By 2015, HTTPS Will Be Everywhere

Public WiFi connections are often unsecured, leaving their connections open to being hijacked or “sniffed” by malicious people. To protect users from data and privacy loss due to insecure and untrusted connections, web sites and applications are increasingly being run entirely over secure connections (HTTPS).

My prediction is that by 2015, it will be bad practice to access web sites via HTTP, and users will increasingly demand HTTPS. This has interesting implications for hardware manufacturers and software development teams alike.

Node.js is faster on Windows than on Linux – what can we learn?

In an interesting interview on DevBeat (http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/09/node-js-rackspace/), Rackspace systems architect and Node.js contributor Paul Querna talks about the Node.js implementation on Windows. (Original video here: http://vimeo.com/33248104)

Paul’s points in the interview about making use of I/O completion ports on Windows highlights a key issue in cross-platform software development: Windows has some incredibly powerful and advanced APIs, which – if used directly – can provide huge performance benefits for software that uses them.

ThoughtWorks AWS Training in London

Just back from the ThoughtWorks AWS training in London at Wallace Space. Great day: good pace, with some excellent discussions and lots of learning.

Agile Tools and the Importance of Physical Interaction

There is in interesting discussion on Daniel Markham’s blog about the Tyranny of the Tools in relation to Agile software development. In a nutshell, “throwing so-called ‘Agile’ tools at development team does not make it Agile”; it’s the ways for thinking and learning which are truly important.

Quick Tab extension makes Google Chrome more usable

The excellent non-nonsense Quick Tab extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/quicktab?hl=en-GB) makes Google Chrome much more usable, especially if you tend to have (like I do) many tabs open:

Why this isn’t standard in Chrome is baffling, but good work from Tom Lerendu (http://tomlerendu.com/chrome/)