Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

 ALL


  Learning Ruby and Ruby vs Lisp

The company I work for has a lot of legacy Ruby code, and as Ruby has become kind of a mainstream language, I decided to get a book about it and learn how it works. As my learning resource, I chose The Ruby Programming language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto as that receives great customer reviews, covers Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9 and is authoritative because the language creator is one of the authors. The book makes a good read in general. There are plenty of code examples, but not too much to obscure the prose. What I found first interesting, later annoyi...

6,475 1       OOP RUBY DIFFERENCE FEATURE FUNCTIONAL LISP


  Thoughts on Python 3

I spent the last couple of days thinking about Python 3's current state alot. While it might not appear to be the case, I do love Python as alanguage and especially the direction it's heading in. Python has been notonly part of my life for the last couple of five years, it has been thelargest part by far.Let there be a warning upfront: this is a very personal post. I counted ahundred instances of a certain capital letter in this text.That's because I am very grateful for all the opportunities I got over thelast few years to travel the world, to talk to people and to share thespirit that an ...

1,909 0       PYTHON FEATURE DRAWBACK PYTHON 3 EMBRACE


  What Separates Good Designers from Great Ones

Most of the design books you read, including my own, are about how to be a good, competent designer. They are about how to make strong, reasoned design decisions and about design methods and tools. But what they won’t—can’t—teach you is how to become a great designer.The only way to be a great designer is to produce great products. Everything else is…well, everything else. I’m convinced that the people who are great designers, while assuredly they’re both talented and experienced, have taken extra measures to ensure that what they produce...

2,149 0       COMPARISON DESIGNER FEATURE GREAT DESIGNER GOOD DESIGNER


  The Mature Programmer

1. The Mature ProgrammerThe mature programmer manages their own time and productivity well. The MP knows that maintenance is as much work as the initial writingand code always takes longer than you think. The MP knows that any changes to code can introduce bugs, no matter how seemingly trivial.The MP knows that premature optimization is foolish and dangerous. The MP knows that sexy coding like writing big complex systems fromscratch is rarely the best way to go. The MP does not get into ego competitions about who has the prettiest code. The MP acheives thebest final result in the minimum ...

2,405 0       EFFICIENCY FEATURE CODING STANDARD MATURE PROGRAMMER MP


  How to tell if this idea is a good idea.

Good Idea or Bad Idea?I’ve got an idea for a product. I’ve talked to some people. I know some people in the industry. I have been cold calling others. The idea is promising. The price point people have agreed with is about where I would like it to be. I’ve shown some mockups around and iterated on them. Now, I feel the need to start writing code because, well, I like writing code. And I’m comfortable writing code.But I see lean people.Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Jason Cohen, Ash Maurya, and a thousand other blogs think I should talk to X people in Y stage...

2,139 0       GOOD FEATURE IDEA CODING BAD DISTINGUISH


  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 said in my talk, if it was just me that had a poor opinion of Scala I would probably keep quiet (or t...

1,912 0       SCALA FEATURE MODULE EJB CONCURRENCY


  The Anatomy of a Perfect Web Site

Many sites on the web are good. They are well-designed, clear, have great information architecture and are easy to navigate. Often, web designers emphasize the “design” part too much, and neglect the other equally important things. However, there are sites which aren’t that aesthetically pleasing, but still are the best sites in the world. They may look like a big, sad bag of wrestling underwear on the outside, but their underlying user experience is really, really refined, and thus makes the appearance part fade away while visiting the site. How and why?A case study: ...

2,526 0       INTERACTION WEB DESIGN WEBSITE FEATURE ANATOMY


  Social networks are becoming your personal operating system

Today’s biggest trends — the mobile web, social media, gamification, real-time — are changing the landscape for business. Consumers are connecting with one another, and in the process they’re becoming increasingly empowered and influential.How these connected consumers discover, share, and communicate is different than the way they used to. This change requires businesses to rethink their approach. Organizations need to examine the impact of technology on consumer behavior and understand how connected consumers make decisions and influence the decisions of their pee...

2,535 0       FACEBOOK FEATURE SOCIAL NETWORK OPERATING SYSTEM FACEBOOK ME