I have a confession to make: I’m addicted to purchasing domain names. Whenever I get an idea for a project, I can’t stop thinking about how to name it and when I find a good enough name, I have to purchase the domain for it. The result? About a dozen of domains doing nothing. I could just release them, but I feel like some of those can actually be worth something to someone (they do to me) and I have not necessarily given up on creating something with them.

So instead of letting them sit on an ad page for GoDaddy that gives me absolutely no benefit, I created a simple “domains for sale” website (hosted on a subdomain on one of my existing domains, I’m crazy enough to buy another domain for that) and I forward each of them there (the subdomain in question is domainsforsale.mbillard.com). I created the website with Ruby on Rails, because I could create something simple quickly and because I could make use of the excellent heroku hosting which is free for websites with low performance requirements. Read more »

I recently had to work with a library that was very difficult to understand and use. The documentation was poor, there were not many samples online to help me do what I needed to do and nothing was predictable. That means I had to resort to trial-and-error for tweaks and to search online for pretty much every new feature I wanted to implement with the library. Maybe I was pushing the library to its limit of what it could do, but what I was doing should not have been this complicated.

For me, code usability is just as important for programmers as is usability of a UI. Less usability means less usage of your product/library which means less feedback and eventually less profit. But what can we do when we’re stuck with a bad library? One option is to look for alternatives, but sometimes there aren’t other viable options or they’re just as bad or worse. The solution? Wrap up the bad code inside your own component and make it easy to use. Read more »

Nowadays, you can manage a software company almost entirely with online services. Whether you want to manage projects, emails, repositories, bugs, or anything else, you’ve got plenty of options. Most of the time, in addition to being time savers, using Cloud services also help you save quite a bit of money. Can we, however, really trust those providers with our data? By hosting it yourself, you only have to trust your employees; by hosting it elsewhere, you have to trust all those other companies and their employees that you know nothing about.

This is a really hot topic at my job. I believe that Cloud-based solutions can really benefit a small company, but sometimes I wonder if I’m being too naive. On the other side, I don’t think all the fears of having your data stolen are really founded and that most of the time, it’s just paranoia kicking in. Even if  the content was stolen, would it really be such a big deal most of the time? I will try to list the pros and cons of each option to help understand the issue. I do not aim to reach a conclusive decision, as I do not believe there’s a single right answer. Read more »