High-end smartphones, such as the latest Apple iPhone and Google Pixel 2, offer the so-called Portrait Mode when taking pictures. This mode blurs the background so that the foreground object stands out, thereby creating a professional-looking photo with almost zero effort. Fortunately, this act of blurring the background also reducing the size of the JPEG file of that picture.
We are notoriously bad at password hygiene. Yet, it is crucial for our digital lives. How many of us managed to convince our friends and family members to use a strong and unique password for every service which they use? How about the grumpy response when you suggest them to always use a password manager for everything?
Because the particular nebulous definition of cloud computing, an organization which does not carefully perform a proper assessment typically ends up using sub-optimal cloud services. A very common mistake is to stick with IaaS, while moving to SaaS can yield a better outcome for all parties involved.
Many forms of technical communication (functional specification, sprint planning, test plan, etc) need to demonstrate clarity. Unfortunately, clarity is often sacrificed – sometimes unconsciously – by an excessive use of ambiguous references.
Professional public speakers are always confident in their delivery. For the rest of us mere mortals, the confidence level can be boosted by our ability to maintain eye contact and demonstrate a good posture. Of course, it also helps to avoid any speech fillers as best as possible.
Being able to communicate with clarity and conciseness is a critical skill to the success of every engineering manager, tech lead, and software architect. A very typical approach to achieve that is by having a lot of deliberate practice.
There is no shortage of ready-to-use CSS-based loading spinners. Yet, it is still fun to derive a spinner from scratch, particular if the constraint is to use only one DOM element.
Firebase is an attractive service from Google to build web, Android, and iOS applications. Visual Studio Team Services is an amazing service from Microsoft to host code and to run deployment script. How can we combine these two services together?
If you are running an HTTP server and would like to enable SSL, an easy way to do that is to use a terminating proxy. Among others, stunnel is relatively simple and very easy to use.
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