Over the past few years as a Software Engineer, I’ve worked on several Enterprise grade projects. That means tight, ridiculous deadlines on our part. When that happens, no one, QA leads included, cares about quality as long as your code is in the code base on time. No, the regret comes later when all hell break loose.
Once I worked with a guy who checked in some half-cooked code just to close the issue for then before it sets the alarm bell ringing within. However, that particular piece of code completely went on to run for hours and blew up in our face when the app went live. By then a slew of modules were built over this, and we (cough I cough) had to revisit it later on, make numerous changes to the design before that flow was usable. In this process we wasted several thousand dollars which could have been avoided if we had some sort of process in place. Sadly, most of the software world works the same way.
Big Deal! Hire a performance guy and optimize the DB performance, some might suggest. As valid as the idea is, not all bottlenecks are I/O related, though traditionally this is where most applications fail. It could be due to a poor coding as well or lack of sufficient hardware power. NewRelic is a service which analyses these issues and help you optimize your product. Does it work? Join me after the jump to find out.
Most of us have a lot we need to do each day. We need a way to record everything that needs to be done, and be reminded with our tasks are due. In the past, people would have used a diary or a notepad, but nowadays we need something more sophisticated to keep up with our bustling lives.
For a while now, I have been looking for the best app for this, and while there’s many nice ones, I never could find the perfect app for me. That is, until a few weeks ago I discovered Cloudship, an app which looked as good as it performed — for me this was the perfect application.
Two weeks on and I’m using Cloudship everyday to manage and organize my everyday life. Read on to find out where Cloudship can fit into your everyday life.
Our sponsor this week is Online Logo Maker, a new, free web tool created to help people create logos, without the need of design skills or expensive software.
All you’ll need is a browser with Flash player installed, and you can quickly put together a basic logo using any of their 200+ included symbols or your own image. You can move, rotate, or resize anything, add shadows, and set any object’s location. You can then add text with a variety of included fonts to make your branding more personalized.
It’s a simple tool that helps you make a basic logo online. Check out the Online Logo Maker tutorial for more info on its features before you get started.
Go Try It Out!
It’s easy to take the Online Logo Maker for a spin and see if it’ll work for your needs. Just head over to their site, click the link on the bottom of the page to try it out, then signup for free with your email address, Twitter, or Facebook account to keep using it. If you only need a simple logo, it’s a quick online tool that just might fit your needs.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” is the question your Twitter account answers.
Opinions, experiences, current geographic location and ability to find hilarious links are what set one tweeter apart from the next. The platform itself evolved from a simple ‘status update’ tool to a flourishing ecosystem of people interacting, sharing and discovering.
As with any ecosystem there are those on top and those at the bottom. The higher you are the more active followers and influence you’ll have. This is a fairly useless observation for those who use Twitter to find news and check up on friends. But for people who use Twitter to interact with a community, market their product or service or research a segment of people, analyzing a Twitter account is a top priority.
Here’s a few tools that’ll will check out your Twitter, tell you what’s going on in the world and how much power you hold in it. (more…)
When my mother gifted me a copy of Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 a few weeks ago, I felt weird holding reading material in my hands. I suddenly realized that most of the reading I did through 2012 was on screens, and consisted mainly of blog posts and articles online. While I’m not happy that my balance of reading literature and non-fiction is totally out of whack, I now understand that reading online is undeniably a big part of my life.
That said, it’s great to have tools to keep track of what you read on the web — I subscribe to RSS feeds aplenty using Google Reader, save stuff for later with Pocket, and have set up a recipe with IFTTT to push links from my favorited tweets to Pocket as well. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a community of fellow fans of longform content, to share new things to read with? Enter Readingly.
If you use Facebook, chances are you’ve written about what’s going on in your life, RSVP’ed for events, liked your favorite groups, posted photos, and more. You might have your education, employment, relationships, religion, and favorite quirky quotes listed for all the world to see. If you’ve tagged photos with location and people, you’ll have quite a clear record online of the people you spend time with and the places you’ve been. Or, you might just have a history full of spamming your friends for help growing carrots on your flourishing fake farm.
Either way, there’s a ton you can find out about yourself from your Facebook profile, data that’s sitting there ready to be mined. It used to take going to each of your friends’ profiles to find out this info, but with Facebook’s new Graph Search, it’s just a click away. We’ve just gotten access to it, so here’s a quick look at the newest iteration of the world’s most popular social network, and how it might affect the way you use it. (more…)
Web apps can be confusing, but with so many of them out there, there’s bound to either be one that’ll fit your needs, or a way to make your favorite ones work better. Last week, we asked for your questions about web apps, and we’ve gotten two great questions so far.
Our reader Melissa asked if we knew of a “to-do list app that offers a nice clean interface, is fast and easy to use, allows for shared tasks, and has an iPhone app that syncs.” She’s already found Flow to be nice but pricey, Wunderlist to be a lot slower in entering tasks and syncing, and Todoist to be great but has no task sharing.
Then, our reader Jussie finds YouTube to be a bit messy for managing video channel subscriptions, and wanted a nicer web app to manage video subscriptions.
Keep reading after the break for our ideas for each of these problems! (more…)
Lists may not seem like the most exciting basis for a website, but everyone has the need to create some form of list from time to time. List creation and management need not be a solitary affair – there are countless scenarios in which two or more people might want to make use of the same list.
From shopping lists and to-dos to project management and itineraries, Organisr is an online tool that replaces those all-too-easily-lost scraps of paper that probably litter your desk. (more…)
The internet continues to amaze me all the time, and that is one of the reasons why I love it so much. What really gets me passionate about consistently using the web is the ability to do things in a virtual world that before wasn’t possible. Take for example the topic of collaboration. In years past, you wouldn’t dream of being able to have a company or business where the people who work at it are all in different states or countries.
A perfect example of this is Web.Appstorm, where although I have been writing for them for almost a year now, I have never met my editor or the other writers face to face. Yet, we are able to work together and produce quality content for all of you to read.
So where am I going with this? Well, the internet has given us the opportunity to have no boundaries when it comes to getting work done together. One web app to help with this, called Dispatch, has given us the ability to collaborate on documents and other things regardless of whether we work in the same building or miles a part, and all we need is an internet connection.
It’s always exciting when web apps we’ve tried get a redesign that makes them far better than they used to be. MYCO Suite is a CRM and collaboration app that we’d looked at in the past. We liked it, but felt that its interface held it back. Since then, though, the app has gone through a major overhaul and it’s time to take another look.
Let’s see how MYCO Suite has improved in the last year, and how it can work for your business. (more…)
