Posts by — Adam

Creating Software: Test, Test and More Test

“If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”
-Edsger Dijkstra

Testing is arguably the most important step in any software project and also one of the most neglected steps. In most cases, testing is missed because clients don’t realize the importance of it and aren’t willing to pay for, or take the time to have the developers test properly.

In a perfect world, code would be thoroughly tested before it ever goes into the wild, but this just isn’t possible. Here are a few tips and tricks on testing so your product will never be released without even a little bit of testing.
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Headphones: A Developers Best Friend

I don’t know about you but I personally work a lot better when I’m listening to music. I don’t know what it is but I can concentrate a lot easier and work a lot quicker when I’m listneing to my favourite tunes. The problem with most devevelopment jobs is that, unless you work from home, you’re constantly around co-workers and it would be rude to blast your music.

That is why it’s important to invest in a decent pair of headphones. Here are a few things you should look for when picking out your headphones:
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10 Tips for Being a Great Manager

Having a good manager can make the difference between an amazing work experience and a horrible one. At work, you can tell the developers that have a good manager from the ones that don’t based purely on how well they work and how happy they are.

As a manager, making your developers happy and comfortable can increase their productivity and make a better work experience for everyone. Here are 10 tips to becoming a great manager:
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How To Style Your Pages For Print

Last week I talked about an easy way to add a print link into each and every one of your posts using a little bit of javascript. The output of those pages however, looks extremely ugly and today I’m going to show you how to pretty up your print output with CSS.

Now, before we get started I just want to say that I’m not actually going to get into the dirty details of which colours you should pick and what font you should use to style your pages. I’m merely going to say which elements you need to include and which ones you should remove to make your pages look nice.
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Laptopical Laptop Reviews

One thing that I hate doing whenever I’m getting ready to buy a new laptop is going through the specifications of each computer. I find it annoying searching online for reviews on a specific laptop and then comparing this laptop to another one to see which is better. Who has the time to go to all of the different sites picking out reviews and getting the pro’s and con’s of each laptop; I certainly don’t.

Thats why Laptopical.com is one of the best stops on the internet for all of your laptop reviews and resources.
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Wordpress Hack: Adding a ‘Print This’ Link to Your Posts

If you go to most blogs now-a-days you’ll most likely see their feed displayed prominently somewhere near the top of their content. What happens when a person visits your site and finds an article that they really like and want to print it. You could use a popular plugin to display a link to print the page or you could just add the code yourself and save server resources and load time.

Here are a few lines of code that you could add to your site to give your visitors easy access to print the page.
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How To Motivate the Unmotivated

Most developers have, at one point in their career, worked in a group; it’s inevitable if you’re working on a large project. If you’ve worked in a large group you most likely have met one developer that has been less motivated than the others and this post is for you.

Motivating the unmotivated can be a difficult task for a manager. You have to know how to motivate them and not make them feel unwanted. If you try to hard, the programmer will feel like you’re trying to push them away, but if you don’t try hard enough the developer isn’t doing everything they could be.

Here are a few tips on motivating developers.
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Why Every Blog Should Have a Blog Plan

In the development world, we create plans for pretty much every thing we write, but when it comes to the blogging world I’ve found that a number of people don’t think of creating a plan for their blog. As bloggers, we can increase our blogs success by developing plans for our blogs.

Here are a few tips for creating your own blog plan.
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July: A Month in Review

Here at devjargon, we have just finished our first full month of existence (we pre-posted for May and launched on June 6th), and has it ever been fun.  We’ve had a number of great posts, talked with a number of great people and had traffic beyond what we’ve ever had in any of our previous blogs.

Here are a few of our favourite posts this month:

We’re also please to have release our “Ask Us” section that allows you as readers to ask your IT related questions.  We just launched it recently so we haven’t gotten any enquiries yet, but you could be the first.

Not only have we posted a few good articles, we’ve also read a number of great development blogs from around the blogosphere.  A couple fo my favourites are: Girl Developer, I Hate My IT Guy, LinuxHaxor, Coding Horror and many, many more.

Just before we end this post I’d like to shout out to our first sponsor Laptopical. If you’re planning on buying a laptop any time soon, I’d check them out first because they have a number of in-depth laptop reviews that are worth checking out.

We’re looking forward to August and have a number of great things planned for this blog, so stay tuned.

The Ultimate Development Workstation

To a developer, their desk is like athelete’s equipment; vital to occupation. If a hockey players stick breaks because it’s quality is sub-par they could lose a game. The same goes to a developers desk, if the desk isn’t stocked with the correct equipment it could impair the developer in their work.

Here are 10 things that every developer should have at their desk.
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