Tag: development

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How to Estimate a Web Development/Design Project?

"How much does X cost?" is one of the most common (and yet complicated) questions in the software engineering industry. Estimating development projects is rarely a straightforward process, because of the broad gap between "simple" and "truly complex" variation of the same business problem, along with the external context (all 3rd parties) -- and let's not forget unclear requirements and scope creep. Estimates Are Extremely Hard There’s a good reason why many service providers: build a limited set of solutions in order to stick to sane ballparks, venture into building products, or productize their services under a manageable scope. I… Continue Reading
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Is WordPress Suitable For Large and Complex WordPress Websites?

Is WordPress suitable for large and complex WordPress websites? You should be concerned about building any complex project regardless of the underlying framework or a CMS. Let me quote the original scope from the comment before discussing further: I am currently in the process of obtaining quotes to build a website. The website is likely to be quite complex, with two user groups (e.g.buyers and sellers), payment system, etc. Should I be concerned by a quote from a web designer who proposes to build it within WordPress? WordPress Platform Fundamentals The first thing to consider is the high-end scope of… Continue Reading
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Internet Marketing For Startups – Outsourcing vs. Building Teams

Internet marketing is one of the many online disciplines that don’t require education, certification, or any type of entry point that comes with the right background or experience. The same goes for content marketing, web design, web development, advertising, PR - you name it. It’s not the same for medical professionals and lawyers - which is why we don’t deal with these problems in the first place. Sure, some are better and more experienced than others, but you know that they’ve studied hard and gone to some of the best medical or law schools in order to land a job in the first… Continue Reading
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On WordPress Development Retainers

With over 40 people working at DevriX right now, we have revised our service solutions and focused on promoting a type of service that combines our recurring revenue goal with iterative development solutions for some of our clients. While we do provide maintenance services, we realized that a development retainer would be incredibly useful for most of our leads. This month we've started a new WordPress development retainer and signed a discovery session for another large one coming next month. There are a few more in our pipeline which our sales rep is looking into, sharing our process with our prospects and getting some valuable feedback for… Continue Reading
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How To Prepare For A Software Engineering Job

Getting ready for your first software engineering job can be daunting. Developers are in demand, but gaining the minimum skill set for becoming competitive usually takes 2-3 years. The first job or two as an engineer could be quite challenging to land. The two most important things you need to understand first are: Your job cannot teach you everything. Learning through pet projects and continuous reading and practice is extremely important - especially over the first 5–8 years.Programming is a craft that relies on hundreds of parallel activities - understanding computer architectures, algorithms, data structures, networks, different programming languages and paradigms, effective… Continue Reading
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Investing In Your Software Engineering Professional Development

I spent 3 years teaching Java at the high school I graduated at. I was used to technical training courses for organizations that had already adopted Java, as well as paid courses with students who were really passionate about Java. The high school gig was different. Students had a dozen other disciplines to prepare for! It was their senior year as well. Some of them were already employed as junior developers and rarely attended classes. Others were aiming for a job in a different field - front-end development, Python, Ruby. Needless to say, their commitment was diverse. How Software Engineering Curriculum… Continue Reading
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The WebXpo Event in Sofia

Yesterday I attended the WebXpo event in Sofia, managed by Web & Events. There were plenty of different topics to be discussed on website development, design, usability and so on. It was a great pleasure listening to the discussion of the website price. Three experts from leading web development/design companies in Bulgaria did a workshop on how prices are calculated, how do they manage different clients and complex tasks etc. All of them mentioned that the higher prices when you recall to company are based on the professionalism that they imply in their products. The whole cycle requires brief specifications, development and design,… Continue Reading
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Over-abstractionism

Coming from the JEE world, I was used to adding several layers of abstraction for high level enterprise projects. Even back then, I was trying to evaluate the necessity of some of the layers. PHP is an interesting language, currently the most popular scripting (or maybe any programming) language at all for web projects. Developed naturally for non-developers without OOP nature (added in the next versions), loading everything on every single request, it lacks the concept of a number of complex layers with enterprise design patterns. Most projects follow flat-hierarchy, simple and straight forward structure (PHP doesn't support multithreading as well)… Continue Reading
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QA != Tester

Last Saturday I had one of those epiphany moments for something way too obvious, still too shocking for me at the moment of speaking. It was related to the QA process and the place of the QA role in the software industry. I got involved in a discussion on Saturday evening regarding several different technical specialties. There were three of us teaching classes at the Telerik Academy here. Trainees could end up as: developers, frontend engineers, support experts, QA guys etc. Not surprisingly for me, most people tend to lean towards the development department, i.e. trying to join the dev… Continue Reading
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Periodic Table, my First Public Upload

Recently I found a link to an app that I've published online almost 10 years ago and as far as I remember, it's my first publicly available application ever, free for download: I'm definitely not proud with the overall end product or the code quality produced back then, but that's my first contribution to the free software initiative and I felt somewhat sentimental. The application was written in Visual Basic and it was a cheat sheet of the Periodic Table of the Elements, displaying various details for each element like the atomic number, temperatures of boiling or melting, density. It… Continue Reading