Studying for a master’s degree can be one of the best steps to take for your career and personal development. Whether you want to pursue an academic career and go on to gain further qualifications such as a doctorate, or want to use your master’s degree to further your career prospects, earn a promotion in your current job or even facilitate a career change, there are many reasons why more and more people are choosing to return to education. The opportunity to study for a master’s degree online has made it easier than ever for those running their own business, working full-ti...

I am a programmer in C and C++, although I don't stick to either language and write a mixture of the two. Sometimes having code in classes, possibly with operator overloading, or templates and the oh so great STL is obviously a better way. Sometimes use of a simple C function pointer is much much more readable and clear. So I find beauty and practicality in both languages. I don't want to get into the discussion of "If you mix them and compile with a C++ compiler, it's not a mix anymore, it's all C++" I think we all understand what I mean by mixing them. Also, I don't want to talk abou...

A web developer today is expected to be an expert in every aspect of their craft and JavaScript is no exception.  Years ago JavaScript seemed to be more of an annoyance, producing those trailers at the bottom of the browser.  This has changed and JavaScript is a first-class citizen as a functional programming language and what seems like an unlimited number of resources covering the language.I have been doing more and more JavaScript lately, both on the front-end and some node.js on the back end.  I wanted to share some great resources I use for what’s new with regards to...

How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?For a while, I didn’t have a real good solution. Something would trigger me to remember “Oh yeah! I really wanted to learn more about that”. I would spend the evening doing busy learning - it seemed like I was learning but I really wasn’t.Instead of trying to do Deliberate Practice, I’d fool myself into thinking I was investing my time wisely by reading blog posts and examples but not actually doing much of anything.Soon, the enthusiasm would pass and my progress would stale. Rinse and repe...

I posted a very brief response to a post on HackerNews yesterday challenging the notion that 8 weeks of guided tutelage on Ruby on Rails is not going to produce someone who you might consider a "junior RoR developer." It did not garner many upvotes so I figured that like most conversation on the Internet it faded into the general ambient chatter. Imagine my surprise when I woke up to couple handfuls' worth of emails from around the world asking me what I did, how I did it, and how I got a job. I'm assuming, judging by the relatively small amount of mail I got from a random ...

I recently attended a discussion group whose topic, at that session, was Death.  It brought out deep emotions.  I think that of all the Silicon Valley lunches I've ever attended, this one was the most honest; people talked about the death of family, the death of friends, what they thought about their own deaths.  People really listened to each other.  I wish I knew how to reproduce those conditions reliably.I was the only transhumanist present, and I was extremely careful not to be obnoxious about it.  ("A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change t...