Before all the laws of software, before the purpose of software, before the science of software design itself, there is a singular fact that determines the success or failure of a software developer. This fact makes the difference between the senior engineer who can seem to pick up new languages in a day and the junior developer who struggles for ten years just to get a paycheck, programming other people’s designs and never improving enough to get a promotion. It differentiates the poor programmers from the good ones, the good programmers from the great ones, and the great ones from the...

After few years on Warsztat (a Polish gamedev site) I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon. Every now and then there are Compos (programming competitions) organized in two different flavours. Some compos are single-run events that last only few hours, others are long-term (several days/weeks). And as an extra catch, the former are usually restricted to basic APIs (SDL, OpenGL etc) while the latter are free-for-all (all sorts of engines, UDK/Unity allowed).Now, results are somewhat shocking. Much more people participate in short compos than the long ones. But the best part is that qualit...

This post lists several benefits of taking a break during programming.You work smarter, not harder. Once, I worked really hard on a feature. For two weeks, 12 hours a day, I put in a lot of effort. After those two weeks, I took a break and came up with several ideas that made much of the work unnecessary.You think more clearly. Being tired has a similar effect as being drunk. At the end of a day, I often kid myself that I’ll just get this one thing finished quickly to have a fresh start the next day. In reality, I usually need to clean up yesterday’s messes then. If instead I fin...

Peter Knego states something interesting: “It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.”. He uses reputation and other metrics from StackOverflow to corroborate his point.His summary is:Number of coders drops significantly with age. Top developer numbers, at age 27, drop by half every 6-7 years.Developers in their 40s answer roughly twice as much and ask half the questions compared to colleagues in their 20s. It seems younger generation learns and older generation teaches.Quality of posts, i.e. upvotes earned by post, only slightly increases with age.Seniors earn the...

This post is part of our ReadWriteHack channel, which is a resource and guide for developers. The channel is sponsored by the Intel AppUp Developer Program. As you're exploring these resources, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: AIR for AppUp: What You Need To Know Rackspace recently published a nice infographic on the evolution of programming languages. It starts with FORTRAN and COBOL and runs through Ruby on Rails (which, yes, is a framework and not a language). Unfortunately, it omits such influential languages as  Lisp,  ALGOL 60 and  Smalltalk. But inclu...

If you are a student, you probably know C, C++ and Java. A few know VB, or C# / .NET. At some point you’ve probably built some web pages, so you know HTML, CSS and maybe JavaScript. By and large, it is difficult to find students who have any exposure to languages beyond this. And this is a shame because there are a number of programming languages out there which will make you a better programmer.In this article, we give some reasons why you must learn Python or Ruby2.Compared to C/C++/Java – Python/Ruby allow you to write the same program with much, much fewer lines of code. It i...

Why programming is unique profession - Presentation TranscriptIntroduction Some people says programming is difficult and for some others it is so easy. It not only depends on your capabilities, but your attitude for work. Programming is hard indeed, but not at all as difficult as life of a crook or joker who pretend, lie and act for living. Knowing what you do, life is going to be much more interesting and enjoyable for a programmer. You play with a dumb machine Computer is dumb machine. Unless you give precise instruction, the computer can not understand. Working with a dumb is obviously diff...

Recently I took on the enormous task of learning Objective-C from the bottom up and I was struck by something I couldn’t shake: this is too hard. An experienced developer might scoff at me for saying that, but it’s true. I’ll be honest about my education, Calculus II was the most math I ever took, I have an advanced degree from Berkeley in Journalism. I am a proficient HTML/CSS developer and can glue enough javascript together to solve almost any problem that has presented itself. My first encounter with C was at a community college when I was 13, and found the syntax so r...