Computer related technical skills are usually thought as complicated and difficult to understand. It's very difficult for one to get hands on one skill or master one skill. But if you really do want to learn something useful within one day, there are some good choices which will not take too long to get to know and use..Version control:- Git, GitHub and SVNRegular expressionsAWKsedGrepLearn how to do things with Vim that you never knew could be done.Set up a crawler that can scrape some webpages and parse some basic data.Set up a bigger crawler that has to fill out a form or two.Program a basi...

Recently I saw somebody asked a question in a forum, the question is "Which programming language should I learn first?". Then someone answered this question. His answer:Depends.To program in an expressive and powerful language: PythonTo get a website up quickly: PHPTo mingle with programmers who call themselves “rockstars”: Ruby.To really learn to program: C.To achieve enlightenment: Scheme.To feel depressed: SQLTo drop a chromosome: Microsoft Visual BasicTo get a guaranteed, mediocre, but well paying job writing financial applications in a cubicle under fluorescent lights: Ja...

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effe...

After I wrote my last post, a surprising number of people emailed me asking why I decided to join a startup after graduating from Duke. Many of those I heard from face similar decisions today: either they are college seniors choosing between a big company and a startup, or they are recent graduates who work at a big company and are thinking about making the switch. What’s interesting is that most are already leaning towards the startup career path: it seems they just want someone to assure them it’s a rational move. Their friends and family are skeptical: “How can you ...