The enemies of programming
As many of you will agree with me, sleep deprivation is the enemy of programming.
Maybe we fear only one thing more than that: being interrupted.
While writing code we have to think really hard, we use complex abstractions, we go through long business workflows and so on… fatigue and interruptions are the main enemies of those in this line of work.
Almost like a nice tradition, we went to the PHP Day conference this year as well; this time too it was held in Verona, on May 13th and 14th.
We participated and attended numerous talks and, as last year, we wanted to write a light summary; this won’t be a full “review”, but our intent instead is to highlight what captured our interest most, or what we found more valuable for our everyday work.
HTTP is the protocol that powers the Web. It was originally designed in 1996 for transferring and manipulating simple text-based documents (mainly hypertext resources).
Nowadays it’s been adopted for many different purposes. It’s used for: multimedia content transfer, rich real-time session-based web applications, API messages dispatch, Internet of Things and much more.
For this reason, the HTTP specifications are continuously updated, by adding new features and improving performance.
In May 2015, the latest version 2.0 was standardized with RFC 7540.
This introduced major differences on how the low-level protocol works.
From the application perspective, very little has changed: requests, responses, resources, headers and HTTP methods are still there.
New features have been added such as the possibility to push resources to the client.
As you may have noticed, we went through a bit of a restyling in the last few days, and our blog changed a lot in terms of appearance and structure.
We are very happy with those changes, but the reason behind this transition is not just a simple template change.
What we were searching for
Before, we were using an hosted CMS to run the blog, Ghost. We were happy with the results, it wasn’t our concern to administrate the server or bother about other hosting stuff.
The third edition of Droidcon IT was, as expected, a great conference, full of interesting talks and people coming from all over the world. We saw a lot of GDEs (Google Developer Expert) and also some Developer Advocates from Google, although it was not organized directly by the company. Back in March the Android team surprisingly released the brand new N Developer Preview earlier than expected, so this year we were already able to talk about the new features in Android N and analyze them. Furthermore, there was talk of Kotlin, RxJava and a lot of other useful and interesting topics.
