So there's recently been a bit of hype about another Colebourne article: http://blog.joda.org/2011/11/real-life-scala-feedback-from-yammer.htmlI'd like to respond to a few points he makes.First - You should evaluate Scala and pay attention to its benefits and flaws before adopting it.  Yes, there are flaws to Scala.   Working at typesafe makes you more aware of some of them.  We're actively working to reduce/minimize/get rid of these.   In my opinion, the negatives of using Scala are peanuts compared to the postives of choosing Scala over Java.  I think everyone s...

I have been using Emacs for over a year now. I actually didn’t learn a lot when I started using it (just the basics to get going and then some relatively common keyboard shortcuts), but lately I have been reading and learning much more about it. I’m so grateful by everything I’ve learned from different people on the net that I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve learned, and a simple major mode for editing AsciiDoc documents.As a long-time VIM user, I feel it’s my duty to make a micro-introduction to Emacs to VIM users (skip this whole paragraph if you...

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, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen,...

Click for a larger imageGhostery, the browser plugin that allows its users to "track the trackers," just released data on the tags, widgets and analytics on websites that are the worst in terms of slowing page loads to a crawl.Update: Ghostery discovered an error in their original data set. It appears that Millenial Media was not on this year's list at all, and the #2 slot belonged to AdFunky. Both the text and the graph above have been changed to reflect this.Any webmaster worth his or her salt already knows that slow page loads adversely affect Google rank and pageviews, but not everyone see...

Why do people chew gum? If an anthropologist from Mars ever visited a typical supermarket, they’d be confounded by those shelves near the checkout aisle that display dozens of flavored gum options. Chewing without eating seems like such a ridiculous habit, the oral equivalent of running on a treadmill. And yet, people have been chewing gum for thousands of years, ever since the ancient Greeks began popping wads of mastic tree resin in their mouth to sweeten the breath. Socrates probably chewed gum.It turns out there’s an excellent rationale for this long-standing cultural habit: ...

If this isn’t a Zawinski quote, it should be.I have avoided the JVM my entire life. I am presently confronted with problems which fit in the JVM; JVM libraries, concurrency, giant data: all that good stuff. Rather than doing something insane like learning Java, I figured I’d learn me some Clojure. Why not? It’s got everything I need: JVM guts, lispy goodness; what is not to love?Well, as it turns out, one enormous, gaping lacuna is Clojure’s numerics performance. Let’s say you want to do something simple, like sum up 3 million numbers in a vector. I do shit l...

The object literal notation in JavaScript looks like:var fido = {name: "Fido", barks: true};or var fido = {};fido.name = "Fido";fido.barks = true;From assoc arrays to objectsIn PHP you would call that an associative array. $fido = array( 'name' => "Fido", 'barks' => true);And you can easily make it an object too:$fido = (object)$fido;echo gettype($fido); // "object"Or if you want to start with a blank object and add stuff to it:$fido = (object)array();or$fido = new StdClass();and then$fido->name = "Fido";$fido->barks = true;A little explanation maybe: objects in JavaScript are ha...

7Share6inShareAgile methodology was supposed to be a solution to solve all of our problems. But it looks like it’s not. Some issues appear when companies start to implement Agile in their organizations. A research has been done on seventeen companies using Agile methodology (People over processes: Key people challenges in Agile Development). Authors chose nine of the most often reported issues. I’d like to focus on four, in my opinion, most important.#1 Developer fear caused by transparency of skill deficienciesThe Progress of each team member’s work is usually rep...