Latest Posts - Page 147 of 205

October 12, 2018October 7, 2018 Free and Low Cost Tools

Customer Relationship Management Tools – Free and Low-Cost CRM

Customer Relationship Management Tools are big business. You can see examples in vast and expensive solutions like SalesForce.com. However, not every answer is world-class and focused on the enterprise customers. There are also plenty of options all the way down to the free and low-cost arena. We will look at some of these contenders that not only can serve your needs. They also can be easier to implement than SalesForce. CRM Tools Are Broad in Features One of the most significant challenges in selecting a CRM is matching the requirements. There are a lot of directions a CRM can go and still be focused on customer management. There is the sales pipeline approach that focuses on analytics about your customers. On the... Read more

October 10, 2018October 7, 2018 Patterns of Software Design

Software Design – The Singleton Pattern

The last of the creation patterns we will cover is the Singleton. This is a pattern that has a little controversy around it and may even be an anti-pattern. It is easy to implement, but the reason for needing one can trip you up. The Singleton Pattern Defined It helps to start with the “Gang of Four” definition and then we will dig into that. “Ensure a class only has one instance, and provide a global point of access to it.” This is what we use when we need one and only one instance. An example might be the application settings or an instance that represents a real-world device (keyboard, mouse, maybe even a printer or hard drive). When we access values... Read more

October 8, 2018October 8, 2018 Become a Better Developer

Detecting and Avoiding Burnout

Every developer is different in their ability to sustain a high level of productivity for any amount of time. The higher you push productivity and the longer you try to maintain it, the more difficult this becomes. Therefore, everyone has their limits. The suggestions I am making have worked for me but will need to be adjusted for your drive and endurance. I also feel the need to re-iterate that this all comes from decades of experience and adjustments. Your best approach may require years of tweaks and trials to achieve it. The Warning Signs One of the best ways to avoid burnout is to make adjustments before you go over the edge. It is harder to recover from being... Read more

October 8, 2018October 3, 2018 A Summary Of Amazon Services

AWS Developer Tools – Your Entire Environment

As we move through the groups of AWS services, the developer tools group is one of the most impressive. Amazon does an excellent job of providing you everything you need to jump right in and get into writing code. Buckle up as we look into this broad group of services. Code Commit The options for version control go beyond Git. However, it seems like the other choices are becoming less and less viable. Thus, Amazon skips looking at any other option. They have provided Code Commit as a way to give you a personal git repository that is integrated in with several of the other tools we will be looking at. It is not much more than a robust git solution. ... Read more

October 5, 2018October 1, 2018 Free and Low Cost Tools

Content Management Tools (Free and Low-cost)

Content management systems were all the rage about a decade ago. However, that market has settled down a lot and has only a few top contenders. That may not matter to you or your customers. A CMS is going to be a tool that can provide a large amount of value if it works closely to how you do. Therefore, it is worth your time to stay up to speed with the latest offerings. There are significant differences in how they approach managing content. Content Management Usually Means WordPress To be honest, WordPress is the winner of popular and useful CMS tools. It leads the market in a way that it makes little sense to develop extensions and integrations with... Read more

October 3, 2018September 23, 2018 Patterns of Software Design

Software Design – The Prototype Pattern

Our tour of the creational patterns takes us to one of the fastest ways to create a new instance. The prototype pattern provides an option to clone an instance rather than create and then set values. This approach has a variety of uses that can reduce coding and execution time. The Prototype Pattern Defined It helps to start with the “Gang of Four” definition and then we will dig into that. “Specify the kinds of objects to create using a prototypical instance, and create new objects by copying this prototype.” The benefit of this pattern is that we replace the constructor with a clone method. This approach can include parameters for the clone to limit/specify the values to clone. On the other hand, it... Read more