Admitting that may be career suicide, or possibly it will cost me dearly because 'software engineers' are raking in the big bucks these days, but the fact of the matter is that I'm a programmer. It's what I do best and it is the job title that I associate with most because it feels as though the biggest chunk of me will always be most likely to blurt that out when people ask me what my job is. That I like to program definitely helps.So instead of choosing some fancy title for what it is that I do because that might possibly make me a bit more money I chose to embrace it, and I have yet to regr...

The last couple of years more and more people have been moving towards Agile development. These techniques aren’t new, most we’re devised in the 80s or 90s. But finally these days programmers and (more importantly) business consultants, architects and clients have learned to love and embrace Agile development.Evolving requirementsIt has now become common knowledge that you can’t write down all the requirements before you start the project. These requirements have to be written down in an evolutionary matter. In short cycles/sprints we build pieces of the pro...

No, it’s not Knuth’s “The Art of Programming”. I’m talking about quite an easy-to-read (compared to TAoP) book, which, in fact, does not require any engineering or mathematical background from the reader.I am talking about C. Petzold’s “CODE”. It is a truly remarkable book about how computers work. Let me explain why I think this book is so awesome.The book starts from the very beginning, from explaining what code is, bringing several examples, like Morse code and Braille’s system. It then goes on to explain how ele...

Now that Conrad Barski's Land of Lisp (see my review on Slashdot) has come out, I definitely think Common Lisp is the best language for kids (or anyone else) to start learning computer programming.Between Land of Lisp, David Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation (really great book for people new to programming, available for free) and The Little LISPer (3rd edition, editions four and up use Scheme) you have three really great resources to get started.Lisp's syntax is a great advantage because it is so simple to learn and has so few special cases. The interactiv...

I've found, contrary to what you sometimes read, that learning Python and Haskell has not improved my programming using other languages. Haskell in particular, being so different from imperative languages, is supposed to give new insights into programming that will help you even when you are not using the language. My current experience doesn't exactly tally with this, and here is why:Demotivation.I find I think in Python, and even in Haskell to some extent, even though I have used Haskell very little. I constantly find myself wanting to use idioms from these languages, or noticing h...

Mysql is a database, and to gain access to the data within C++ you will need to be able to “talk” to the database via queries (just like on the mysql command line interface e.g. select * from tablename), the connection process is very similar to the command line interface you will need to supply connection details as in hostname (localhost normally), username, password, database to use and also there are other details that you can pass e.g port number more information can be gained from the MYSQL API pagesTo start with I created a struct that will hold the username, host etc detail...

(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp-- both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of Lisp's distinguishing features, and the reason why, unlike other languages, Lisp has dialects.)In 1960, John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry. He showed how, given a handful of simple operators and a not...

Hi! I’m Pavel and I interned at Dropbox over the past summer. One of my biggest projects during this internship was optimizing Python for dynamic page generation on the website. By the end of the summer, I optimized many of dropbox.com’s pages to render 5 times faster. This came with a fair share of challenges though, which I’d like to write about today:The ProblemDropbox is a large website with lots of dynamically generated pages. The more pages that are dynamically generated from user input, the bigger the risk becomes for Cross-site scriptingattacks. To prevent thi...