see one side of the moon because it's tidally locked to our planet, meaning its orbital period is the same as its rotation around its axis.

The images of the far side of the moon weren't seen by humankind until a Soviet mission in 1959. While it monitors solar winds, NASA's observatory will capture the dark side of the moon twice each year.

Difficult words: observatory (a special building from which scientists watch the moon, stars, planets and other things in space) observer (a person who observes – watches something), tidal lock (when a side of a moon or a planet always faces another moon or planet), orbital (relating to orbit – the regularly repeated elliptical course of an object), axis (an imaginary line about which something rotates).

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Do You Know The Real History Of Software Engineering

Do You Know The Real History Of Software Engineering

Posted by Ziaullah on 4:40:00 PM in My Articals, Science and Technology,

Do You Know The Real History of Computer Software Engineering? Today i will tell you about history of software engineering.

So What is Software Engineering/History?

The history of computer science, software engineering, and the World Wide Web is rich, fascinating, and quite surprising if you haven't gotten into it before. It begins in a time when computer programs were essentially just instructions to manipulate a physical device and carries through several key turning points that led to first the commercialization and finally the consumerization of computing technology.

Here, we'll present a very brief overview of some of the major milestones and send you to more reputable sources for the good stuff :)
Hardware and the First Software Engineers

Back in the late '50's and early '60's, programmers didn't even interact directly with computing devices. They delivered their programs by hand to technicians and then picked up the results hours later after the programs were batch processed with many others. Thus early tasks were typically geared towards mathematical computation, which required a very limited feedback loop.

You've probably heard of the first widely used programming language -- IBM's Fortran -- which was released in 1957 for mathematical and scientific computing. Another, Cobol, was released by the US Department of Defense in 1962 for use in business applications.

But the transition to using a time-sharing model instead of batch processing for running programs was perhaps most significant of all because it led to a rapid growth in computing applications. Unfortunately, projects consistently failed to deliver reliably, on time and on budget. Practitioners were forced to admit that they lacked the proper best practices to implement and produce software at scale commercially. They called it the "Software Crisis".

It was clear that designing complex software systems would require better tools and approaches than were available at the time so a conference was convened in 1968 to find a solution. This is really where the term "Software Engineering" found its roots. The conference sought to apply the best practices of project management and production -- already used in traditional engineering disciplines -- to software. As a result, they produced a report which defined the foundations of software engineering.

Over the following decades, the discipline of programming saw a familiar tension between the scientific thinking of academia, which tended to seek idealized solutions to engineering challenges, and the practical needs of an industry faced with real-life time and cost pressures (and bloated code bases). The early 70's saw the emergence of key ideas in systems thinking which allowed engineers to break these giant projects into modular (and much more manageable) pieces that communicated via interfaces.

Another tectonic shift occurred in the early 1980s with the move away thinking of data as just a continuously changing stream and towards the idea of persisting discrete "objects" which could interact and hold independent state. More concretely, that allowed developers to create and interact with the almost-physical objects of the graphical user interface (GUI) like menus and icons and windows. You're probably familiar with the derived term "object-oriented programming".

The decades leading up to the present day were marked by astounding increases in computing power.

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