SEARCH KEYWORD -- productivity tips

  What Makes A Great Programmer?

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the year 2000, Dr. Pargas was standing at the front of our data structures class talking about some data structure-y topic while an SSH session was projected on the wall in front of us. Someone asked a question, and he said something along the lines of "Well, if you want to be a real computer scientist you need to start using vi". I think he was smiling as he said it, and in hindsight his statement wasn't even slightly true, but being young and ...

   Tips.Programmer,Great,Great programmer     2011-06-08 03:08:04

  Why would a developer invest time in your startup’s platform?

The notion of developing a platform is highly addictive for technology founders. It ticks every “this is awesome” box and its drawbacks do not become evident until after you’ve already overcommitted.When you’re sunk deep in your idea, you start seeing the infinite number of directions it might go. It could be used for creativity or education or advertising or television or personal productivity or anything.Possibilities are exciting.You soon realise you can’...

   Platform,Invest,Attraction,Sell point,Developer     2011-10-31 10:49:37

  What It’s Really Like to Work at Google

Google. It’s one of the most common household words in today’s modern society, and yet for a company that is used by most of us essentially as an algorithm, it tends to trigger a highly emotional response when overheard. It’s a dream job for college students nearing graduation, a highly coveted invitation to lunch by friends and colleagues who work near campus, and the bane of existence for those who produce content for the Internet. For several years, most of the publ...

   Google,Work,Life,Workplace     2012-01-18 08:19:00

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41

  Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong

Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning. Really, I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out. And it turns out that everything I thought I knew about learning is wrong. Here’s wh...

   Learning,Thought,Before,Wrong     2012-01-30 05:45:36

  About JavaScript source map

Last week jQuery 1.9 was released. This is the last release before jQuery 2.0. It adds many new functions, one of them is the source map. By accessing http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.0/jquery.min.js , you can scroll to the last line and you will see below line : 　//@ sourceMappingURL=jquery.min.map This is source map, it is a separate file and it is put at the same directory as the source file. You can click here and see what it looks like. It's an very useful functio...

   Source map, JavaScript, jQuery     2013-02-01 07:06:44

  GDC 2012: How Vector Unit made the leap from console to mobile games

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 Nv...

   Advice,Game design,Palm,Phone,Change     2012-03-14 13:46:22

  Scala feels like EJB 2, and other thoughts

At Devoxx last week I used the phrase "Scala feels like EJB 2 to me". What was on my mind?ScalaFor a number of years on this blog I've been mentioning a desire to write a post about Scala. Writing such a post is not easy, because anyone who has been paying attention to anti-Scala blog posts will know that writing one is a sure fire way of getting flamed. The Scala community is not tolerant of dissent.But ultimately, I felt that it was important for me to speak out and express my opinions. As I s...

   Scala,Module,EJB,Concurrency,Feature     2011-11-22 08:29:44

  How To Write A Good Programming Test

I’ve taken and marked a lot of programming tests in the past. I love doing them as it’s always good to see what challenges different programmers have come up with when designing them. Unfortunately, however, most of them aren’t very good. Below is a list of general ideas to help increase the quality of programmer tests. 1. Keep it relevant Too many of the tests have questions on content that simply isn’t relevant to the job. The whole idea behind a programming test i...

   Programming test,Interview,Questions,Pro     2011-08-26 02:46:44

  Bionic Office

Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a replacement for my grandmother's old brownstone where we spent our first few years, working from bedrooms and the garden. Most software managers know what good office space would be like, and they know they don't have it, and can't have it. Office space seems to be the one thing that nobody can get rig...

   Work place,Life,Office,Confortable     2012-01-18 09:00:55

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