3:56 AM, JULY 24, 2035
Inland Malden, a fictional Mediterranean Island
Deep behind enemy lines, my Special Forces team of four has been tasked with eliminating an enemy mortar position. Before a larger invasion begins, this particularly pesky battery must be silenced. Its location seems to be constantly changing, however, necessitating a more precise strike.
Donning night vision goggles, we make our way down a tree-filled valley. Lights at a nearby farmhouse can be seen even without the goggles, where a few presumably bored guards on night watch mill around. Forewarned that it would be best to avoid getting too close to any enemy encampments, I lead my team to the fringes of the woods at the mouth of the valley, where crops of grapes or perhaps olives cover the open terrain around the farmhouse. …
Canada often ranks among the most expensive countries for wireless phone plans. Our current mobility-provider landscape consists of the Big Three national companies — Telus, Rogers, and Bell — dominating most (97%) of the market, with a few smaller providers piggybacking off the network infrastructure of these larger companies. In a few provinces (Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Québec), competitive provincial carriers drive down mobile-plan costs from the national carriers.
The overall rhetoric from the Big Three is that serving a small population dispersed across a large geographic area is expensive. A 2017 study, however, found that similarly-low-population-density Australia enjoyed phone plans over $37/month (all amounts CAD) cheaper than in Canada. Smaller providers (Freedom and Wind in Alberta) have attempted to offer competitively priced plans; however, my experience with these smaller providers is that coverage (reception) is usually limited to large urban centres and may not be as reliable in rural areas. …
Back-end web developers have an abundant — perhaps overwhelming — selection of server-side frameworks to choose from in 2019: Express on Node.js; Django on Python; Ruby on Rails; Laravel, CodeIgniter, or Symfony on PHP; and Spring on Java; among many more. Such server-side frameworks are intended to accelerate the creation of web applications, usually by providing helper libraries that minimize the coding required in development.
Interestingly, Ruby on Rails developers often rank among the top earners of web developers, despite the relatively low overall popularity of Rails servers. …
Dabbling in web design in the late 2000s as mobile devices were just starting to enter the digital landscape, I developed an appreciation for website optimization. At the time, optimization generally meant shrinking and compressing images (especially with data-limited mobile plans), minimizing page and script file-sizes, and a frequent tip that came up — and still comes up — was that you should minimize the number of HTTP requests (network requests sent between your browser and a webserver) your page makes. This meant serving ideally no more than one stylesheet, one JavaScript file (i.e., …
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