Blog de Joe Freeman

Google's open-source Flutter is a multi-platform UI tool that can bring more people into professional UI development.  In other words, Flutter democratizes user interface construction, taking it out of the hands of a few platform-specific specialists. It lets one person implement business functions across web applications, iOS native, and Android native. This reduces specialization and the amount of skew between the different platform implementations. Platform specialization may still be required.  We still need experts.   We just need fewer of them when building our applications. Flutter is a User Interface toolset that lets software developers create mobile and web applications without requiring that they be user interface specialists. Flutter isn't a tool built on top of another tool built on top of some weird 1990s library. It was created to build applications with mobile, web, and desktop portability in mind.  Less living on an island UI development in gene...

We expect artists to bring previous work, architects to bring previous designs, and writers to bring previous articles. Why are programmers any different? Opensource contributions or personal repositories are pieces of that person's portfolio. They give a feel for your interests, how you think, problem solve and, what you think is important. "Walk me through why you put this together this way". "I only had a little time and the primary thing I needed was XYZ". A person's contributions and comments give a feel for the person in a way a synthetic 45-minute crush programming test in an unfamiliar environment by itself does not. Using Open Source Contributions as a Technical Portfolio on YouTube If your company doesn't give you 20% time, how do you expect to get out of the narrow niche your company has you working in? How do you expect to enhance your technical radar without external exploration and discovery? Self Improvement pays off in multiple ways So...

I do not understand how any mere mortal has any idea what data protection backup tool to pick or how to balance the risks. The Windows backup/data protection story is a sorry mess. Windows 11 and 10 have at least 4 different ways to protect or backup your files. Who thought this was a good idea? Why isn't there a Microsoft-provided capabilities matrix? I understand that these are legacy but someone should have at least pulled this stuff together and put a pretty cover page on it. Some of these are traditional backup tools.  Others are network drives or network drive mirrors where files in the mirror are deleted when you delete the file locally.  This can leave you one action away from losing data depending on how the trash folder operates. A backup is an off-drive copy of your data that can be recovered when your hard drive goes bad, a machine is damaged/stolen or you accidentally delete a file.  Backups are usually saved on network shares, cloud drives, or removable medi...