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Shooting with Nikon D3200 50mm lens

Nikon 50mm example

Not so long time ago I decided to come back to digital photography making Nikon D3200 my new choice for DSLR. Together with it I purchased Nikon 50mm f/1.8 D AF lens and here are photos from the session with young aspiring actor Vitaly Benko.

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Tags: 50mm lens, dslr, Nikon D3200

So you want to build a calling card company in the cloud – but should you?

With recent multiplication of cloud telecom provider like Twilio, Plivo, Tropo, Nexmo, TelAPI, Apifon.... and many more popping out every day, I had this idea about how easy it should be now to build a calling card solution based completely in the cloud and on one of the provider's rich API. A weekend or so of coding, thought I and it should be ready for production! But little did I know about what it takes to create something as simple as a calling card service.

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Tags: grails, plivo, twilio

Palm Pre 2 as budget alternative to Android and iPhone

It has happend so, that for more than a month I am an owner of Palm Pre 2. Due to the circumstances, I no longer have my beloved iPhone 5 and is definitely not paying $ 650.00 to get one. For some of the folks, it may come as a nerve breaking to let a shiny Apple product go and not being able to have a replacement with the same level of comfort, polished software and retina display. But... being a developer, it is essential to always be able to replace things, re-write the code, re-adjust the setup and find budget alternatives for situations your life may surprise you with.

Being left with no choice but to purchase a new smartphone, I started thinking about what are my options and most importantly - what is the cost for each: Read full story »

Hiring software developers – picking talent from the pile of coders

This post is inspired by the recent job posting I came across of from Kikin.COM. InsideStartups sends me emails every weekend, and obviously some of those get opened, with some of the links clicked.

It is indeed true, that many of the software developers come from the crowd of complete nerds who are deeply submerged into their own culture. While hiring process involves measuring their qualifications, it does not account for anything beyond that. And by beyond, I mean creativity and ability "to look outside of the box". I have met situations like this a few times and while developers were shining their diplomas, some of them were just good at writing the code, but nothing else.

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Tags: developers, software

Building topHDvids.com – a lot of JS/JSON and a little php

I have been to quite a number of parties recently, where host's entertainment options were limited to a TV with audio system and/or connected iPod/iPhone. Thus a library of music/videos at times was old, not updated and let's be honest only to the likes of the host.

To fix something like this you have two options, bring content with you and bother with setup to connect, or get a source of media which will be accessible in most setups and make sure this source constantly updated with fresh music/vids. This is how www.topHDvids.com came to life. 90% Javascript and 10% php, like anything simple and brilliant it was done in one day.

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