John Louros

Social networks are, without a question, one of the greatest technological achievements of the last decade. It's hard to imagine a world without them. Even if you spend no time keeping up with your virtual persona, and you despise the ones that do, you must acknowledge the impact of Social networks in today’s society. It's around us in the real world; just look at all the junk mail from last week and the abundance of "like us on Facebook", or "follow us on Twitter", or "check us out on Google+"… Turn on the TV and check the little hashtag at the corner of the screen. Go to a restaurant and do a FourSquare check-in to get the latest deal. It's literally everywhere.

A common trend that I see with Software Development teams is the absolute need to over-engineer prototype solutions. "Hey Mark, can you build me a website where I can upload the photos from my phone?". Two months later Mark comes back with a budget estimate of two million dollars to cover hiring and infrastructure costs and a three year roadmap... "Dude, I just want a website to upload my photos... It will cost me 3 years and 2 million?". Seriously Mark, why couldn't you focus on the goal, keep it small and simple? Why did you have to go "all-in" right from the start?

Time for another quick tip. Today let's write a simple PowerShell script to download a bunch of images from a website. As an example, I will use Bing to search for 'funny pictures' and where the resulting images are 'Free to share and use commercially'. This can be quite useful when you are looking for images to use on your projects, presentations, websites, whatever. Just a small disclaimer, anyone is absolutely free to use and modify the PowerShell script I have written for this post, however I won't be held responsible for how it's used. Any license infringements will be the responsibly of the person executing the script.

Today I marking the official start of my new blog series entitled quick tips. For this series I will focus on simple things that developers might find handy; from scripts, to commands, hot-keys and other tips that, maybe you already know, maybe not. Most of the posts from this series, will be direct, quick and simple. Personally, I just want to share the notes I have been gathering though the years. For my first quick tip post, I will show how you can list all remote desktop connections, and kill a particular session.

As you might have heard, last month (April of 2015) Google announced some changes to their search algorithm upon "unfriendly" mobile websites would get demoted in future searches. As Google claim, recent researches suggest that a poor mobile user experience tend to transmit a careless/sloppy impression, of both website owner and device being used. This decision is highly compressible since web traffic coming from mobile devices, is rapidly growing and Android (owned by Google) being most used mobile OS, is responsible to provide an enjoyable mobile experience not only with Apps but with web browsing too. While Google can't fix websites to be mobile friendly, they can ”derank” them from their search results.