SOPA/PIPA: Anti-Censorship Protest or Techies Revenge?

In the past week or so, we’ve seen something truly unique in the world of technology.  I’m referring to the highly effective protests of the proposed SOPA and PIPA laws by web giants “Google” and “Wikipedia” (among many others).  If you’re not sure what SOPA and PIPA are, you should go to Google or Wikipedia and read all about it (irony intended). Read more >>

A Decade of Fairway

Has it really been 10 years?  It certainly doesn’t seem like it, but judging by the desolate patch of forehead I used to call a hairline it may as well have been 50 years.

Things may be different today, but nothing’s really changed and I’m proud of that.  When I started Fairway 10 years ago I set out to work with only the people I wanted to work with.  The best and brightest from my own small but deeply talented nexus of engineering friends and acquaintances.  Our goal was simple; to provide the highest quality software development services in town.  I believe we’ve achieved that, and had a lot of fun and made (and brewed) a lot of memories along the way.

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Handling Session Timeout Gracefully

Nerd-Face

Have you ever been to those sites that show you a nice helpful popup to let you know that your session will expire in a few minutes?  You know, the ones that show you a countdown timer, and let you Continue Your Session, or Log Out?  And if you’ve been gone so long that your session really did expire because you were feeding your nerd-face, it automatically logs you out and shows you a nice message letting you know it was only to protect you?  That it was For Your Own Good?

Yeah, me too!   Then I said, “I want one!” and set out to build my own. Read more >>

Generating Software Diagrams

Introduction

In this post I’m going to describe how to automatically generate diagrams from source code.  I’ve found that diagrams provide the quickest path to understanding how a piece of software works.  Diagrams also provide a great means to discuss software at a high level.  They’ve proven invaluable in the software development and software consulting work I’ve done.

Often diagrams are created by hand.  Unfortunately hand-crafted diagrams are prone to manual mistakes and falling out-of-sync as the source code changes.  Many IDE’s can automatically generate diagrams from source code on the fly, but sometimes your IDE doesn’t provide the diagrams or options you want.  Being able to generate your own diagrams will give you the ability to create exactly what you need when you need it. Read more >>