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Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.

Ibrahim Diallo

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2013

October

Human readable sitemap

Human readable sitemap

A site map is the list of pages accessible on a website. It is mostly made for crawlers to make it easier to find pages on your website. Sitemaps are written in XML and follow a set of standards that can be found here. It is pretty easy to build following these sets of rules. Adding a style to your sitemap can make it legible not just to bots but to your fellow humans.

180 days of blogging

180 days of blogging

Hopefully this will be my only post about blogging. The whole point of starting this blog was to improve my writing. Hoping that some strangers will find a place in their heart to tolerate my bad writing and look beyond the obvious mistakes and understand the message I am trying to pass. Not that many strangers for the moment but the few that come along did have an opinion. As hurtful as some can be I have come to build friendships out of others. 180 days went by so fast. I still couldn't pinpoint exactly how much I improved until I went to page one and started reading.

September

Employee or contractor, you are your own boss. Act like it

Employee or contractor, you are your own boss. Act like it

Being your own boss is a little overrated. At least in the sense that you have your own company and get to do whatever you want. If you have a successful business then you know that that's not how it works. You work longer hours, you make tough decisions, (like firing people), you have to deal with customers directly and do many more stressful things. But I am not writing this to tell you how to handle your small business. This is about being your own boss at while being an employee.

Now that you are experienced, help others

Now that you are experienced, help others

I get frustrated when I hear people saying how much SO (StackOverflow) sucks. The SO team works really hard to improve the way people close irrelevant questions, but in the process I can't help but notice how newcomers are treated. If their question is not "perfectly" written it takes only a couple of seconds for it to be closed and sent to oblivion. The other thing is when a beginner asks a question, instead of getting help, he will receive a torrent of ridiculing comments and that will refrain him from ever asking another question. We all had to start somewhere but when you are experienced enough you have to give others the chance to get there too.

Your code is bad, but good enough for production

Your code is bad, but good enough for production

Most of the code you will write will look stupid when you comeback some times later to review it. Just like when you write a nice article, you know when you re-read it the next day you will find lots of mistakes. But this shouldn't be a reason not to deploy your code to production.

Reviving the blink tag

Reviving the blink tag

All the web browsers worth mentioning have depricated the blink tag. On Mozilla docs they say: Blinking text is frowned upon by several accessibility standards and the CSS specification allows browsers to ignore the blink value. Not that I have ever needed to use the blink tag but today I am going to show you how to bring it back to life.

August

Disorganized learning

Disorganized learning

There are different strategies to learn something new. With a book, some people perform best with the step by step pattern going from chapter 1 to 12, others jump straight to the section they need, and some others ditch the book entirely and jump in to the problem only to find that they actually need a book or some way to acquire knowledge. I fit best in the third group. When it comes to learning I am always in a hurry. A few years ago when I was still in school, I was frustrated with the pace at which we were going in class. I did slow down eventually eventually but this had lead me to learn things in a very disorganized way.

How about some positive detesting.

How about some positive detesting.

Sometimes I read blog posts that I completely disagree with. Sometimes the post is actually good, but the comments offend me so much that you can't go to bed without answering. I want to give them a piece of my mind. Tell the author he is an idiot. However I am starting to realize that you can learn a thing or two even from the thing you hate the most.

Ubuntu Edge campaign ends at $12.8 million

Ubuntu Edge campaign ends at $12.8 million

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It saddens me a little that the new Ubuntu Edge Project did not reach it's goal of $32 million but it didn't come as a surprise. It is a considerable amount of money and the campaign was most successful in the first few days. However the bar for the future of smartphones has been set.

Filter your user feed back before reading it

Filter your user feed back before reading it

Has someone ever told you that your product sucks? Has a customer cancelled his service because he found no use of it? Did you release your product to get feedback and your feelings were hurt? Believe it or not that's what people do and it's actually a good thing. That's the signal you will use to improve your product.

JS Tip of the day

Improving your JavaScript Performance

Computers are getting faster. Mobile devices are catching up too. Browsing the web on your phone no longer needs to be an inferior experience. But despite all t…

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