So, what will 2018 be the year of?

They say that life is what you make it so time to make some resolutions …… yes?

Well, if John Sonmez from Simple Programmer is to be believed – maybe not!

I receive regular email updates from the Simple Programmer website and the one I received on 27th December caused me to stop and think.

Online Tool of the Month – BuiltWith

Have you ever looked at a website and thought ‘I wonder what that’s written in’? Well, even if you haven’t I certainly have which is why I was interested to hear about BuiltWith.

Simply put, BuiltWith puts websites under the microscope and produces a detailed report about what it sees.

From Webservers and SSL Certificate providers through programming languages, Javascript libraries, content management systems and advertising platforms it sees it all. The produced report contains links to allow you to see technology trends across the Internet which may well assist with infrastructure decisions for your next project.

Ditching AntiVirus

Just like us, as computers get old they tend to slow down. It’s a fact of life pure and simple.

With computers it tends to be due to the hardware not keeping up with the new requirements of today’s applications (just try running later Windows or Office on a Pentium 4 and you’ll see what I mean). We tend to put up with the slow down until something finally gives out, a hard-drive or motherboard for instance, and then we buy a new one.

Well my Windows 10 development workstation was slowing down and while it’s a few years old now, it is still a pretty high spec – i7-3770 with 32GB RAM and SSDs – this thing used to fly.

But recently it was noticeable that it was taking longer to boot, applications like Visual Studio and SQL Management Studio seems to struggle to load and surfing the web was a bit of a grind.

Online Tool of the Month – QuickType

I was recently working on a freelance project which required interaction with a 3rd party webservice that returned a JSON result.

While connecting to the service and fetching the data was a fairly trivial task, looking at the data being returned it was clear that a lot of POCO/DTO classes were going to be required.

Obviously these are easy to create but they are time consuming and prone to the odd typo. I then remembered a labour saving service called QuickType which would take the returned JSON and generate the C# code for me – I just needed to pull it into my project.

Online Tool of the Month – Polyfill.io

Browser compatibility is a pain – and that’s a fact. But when your client says, “we need to support IE9 and upwards” you can feel the dread come over you.

Well, fear not as help is at hand in the form of Polyfill.io, a CDN hosted service which will serve up a custom set of polyfills to fill those functionality gaps in whatever browser makes the call.