As a programmer, you’ve probably been told that writing tech blogs can offer a range of benefits. There's no shortage of articles encouraging you to start writing, and this post, this post adds to that chorus. But while the advice is solid, what’s often missing is how to begin the journey of writing tech blogs. Based on my 10+ years of experience, I’d like to share some thoughts to help you get started.From what I've seen, the reason many programmers don’t write tech blogs isn’t that they don’t want to—it's that they don’t know how to answer the ...

Programming is cool. But behind the scenes it's also difficult for many people. Many people are defeated at the early stage of learning programming. When you are not so familiar with programming, you may find you don't know where to start and what to start with first and where to apply the knowledge. Once you go though the tough period of the learning phase, you will find a whole new world. Below are some advice which can help you improve your programming skills quickly.Write more code.  The best thing to learn something quickly is practicing. You should spend more of your time on buildin...

The early ages of web era mainly consisted of webpages of text and links. At that time,Netscape was the still dominant of web browser market. As a web developer, you could develop web apps(or better to call web pages) easily with knowledge of HTML only. But with the evolution of web, new technologies came out, we can see more robust web apps around us everywhere. Today as a web developer, the ability to run and configure a web server and edit HTML to create some simple web pages has lost almost all of its value, you need to equip yourself with lots of different technologies such as HTML5,CSS3 ...

Matt Small, creative director at independent developer Vector Unit, thought his small studio would focus on consoles forever when it was working on Hydro Thunder Hurricane for Xbox Live Arcade.But then the smartphone and tablet market picked up, and mobile devices started to offer increasing amounts of processing power. That increase in power opened up new opportunities for the people at Vector Unit, which had years of developing for consoles.So the studio worked with Tegra chipmaker Nvidia and created the Android and iOS game Riptide GT, a jet ski racing game that took five months to develop....

Writing documentation is one of those things that is dreaded by many developers. It takes a lot of effort and time to get right. And too often, people take shortcuts. This is sad, because well designed documentation is the key to getting people excited about your project, whether it's open source or a developer focused product.In fact, I argue that the most important piece of UX for a developer product isn't the homepage or the sign up process or the SDK download. It's the API documentation! Who cares if your product is the most powerful thing in the world if no one understands how to use it.I...

You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming.Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You'll needsome advice to make sure you continue on the right path, and get the mostenjoyment out of your newly chosen activity.I've been programming for a very long time. So long that it's incrediblyboring to me. At the time that I wrote this book, I knew about 20 programminglanguages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on howweird they were. Eventually though this just became boring and couldn't holdmy interest anymore. This does...

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So what sort of tricks do they use while they're under the pump, doing 12+ hour per day for weeks on end?Below ...

Planning to be an Intern in the Bay Area during Summer 2012? Make sure to read an Intern's Guide to the Bay Area, and join the 2012 Facebook group. (via this guy, via this guy) Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05. According to Joel, No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.As such: here’s everything you ever wanted to know about tech internships, plus some bloviating about my experience. The TL;DR is, try to have at least two internships: on...