Stories by Peter Wayner

10 picky reasons to choose a cloud

How do you choose between one cloud of commodity machines and another? You have to get picky

Written by Peter Wayner04 Nov. 19 22:00

What those developers really mean

Developers speak a language unto themselves. Here’s how to cut through their half-truths and sneaky barbs to know what’s really wrong with your code, timelines, expectations and management style.

Written by Peter Wayner26 Feb. 18 22:00

13 reasons not to use Chrome

Chrome may be the world’s most popular browser, but it isn’t necessarily the best one

Written by Peter Wayner02 March 17 22:00

8 MySQL gotchas worth a rant

MySQL is easy to install, relatively fast, and loaded with features. If that's not enough, it's also one of the most prominent flagships of the open source movement, the big success story that showed us that a winning company could be built around open source code.

Written by Peter Wayner23 July 15 02:31

9 ways developers can rebuild trust on the Internet

The Internet is a pit of epistemological chaos. As Peter Steiner posited -- and millions of chuckles peer-reviewed -- in his famous New Yorker cartoon, there's no way to know if you're swapping packets with a dog or the bank that claims to safeguard your money. To make matters worse, Edward Snowden has revealed that the NSA may be squirreling away a copy of some or all of our packets, and given the ease with which it can be done, other countries and a number of rogue hacker groups may very well be following the NSA's lead.

Written by Peter Wayner23 July 15 02:02

MEAN vs. LAMP for the future of programming

The transition from cutting-edge curiosity to practical workhorse is not one that many technologies make. Yesterday's precocious upstarts often fail to live up to their Version 0.1 promise -- not so for the technologies that make up the fiercely acronymized MEAN stack.

Written by Peter Wayner23 June 15 05:49

17 JavaScript tools breathing new life into old code

Computer languages have a strange shelf life. The most popular among them experience explosive growth driven by herding behavior akin to that of the fashion industry. But when they fade from the spotlight, something odd happens. Instead of disappearing like a pop song or parachute pants, they live on and on and on and on. The impetus behind this quasi-immortality? It's often cheaper to maintain old code than to rewrite it in the latest, trendiest language.

Written by Peter Wayner05 May 15 01:54

7 reasons why frameworks are the new programming languages

In the 1980s, the easiest way to start a nerd fight was to proclaim that your favorite programming language was best. C, Pascal, Lisp, Fortran? Programmers spent hours explaining exactly why their particular way of crafting an if-then-else clause was superior to your way.

Written by Peter Wayner31 March 15 04:27

7 timeless lessons of programming 'graybeards'

In one episode 1.06 of the HBO series "Silicon Valley," Richard, the founder of a startup, gets into a bind and turns for help to a boy who looks 13 or 14.

Written by Peter Wayner10 March 15 04:17

PHP vs. Node.js: An epic battle for developer mind share

It's a classic Hollywood plot: the battle between two old friends who went separate ways. Often the friction begins when one pal sparks an interest in what had always been the other pal's unspoken domain. In the programming language version of this movie, it's the introduction of Node.js that turns the buddy flick into a grudge match: PHP and JavaScript, two partners who once ruled the Internet together but now duke it out for the mind share of developers.

Written by Peter Wayner13 Jan. 15 07:43

Attack of the one-letter programming languages

Watch out! The coder in the next cubicle has been bitten and infected with a crazy-eyed obsession with a programming language that is not Java and goes by the mysterious name of F.

Written by Peter Wayner25 Nov. 14 06:49
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