Opinion

The year was 1997. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were musing on love and the motions of amusement park rides, Pathfinder landed on Mars and Leonardo DiCaprio drew Kate Winslet as per one of his French associates.  It was around this time I had heard about a thing called “Java”, a fancy new language everyone was talking about. The word on IRC was that it was based on work Sun Microsystems had originally done for embedded software on set-top boxes and other smart appliances.

When I started out as a developer the internet was made of wood and owl feathers, held together with spit, pluck, gumption and whatever else it is that you kids today no longer seem to have (job security? the possibility of owning your own home? a habitable climate?). We had to chisel our code out of the rocks 26 hours a day, 10 days a week, wait two years for it to compile, and the only way of knowing if it worked was if the old wise woman of the company divined the error messages in the entrails of a junior developer. I am now that wise old woman, and so I must pass on the things I have learned.

Adobe Experience Manager is designed to cater for content authoring of multiple sites by multiple content authors. Naturally, this process needs to be governed by strict Access Control Lists (ACLs) to manage who is allowed to do what at any given time. In this post, I’ll cover various approaches that can be used to manage authorizables and ACLs in AEM that should help you make a more informed decision when picking a permissions management strategy for your next project.
In 2010, Patrick McKenzie wrote the now-famous blog “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names”, in which he listed 40 things that were not universally true about names. Did programmers sit up, take notice and change their attitudes to names? Sadly, not really. We still get asked to fill our names out in online forms which assume we have a first name and a last name (in that order) and which refuse to allow us to continue unless we have filled out both. They assume our names can be entered in alphabetic characters, often only ASCII. I fear that part of the reason that this blog post had less impact than I hoped was that Patrick did not give examples of how each assumption can be false. But having worked in a previous life on IBM's Global Name Management product, I can assure you that it's all true. Still not convinced? In this post I'm going to list all 40 of Patrick's original falsehoods, but give you an example (or two) drawn from my experiences working in this space. Ready? Let's go!
I wasn’t sure what my first day at Shine would look like. I looked for some blog posts that resembled this one for some insights but I figured everyone’s experience is different. I hadn’t worked in this industry before, and my work experience at a laptop repair shop didn’t really count. The only relevant experience I had was the industry project I did in my final year of study and that turned out to be very valuable. I knew I would be thrown into the deep end and have to learn quickly. Since day one, I’ve been surrounded by great mentors, helping with code reviews, best practices to follow, great book suggestions and general insights into how this business works. Anyway, I think enough time has passed now to reflect on this year.

Adobe Experience Manager’s latest release became generally available on the 26th of April 2017 and being Adobe Partners we got the opportunity to try it out hot off the press. It’s a minor release but introduces some new key features that go a long way to make Adobe Experience Manager a more enjoyable product to use. Not only from an authoring standpoint but also for developers. Here’s some of the great things about 6.3 as well as the “not so great”.