iToto's Blog

A Montreal based full-stack web developer who loves learning and trying out new things. This blog is my attempt to document my work as well as a place to discuss ideas or topics that I find interesting. Feel free to follow me on linked social networks.

Filtering by Tag: programming

Technical Debt (Re-post)

I recently came across a blog post on a very popular topic in software development:

Technical Debt 101 by Maiz Lulkin

Most of the developers I know (myself included) would be the first to advise for a re-write of a legacy application. Likewise, most of the managers that I've worked with are always there to advise against it. They would say things along the lines of "This would take too long, we need this new feature yesterday" or "We don't have the funds or resources to support this right now".

While both sides have valid points (and are probably exaggerating their points for their own cause) the truth lies somewhere in the intersection of both circles in a venn diagram. This article - in my opinion - gives a description of what the venn diagram looks like. Maiz paints a detailed picture of what both sides argue and then goes on to explain what that intersection area contains. After reading his post, my doubts or uncertainness about re-writes have been silenced. A required reading for developers and managers alike.

#hackmtl JavaScript Hackathon!


This weekend Anna, Graham and I participated in the [#hackmtl][3] hackathon. It was a javascript hackathon inviting people to create web apps and chrome extensions. The venue ended up being at the top of Montreal's Olympic Stadium Tower. It was probably the coolest place they could have chosen to host the event.

Can you spot us?


For the hackathon, we decided to make a Meme manager. Somewhere you can easily collect your favorite gifs/pictures with easy access to that you can quickly post them on forums, chats etc. We also included a quick search so that you can quickly search for some on the web. The code is up on github and is free to use. There are still a couple of kinks in it that we weren't able to iron out by the end of the hackathon, but we will be fixing those soon.

We really enjoyed the hackathon and wanted to thank everyone who made it possible. They did a bang-up job and we would definitely go to the next one :)

Go to the blog post on #MtlStartupTalent to read more about it.