GDPR is coming and many organizations are changing their ways – you must have noticed getting emailed from your favorite […]
Hack
ReadWriteHack is designed to help software, Web and mobile developers learn the key trends, tools, and best practices that shape their work and careers.
These 3 Technologies Will Save Your Business Money
Let’s face it — it’s difficult to keep up with the pace (and price) of new technologies. Business owners face […]
How to Open a Company Bank Account for Your Startup & Avoid the Pitfalls
Congratulations on registering your new business! Or if you’re still contemplating forming your business, and just trying to better understand […]
7 Growth Hacks for Small Businesses and Startups to follow in 2019
Are you looking for some easy and effective growth hacks to boost your budding business? This is a fast-paced environment […]
5 Ways to Buck the Holiday Spending Trends This Year
Every year, predictions about how consumers will spend their money crop up. Covering the most popular toys and the most […]
How To Host A Website With Raspberry Pi
Running your own Web server is the ultimate mark of online independence—and it only need cost you $35.
Building A Raspberry Pi VPN Part One: How And Why To Build A Server
Trust no one and build a server that encrypts your Web data from prying eyes.
4 Unique Growth Tactics for 2020
Marketing tactics change constantly. Each year new tactics become more impactful, and old ones fade into obscurity. Sticking to the same […]
What APIs Are And Why They’re Important
APIs make the modern Web what it is today. Here’s a simple guide to what they are, how they work and why we care.
6 Watermark Apps To Protect Your Online Photos
Photo thieves, beware! Here are the best app options to protect your creative work.
How To Set Up Your Raspberry Pi For The First Time
It’s a computer so simple, anyone can tinker with it. Here’s proof.
Heroku 101: A Beginner’s Guide To Hosting Apps In The Cloud
You build the app, it does the rest.
3 Reasons Why Everyone Needs to Learn Markdown
You’ve probably heard of Markdown. Maybe you’ve heard the name for years. Perhaps you just encountered it, since it’s enjoyed a renaissance lately.
But do you know what it is? Are you using it? You should be. Here are three good reasons to use Markdown. There are no good reasons not to.
Hack of the Day Holiday Special: 3D Christmas Tree in 1KB
Roman Cortes wowed a lot of people with his entry into the “1k Javascript demo contest”: an animated 3D Christmas tree. In just one KB of code.
Cortes has visual guide on how he created it starting with simple pixels to be used as sprites and then animated with 3D vectors.
Seven Ways To Use GitHub That Aren’t Coding
Meet the projects that prove GitHub is a collaboration tool for all stripes.
10 Crazy Things 3D Printers Can Make Today
Never underestimate the power of human ingenuity paired with a machine that can print almost anything.
When Is the Waterfall Methodology Better Than Agile?
Ask any two software developers what the best approach to development is, and you’ll probably get two different answers. Development […]
Five Steps To Build Your Own Random Non-Sequitur Twitter Bot
Make fun of your tweet-obsessed friends—or yourself.
10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job
These tech skills are no longer in demand. Show recruiters that you can adapt and learn.
Why You Love Online Quizzes
How many times have you seen an online quiz and thought that it was silly, but took the quiz anyway? […]
Error Reports: How to Isolate a Bug
Whether you’re a tester reporting bugs or a developer who’s trying to clarify a bug report, isolating bugs can be something of an art.
Some bugs are really obvious, such as if you go to a site and every page is down with a server error. Other bugs are much harder to report, as they only occur in certain circumstances. Here are some tips for…
Extract Locations: Geodict and Yahoo! Placemaker
Have you ever just wanted to point your app at a service and get immediate gratification for the location of a string of text? How about for an entire website? The good news is there is more than one way to get there.
Let’s take a look at a couple of ways to accomplish this goal.
How To: Build Features That Work Really Well
You’ve been asked to build a jump box that will allow users to type into a box and search for a customer id. This is a really simple feature – so how do you build it?
The trick is to build the basic functionality, and then try it out. See what you’ve missed, then go back and make some tweaks. This isn’t so much about fixing a bug or two – it’s…
Database Planning: Avoid Missed Fields
Back when we showed you how logging can save you, we touched on the subject of listing fields prior to building your database.
Once you’ve been building software for a while, you may find yourself jumping into the development stage before you’re ready. In some cases this may work just fine, but if you end up missing some critical functionality…
Hunch Makes My Dreams Come True
As a developer, you probably understand the need to fix bugs and the joy that comes with that commit. You know the one. The commit that says “did it in a minute”. Why not have a little fun when you commit? When there’s a team, the fun keeps everyone from being “out of touch”.
Let’s take a look at how the Hunch software engineers keep “one on…
Getting Verbose on the Mac
Your Mac laptop is probably very fast. Most of the time you are content to just close the lid and don’t dwell on performing a Shut Down. Perhaps you were required to restart after a Software Update. Have you ever been curious about what might be taking place behind those lovely Apple GUI designed screens as your laptop springs to life?
Let’s…
How To: Speed Up the WordPress Admin Panel on a VPS
A few weeks back, I gave some tips for how to speed up WordPress on a VPS. Several readers suggested using WP-SuperCache. This is a good suggestion, but in my case, it didn’t work.
After a bit of investigation, I discovered that the load issues appeared to be coming from the WordPress admin panel. As far as I’m aware, WP-SuperCache won’t help…
Rollyo: A Fast Way to Make a Searchable Aggregator
Rollyo is a simple way to “roll your own search engine”. You can get started by choosing a few pre-defined categories – these contain a list of URLs that you can add to.
It gets a bit more interesting though if you add your own URLs though. From the homepage, click “Create Searchroll” and you can build a custom search engine.
Closer Look: Rise of the Data Scientist
You read “Beautiful Data” and highlighted parts to share with your data geek cohorts. You log everything. Deep down you know there will be metrics in this growing pile.
But have you ever stepped back to reflect on the growing piles of data and wondered how to begin to slice and dice it? You might want to find a data scientist.
Let’s take a…
Fun with Polymaps and CloudMade
Sometimes you need a map and the standard maps don’t fit the bill. That means you need to make your own map. Luckily, this can be done online so put away your crayons and construction paper.
Let’s take a look at using Polymaps with CloudMade.
Error Messages: Help Users to Understand What Went Wrong
Error messages. Not the critical ones that require admin intervention, but those informative bits of text telling you that you missed a field on a form.
Chances are, you won’t see a 100% success rate when people fill in a form on your site. The more complex the form, the more likely it is that people won’t reach the end.
Forms should be easy to…
Saying Hello via IP Geolocation API
Have you ever wanted to determine geographical information about an IP address? There are a growing number of services to accomplish this goal that are a mix of on-demand and offline bulk database services.
Let’s take a look at the Quova API using Ruby.
Developer Discussion: Do You Use Helpers?
It’s Friday, so it seems like a good opportunity for a discussion post. Today we’ll be talking about helpers – basically, any kind of tool that makes your life easier as a developer.
As the name suggests, helpers can be quite helpful. Apparently, developers are lazy, so anything that makes life easier for us is good. Right?
PHP Security: Sanitizing Strings, Validating Values, and Interrogating Integers
Trust no-one. Not just a tag-line for The X-Files, it’s also sound advice when dealing with data supplied by users.
Whether a user is trying to do something nasty or they’ve just hit an unfortunate combination of keys, you shouldn’t assume that what you’re saving is trouble-free. Here are some tips for validating input in your PHP application.
VCast Apps and Network APIs: Developer Perspectives
The big stories at Verizon Developer Community Conference 2010 (VDCC) are APIs and VCAST Apps for Day 1. Opening keynote talks and panels explored a range of topics that are on the minds of all mobile app developers.
Let’s take a closer look.
Bug Labs Open Source Hardware on Verizon’s ODI
Day 2 of the Verizon Developer Community Conference 2010 offered a deep dive into ares such as open source hardware, network APIs and more. RWH sat down with developers attending and gathered feedback that other mobile app developers will appreciate and hopefully apply in their own endeavors.
Let’s take a closer look.
DIY RSS Push Notifications with Notifo
If you like to get immediate notifications when a story hits the wire you are not alone. What if you could schedule your notifications a few times a day. If only there was a way to use push notifications on your iPhone and have them appear on your desktops too.
Using some of the new notification services available this is possible. Let’s take a…
Using Cloudkick with Physical Servers
Perhaps you have taken the plunge into the fluffy cloud of the virtual data center. If so, there might be a few of those pesky physical servers still awaiting their eventual destruction. There’s no reason not to include them in your dashboard views of the cloud you created.
Let’s take a look at how you can use Cloudkick to bring your physical…
Exploratory Testing: An Unscripted Quest For Bugs
Exploratory testing is a form of quality checking that does not rely on test scripts. A tester is let loose on the system, often with very little introduction, and they are encouraged to report any and all issues they find.
As you’re doing exploratory testing, you attempt to use the system as a user who doesn’t understand where they need to go…
6 Tips for Building Coherent Site Navigation
When building a website, getting the navigation right is absolutely critical. A poorly conceived approach to site navigation will confuse and frustrate users, and this isn’t the way to get a lot of people using your site.
A big part of this challenge is that you don’t always start with a lot of links, but more may be added as the site develops…