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  How to Seem (and Be) Deep

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...

   Deep,Work,Smart,Work style,Study     2011-10-23 11:46:11

  Why PHP Was a Ghetto

Note: I wrote this over a month ago, but decided not to publish it until now.I was talking with the Co-founder of a pretty cool start-up in DUMBO the other day about why the non-PHP development world generally has such disdain for PHP and the community surrounding it. He brought up an interesting point that stuck with me, largely because I hadn’t heard it before.If you’re unaware of the usual beef most developers have with PHP, it tends to revolve around:Ug...

   PHP,Framework,MVC     2011-05-06 00:35:37

  Successful Web Design: It’s All About The Details

While the tools are out there for almost anyone to build a website, the most successful designs all share a few characteristics. These sites tend to be organized well, have great content and have all the design details in order. Small parts of your site, from alignment and bolding to contrast and color, can make or break the design. Taking care of the details before your project is published will ensure the page has a clean overall feel. Unorganized design and lack of attention to detail ...

   Web design,Details,Success     2012-04-16 13:38:56

  Preprocessor magic:Default Arguments in C

This post is for programmers who like C or for one reason or another can't use anything else but C in one of their projects. The advantages of having default arguments is not something that needs convincing. It's just very nice and convenient to have them. C++ offers the ability to define them but C under the C99 standard has no way to allow it. In this post I will detail two ways I know of implementing default arguments in C. If a reader happens to know additional ways please share in ...

   C,Preprocessor,Default arguments     2012-02-19 06:17:04

  A Month With Scala

Although I’ve played around with Scala for the few months, these efforts largely involved simple scripts and casual reading. It wasn’t until last month that the opportunity to use Scala in a large scale project finally arose and I dove right in. The project was a typical REST based web service built on top of Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, SimpleDB, S3 and Redis*. First off let’s talk about why I chose Scala in the first place. After spending a good deal of my las...

   Scala,Functional,OOP,Java,Iteration     2011-12-10 06:03:23

  Java is not the new COBOL

If you Google “Java is the new COBOL” you’ll find a glut of articles proliferating this mantra. I don’t know its origins, however I’m inclined to think it’s mostly repeated (and believed) by the Ruby community. Ruby, from a developer’s perspective is a low-friction language. A developer can just sit down at a text editor and start banging out code without really thinking about such superflous things as types. Java on the other hand, well, you h...

   Java,Ruby,Type,COBOL,Comparison     2011-11-10 10:40:56

  A re-introduction to JavaScript

Introduction Why a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world's most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. 2005 saw the launch of a number of high-profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer. It's useful to start with an idea of the language's history. JavaScript was created in 1...

   JavaScript,Types,Array,Re-introduction,OOP     2012-02-09 05:38:08

  What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie?

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at lea...

   C,Father,Dennis Ritchie,Death,Father of C,UNIX     2011-10-17 10:12:02

  How to create a language in one day

About a year ago I worked on a very interesting project which involved creating a unique world with all its history, people, physics, metaphysics and so forth. I like fictional worlds that are thoroughly created and I have always marveled at people like Tolkien or Richard Garriot who go such great lengths and even create languages for their worlds. I have since many years felt that it would be awesome to create my own language and I’m probably not alone in feeling that.When I started stud...

   Language,Develop,Short period,Programming language     2011-10-19 14:15:24

  Top 10 Go Coding Traps and Tips

Go is currently the most common programming language in cloud development. Though I use it very much in my work, I am still repeating certain mistakes. This article is more a record of these errors, figuring out the causes and solutions so that people who read this article will save themselves time when coming across the same problems. Let’s cut through to the tips. Don’t rely on index var in the for loop The most common mistake we make is that we often create goroutine&nbs...

   TIPS,GOLANG,NIL INTERFACE     2021-07-03 23:45:51

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