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Node.js shines in real-time web apps that employ push technology over WebSocket. Node’s real-time, two-way connections—where the client and server can each initiate communication—enable the freer exchange of data.

Sometimes, clients give us feature requests that we really don’t like. It’s not that we don’t like our clients, we love our clients. It’s not that we don’t like the feature, most client-requested features are aligned perfectly with their business goals and income. Sometimes, the reason we don’t like a feature request is that the easiest way to solve it is to write bad code, and we don’t have an Elegant Solution on the top of our heads. This will throw many of us on fruitless searches through RubyToolbox, github, developer blogs, and stackoverflow looking for a gem or plugin or example code that will make us feel better about ourselves.

Well, I’m here to tell you, it’s okay to write bad code. Sometimes, bad code is easier to refactor into beautiful code than a poorly thought out solution implemented under a time-crunch.

It’s always fun to put your programming skills on display. A while back, I figured it’d be cool to try and control my laptop via my Android mobile device. Think about it: being able to play and pause music, start and stop programming jobs or downloads, etc., all by sending messages from your phone. Neat, huh?

Female engineers are valuable at Toptal. This is a piece about how we stand up for their rights and value them for their skills and talent.

After much thought, I decided to engineer a solution to the idea abandonment problem. I call it the ‘Init’ project (or Init.js).

The core of the idea is to have a single project to start them all, to let the developer or the technical founder make all of the essential decisions at once, and receive an appropriate starting template based on those decisions.

Demand within the web design scene today has changed over the past few years: designers with front-end skills, and front-end developers with design skills, are more and more in demand. Yes, you could argue that the jobs are completely different—and maybe you straight-up don’t like one of them—but truth be told, in my six years as a freelance web developer and twelve years as a designer, I’ve learned that it’s much harder to get by as just a web designer or just a front-end developer.

Wearing both hats has a lot of advantages: from a professional perspective alone, you can find work more easily and charge a higher rate because you’re bringing more to the table.

But this isn’t just another article about cohort analysis. If you already know the importance of the topic and want to skip the introduction, you can jump to the simulator, where you can either simulate startup growth based on retention, churn, and a number of other factors, or analyze your own PayPal logs with the code I’ve open sourced.

If, however, you don’t realize that these are some of the most important metrics around–continue reading.

Clouds must be efficient to provide useful fault-tolerance and scalability, but they also must be easy to use.

CloudI (pronounced “cloud-e” /klaʊdi/) is an open source cloud computing platform that is most closely related to the Platform as a Service (PaaS) clouds. CloudI differs in a few key ways, most importantly: software developers are not forced to use specific frameworks, slow hardware virtualization, or a particular operating system. By allowing cloud deployment to occur without virtualization, CloudI leaves development process and runtime performance unimpeded, while quality of service can be controlled with clear accountability.

I live in Córdoba, Argentina, approximately 130 kilometers (~80 miles) away from the lake where I kitesurf. Thats roughly a two-hour drive, which I can deal with. But I can’t deal with the fact that weather forecasts are inaccurate. And where I live, good wind conditions last just a couple of hours. The last thing you want to do is clear up your Monday schedule to go kitesurfing and find yourself cursing the gods on a windless lake after two hours of driving.

I needed to know the wind conditions of my favorite kitesurfing spot—in real time. So I decided to build my own weather station.

Everyone has their own set of tools. As a PHP developer, one of my favorites is a Rapid Application Development framework called “Nooku”. In the words of the development group: “Nooku is more of a web development toolkit than a framework”

In case you are not familiar with it, have a look. It’s an open source project that makes heavy use of industry accepted design patterns to produce highly componentized applications that are easily extensible and reusable (initially created by one of the lead Joomla developers). Out of the box, Nooku gives you a great deal to help get projects off the ground faster. A small, but strong sample:

Porn is a big industry. There aren’t many sites on the Internet that can rival the traffic of its biggest players.

And juggling this immense traffic is tough. To make things even harder, much of the content served from porn sites is made up of low latency live streams rather than simple static video content. But for all of the challenges involved, rarely have I read about the developers who take them on. So I decided to write about my own experience on the job.