What is the difference, and should we care? — When speaking about dependencies, both terms can be used, sometimes in a (dangerous) interchangeable way. Is React a framework or a library? What about Bootstrap, or Lodash? Both are “packages” after all, right? Sure they are, but they will definitely not have the same impact on your app. Libraries A library…

Where are you talking from? — Naming is one of the most important aspects of programming. It is also one of the most overseen aspect of it (i.e. “let’s make it work with a ‘x’ variable, we’ll choose a better name later”). Maybe this is because there is a distorted conception of programming. What is programming? A common definition…

You don’t want to do that — I should make clear that I made all those mistakes myself at least once, and still do a few of them every once in a while. Not because I am a developer, but because I am human: nobody likes to do some tedious things, nobody likes problems to fix, nobody…

Even developers can’t understand it — A few months ago I wrote an article mentioning the sad rejection of CSS by developers. There are several reasons for that, such as the difficulty to find good tutorials for beginners, but let’s face it: the primary reason for all that is the difficulty to understand the language itself. …

Il y a quelques années déjà, je commençais le développement du prototype de UFO@home, un outil de témoignage visuel inspiré des travaux de… — This post was initially written in french, on February 16th, 2008 This is done now as a first version is available through the Java Web Start system (to install before, which allows to start a Java application that can be downloaded from the Internet) on SourceForge or Java.net. …

A JavaOne, toutes les sessions étaient évaluées. Les Java Cards pendues au cou de chaque personne pénétrant dans la salle les… — This post was initially written in french, on June 6th 2008 I just received the evaluations results, and it is quite satisfying: among the 117 people who attended the S4J session, 57 agreed to evaluate it, as among the first best quarter of JavaOne sessions (4,35–4,95) with a global score…

De retour de San Francisco où je fus invité à la conférence JavaOne 2008, j’éprouve encore un peu le décalage horaire (8 heures quand… — This post was initially written in french, on May 13th 2008 Sunday 12:30 AM (local time): After 10 long hours of flight, the place is about to land on a foggy San Francisco but the airport rejects landing: too much traffic, too low visibility. We are redirected toward Oakland, where we…

Understanding recruiters habits — Two decades ago, recruitment was really an expert job. It required significant searching and identification skills, and only few people were able to do it. Actually candidates were so seldom contacted that they were happy to receive a call. Then came the “Internet bubble” with everybody looking for tech talents…

Set them free, always — Resources (connections, files, memory) are typically non-shared objects. Two clients cannot write in the same file or memory area at the same time or perform concurrent transactions on the same connection. This is a matter of consistency, as concurrent writes may result in lost updates, and even concurrent write vs…