Fernando Zamora

Agile development is an approach to software development that we can all agree is effective and efficient.  In many cases when companies adopt this approach they fail miserably, resulting in unfinished products or products that fail to deliver the necessary value.In my opinion the reason for this failure is a failure to understand the principles of the Agile Manifesto. In many cases organizations focus way too much in the process itself as opposed to the philosophy behind it all. Organizations either approach it with a by the numbers approach as dictated by some certification process or agile specialist or with a make up the rules as you go approach.  Both of these approaches have a negative effect. In the former case an extreme amount of effort is placed on the process itself and not on the focus of delivering working software early and frequently.  This also comes with working extra hours over 40 a week which in turn burns out the developers. Developers can become f...

Recently I read about BrowserId in Web Designer magazine.  It seems that BrowserId removes the burden of maintaining passwords within your application.  As such I became quite interested.  I set out to get it working with MVC.  The example in WD was with PHP.   I don't do PHP, for no other reason than I just haven't been exposed to it.  I found some hints along the way on how to integrate it with Asp.net. First I found this blog; http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/asp-net/7784b8c5-51ed-4aa9-b837-ed4084924ee8/implementing-browserid-signin-with-aspnet.aspx .  That put me halfway there but the problem was that that blog demo'ed it using Asp.net webforms.   So I made it my mission to integrate it with MVC.   The browserid backend code was encapsulated in it's own class so it wasn't very difficult. I don't want to say much about how I got it working other than to point you to the demo site, the github repository and some oth...

So you've learned how to create a website.  You wrote all the pages added all of the images.  You loaded your site up to the Web Host and you are set to go.  Everything is great and life goes on.  Not so fast. How will you know if your website is being visited and when? How many hits are you getting each week, month or for the year? We've all heard of page counters.  Those are the little widgets that you can add to your site that provide live information on the number of visitors your site has had up to date.  There is only one problem with those widgets, most of the time they're cumbersome to add and they're specific to the Content Management System that you may be using.  Another disadvantage to them is that they lack much vital information. I mean they only provide you with the total visits but not when those visits occurred, for example. If you website is valuable to you, you will want more information than that. Enter Google Analytics.  ...