One of the promises that comes with HTML5 mobile apps, especially those to be featured on Firefox OS, is that your existing web applications, if created properly (feature detection, responsive design, etc.), can be turned into a working mobile application in relatively little time.  And that's the way it should be, right?  If my app works in the device's browser, shouldn't it work perfectly as a standalone app?  Let's say you have a responsive, well-written website/app and you want to let Firefox OS users experience your work as a first class app;  the following few steps will help you make those Firefox OS app dreams a reality.

I’m going to talk today about what goes on in inside developers’ heads when they make estimates, why that’s so hard to fix, and how I personally figured out how to live and write software (for very happy business owners) even though my estimates are just as brutally unreliable as ever.

But first, a story.

It was the <insert time period that will not make me seem absurdly old>, and I was a young developer ¹. In college, I had aced coding exercises, as a junior dev I had cranked out code to solve whatever problems someone specified for me, quicker than anyone expected. I could learn a new language and get productive in it over a weekend (or, so I believed).

And thus, in the natural course of things, I got to run my own project. The account manager explained, in rough form, what the client was looking for, we talked it out, and I said, “That should be about 3 weeks of work.” “Sounds good,” he said. And so I got to coding.

How long do you imagine this project took? Four weeks? Maybe five?

Um, actually: three months.