Posts

Showing posts from February, 2014

Review of Metaphor, myth and mimicry: the bases of software engineering

In the paper "Metaphor, myth, and mimicry: the bases of software engineering", Antony Bryant  analyses the problematic around the term "software engineering", exposing and discussing multiple point of views from different recognised authors over the last years concerning what brings with (as unwanted baggage) the use of the status "engineering" in software. Bryant opens his paper saying that in the 80s the term wasn't problematic at all and used to be a "good thing" but with the pass of time, the concept was transformed into more activities than just ordinary programming. The idea that software had to be "engineered" gave an image of rigour, care and assurance.  However, soon began to be often misunderstood. In the late 90s, there was a consensus over the term within the academic and research community. Later discussions threads on the electronic list from the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing produced and accepted

InstantClick - JS library to speed up your website

Latency is inevitable with today’s internet architecture so InstantClick cheats by preloading links you are likely to click on. Before visitors click on a link, they hover over that link. Between these two events, 200 ms to 300 ms usually pass by. InstantClick makes use of that time to preload the page, so that the page is already there when you click. If you want your website to not be flooded by requests, you can set a delay before preloading starts when users hover a link. It will still feel instant. If you don’t want any wasted request, you may preload on mousedown .

Interaction Design

From now on i will be using the tag "interaction_design" for the posts related to the class "Interaction Design" from the EMSE!