₦airaland Forum

With a lot of Nigeria's public documents, accessibility is a huge concern. Getting the documents is hard, and when successfully obtained, they are in formats like PDF which are difficult to search and make use of.

Because of this, I have embarked on a project to compile the 1999 Nigerian constitution (complete) and Laws of the Federation of Nigeria (in-progress) in usable, editable formats. Not for my personal use, but for the use of the public.

Constitution: https://github.com/mykeels/nigerian-constitution
Laws: https://github.com/mykeels/nigerian-laws

I started with the constitution, because it is the contract that defines who we are as Nigerians, and our responsibility to our Nation.

I am embarking on the laws project, because we as citizens need a way to search and track the laws that we have to live by. They are so many, and a lot of them do not exist in pubic records. If we do not begin now, we'll find ourselves living by laws that are inhumane and not know how we got there.

They are on GitHub, because it provides an open platform for collaboration, so if you have access to missing laws, you can indicate and help to add them.

Let's work together to build a country our children will be proud to live in.

GOD Bless Nigeria!

You could Google for free software (if they exist), however, another solution would be custom making it from scratch, or modifying the source code of a similar application, to suit your needs.

If it's just stocks and sales, there are many in existence. "Copper Point of Sales Software" is a pretty good one. However, if you want it to be modeled exclusively for pharmacies, you may have to dig a little deeper.

I'm working on a free POS software that will perfectly suit most businesses, including pharmacies. Perhaps, you might want to wait.

Perhaps, you should explain what you mean by cyber security. Security on a Local Network? On a WAN like the internet? On a Virtual LAN?

I have decided to share my thoughts on software development with the world, using the easiest possible media. It's so i can improve my writing style, and learn to express myself, while understanding everyone else better.

For programmers who make use of Java, VB.NET (like myself), and other High-Level Languages, it's easy to get too attached to the ease of use and abstraction that comes with using sophisticated languages, and forget the reason we got into programming in the first place, which is to learn how the computer works, and how we can manipulate it best.

The reason languages are called High-Level, is because underlying processes such as memory allocation and addressing are hidden from both the developer and user. This process is called Abstraction. It makes such languages easier to learn and use.

But does using such programming languages make us better programmers? What happens when we need to write a program where speed of execution is very important? How about where we need to work with specific parts of the memory, or work as closely as possible to the machine layer of the computer?

Sure, DLLs exist that could possibly save our asses. However, we all know how annoying searching for free code libraries online can be, when a few hundred lines of C or C++ could have easily done the job for us.

Even though C is generally regarded as a High-Level language, it is actually an intermediate language, meaning that it exists in a layer between most High Level Languages and the Assembly Layer. C makes use of pointers, meaning that you could actually work directly with memory addresses, and even choose which addresses should hold which values. An advantage of this would be that if managed well, a programmer could write memory efficient programs that would ultimately execute much faster than programs written with VB.NET and Java.

However, a disadvantage is that the freedom which C and C++ will give you could also be the chink in the armor, because poorly written code could result in a damaged operating system, or perhaps RAM. But even this, is rare because most recent compilers would inspect your code for such bugs.

Some might ask how they would write sophisticated programs and perhaps work with databases using C and C++. Call me a novice, but I just found out recently that using C and C++ to build DLLs and integrating them into my VB.NET applications gave me still very fast execution speeds.