#32. Google reader closure. Hail Feedly

After many years already using Google reader to follow blogs and websites, thanks to their update tracking capabilities, I want to dedicate this small post to this fallen product. As you may know on the 1st of July of this year (2013) is going offline, and after waiting a few weeks if Google reconsidered their decision and with no change at all, I started looking for alternatives.

After trying the most renown readers that promoted themselves to occupy the place of the falling king of readers, the winner IMHO is Feedly, which initially I discarded because it needs to download an extension to work and is not completely web based.

That made me try Pulse, but the magazine interface did not convince me at all, I wanted something similar to the old reader, and after finally trying Feedly I am pretty convinced that is the best alternative I found until now. It lacks some features that I miss, and I expect that some day they will implement, like a search bar for posts, to find something that you read some time ago and you want to read again. It helped to do a seamless change that they imported all the data from reader in your first login, so if you are still stuck with Google reader it is the time to change and let it die as many web products have already disappeared. Bye-bye reader.

Thanks for reading!

#30. AppHarbor is the best hosting for beginning freelance .Net developers

AppHarbor is a cloud computing service where we can create web applications in .Net, those applications can be continuous integrated with our github or bitbucket repository. The service downloads our newest revision in the hooked repository and executes all tests in the solution before publishing the new revision.

AppHarbor is free of charge with some limitations, but with enough possibilities for starting freelancers, like me.

So, if you are starting your freelance career as a .Net developer you should check it out. I am just promoting as a satisfied user, nothing more.

For example the homepage of Wishlist Manager is hosted in AppHarbor.

#28. Migrating to Disqus

I have started to migrate to Disqus the comments on my blogs putinyourbasket.blogspot.com and shoppingforcharity.blogspot.com, as currently are the ones that I post more on, Disqus has a good integration with Blogger and really looks like a great community.

It's really easy to integrate, just create an account and add the Disqus gadget to your layout, maybe you can find that it does not add to your blog and maybe it is because you have a modified template, then you will need to add the widget manually, following the instructions of disqus website is relatively easy.

#25. For a less painful development

I was repairing a component that automatically historifies changes in datasets through an abstraction, found out some problems with wrong assumptions in a rushy development. As this code was not made by me, it felt like in this comic, and repairing the component give me the inspiration to take some guide patterns for future developments in our current project at work.

- make functions as test friendly as possible, decompose when you can
- use tests to assure you do not break anything and even it costs more, make tests that build the data they use, don't depend on a DB that may change in the future, so favor functions that receive simple data so they can be easily testable.
- favor composition over inheritance, it gets simpler to make a change of behaviour and extend it
- put code where should go, if you use an instance in a function too many times to access its fields maybe you should consider to put this function inside the class of the instance, if it is your code.

Follow these simple rules and you will be happier at your work also read Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, a must read.