SEARCH KEYWORD -- Design principle

  Why using anchors as buttons sucks

So let's say you're an awesome web developer making an awesome web app. One day, you add a link in the web app that has an event handler instead of an href. Testing it, you realize that your cursor doesn't change when hovering over it, unlike a normal link. You think for a minute and then give it a cursor:pointer style, which fixes the issue. You are happy.The next day, QA informs you that the link cannot be tabbed to. Confused, you do some research and find a solution to the problem: Sim...

   Anchor,Button,Link,Sucks     2012-02-05 07:22:39

  The 15 Golden Rules of UI design and flow.

Last night a good friend of mine showed me the latest Need for Speed game on the iphone / ipad. Quite an impressive feat of rendering and a relatively good game to boot. However, the front end, wow, a classic case in UI mis-engineering. Loads of stats, pages and pages of bits and pieces to wade through – a classic case of over stimulating the player with lots of decisions they have no business making – stuff that will significantly change their game play experience but being...

   UI design,Game design,Feature     2012-04-05 12:20:18

  Event Loop Mechanism in JavaScript

Introduction The Event Loop Mechanism The event loop mechanism is the core of how JavaScript handles asynchronous operations. It ensures that the execution order of the code aligns with the expected sequence. JavaScript's Single Thread JavaScript is known for being a single-threaded language, meaning it executes one task at a time. This can lead to a significant issue: if a thread is blocked, the entire program becomes unresponsive. To address this, JavaScript introduced the event loop mechanism...

   JAVASCRIPT,EVENT MECHANISM,EVENT LOOP     2024-07-03 08:19:09

  "Programmer" is an Overgeneralization

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald Knuth Earlier today, I came across a post during a google-fu session that claimed that no one should use the C++ standard library function make_heap, because almost nobody uses it correctly. I immediately started mentally ranting about how utterly ridiculous this claim is, because anyone whose gone to a basic algorithm class would know how to properly use make_heap. Then I started thinking about all the ...

   Programmer,Overgeneration,Overload     2012-03-13 08:13:16

  How do Silicon Valley companies recruit

There are a lot of friends asking me about the basic flow of how Silicon Valley companies recruit engineers. As a candidate, I tried Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and I received offer from all these companies. As an interviewer, I have interviewed no less than 300 people and I know about the process of recruitment. I write this article with the hope of inspiring people who want to go to Silicon Valley or who are preparing for interviews or who are in the design of the recruiting process...

   Facebook,Interview,Experience,Silicon Valley     2012-05-15 06:36:52

  Tricks with Direct Memory Access in Java

Java was initially designed as a safe managed environment. Nevertheless, Java HotSpot VM contains a “backdoor” that provides a number of low-level operations to manipulate memory and threads directly. This backdoor – sun.misc.Unsafe â€“ is widely used by JDK itself in packages like java.nio or java.util.concurrent. It is hard to imagine a Java developer that uses this backdoor in any regular development because this API is extremely dangerous...

   Java,Directly memory access,Tricks,JVM     2012-02-13 05:31:19

  All Programmers Are Self-Taught

When I was a teenager I played high caliber baseball. I’m competitive to a fault and when I decide I want to be good at something, results usually follow. Now I’m a third year undergrad studying computer science. There’s something critically different between programming and sports though: A pitching coach teaches you how to pitch, but a CS professor doesn’t teach you how to code. I was surprised that neither my TAs nor professors critiqued my code during my firs...

   Programming,Style,Habit,Self learning     2011-12-21 10:25:50

  Text editor vs IDE

A meaningless editor war Many people like to debate which editor is the best. The biggest controversy is between Emacs and vi. vi supporters like to say: "Look it's very fast to type in vi, our fingers no need to leave the keyboard, we even no need to use the up,down,left and right keys" Emacs supporters often downplayed this and said: "What's the use of typing fast if I just need to press one key and it equals to dozens keys you type in vi?"In fact, there is another group of people who like to ...

   Editor,IDE,Structured editor,vi     2013-05-20 12:03:39

  The Five Stages of Hosting

As a proud VPS survivor, I thought it might be fun to write up five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of 'cloudiness'. People who aren't interested in this kind of minutia would be wise to pull the rip cord right here. 1. The Monastery You run your site on an 'application platform' like Heroku, Azure, or Google App Engine. You design your application around whatever metaphors and APIs the service lays out, and in return you are veiled from all t...

   Website hosting,Recommendations,Stages,Advantages     2012-01-30 05:43:42

  The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful. Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, ...

   Software,Obvious,Easy,Possible,Requirements     2011-11-30 11:48:12

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