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  Letter to a Young Developer

I’ve been getting some emails from young developers wanting to “level up” as programmers. I’m definitely not the first to write about this topic, so I’m not sure how much I have to add. Still, for what it’s worth here are a few points off the top of my head: Work with other developers. We are at a wonderful time in the history of technology when for the first time, it doesn’t really matter where you are or who you are working for. So long as you ...

   Letter,Tips,Programmer,Developer,Opportu     2011-09-14 11:49:24

  A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of

Here are some sequences of events: Take the rake out of the shed, use it to pile up the leaves in the backyard, then put the rake back in the shed. Fly to Seattle, see the sights, then fly home. Put the key in the door, open it, then take the key out of the door. Wake-up your phone, check the time, then put it back to sleep. See the pattern? You do something, then do something else, then you undo the first thing. Or more accurately, the last step is the inverse of the first. Once you're aware ...

   Programming,Idiom,Strange     2012-01-04 08:12:25

  The History of Programming Languages

This post is part of our ReadWriteHack channel, which is a resource and guide for developers. The channel is sponsored by the Intel AppUp Developer Program. As you're exploring these resources, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: AIR for AppUp: What You Need To Know Rackspace recently published a nice infographic on the evolution of programming languages. It starts with FORTRAN and COBOL and runs through Ruby on Rails (which, yes, is a framework and not a language). Unfo...

   History,Programming language,C,Java,Java     2011-07-28 09:00:23

  Importance of Side Projects

Side projects are important for a few reasons. Programming is a creative process. Side projects allow programming without deadlines or restraints. Side projects allow programming in an exploratory way. Explore new technologies Every day there are more and more bleeding edge technologies coming out. A side project is a great place to try them out. There’s no reason to worry about bugs or performance issues because it’s just a side project. You’re not depending on the ...

   Side project,Creative idea,Dealine,Scratch,Launch     2011-11-28 03:17:22

  I've run out of adjectives

The news of Dennis Ritchie's passing hit hard. So much has been written in the past day. His impact was enormous, and outside the tech world, mostly unknown - but very much felt. C underpins everything. My whole career has grown out of C and Unix. Wow.For most engineers working today, it's hard to understand the euphoria I felt in the 70s when a programming language finally came along that I (and everyone else) could use to move up from writing in assembler to a real programming l...

   Dennis Ritchie,James Gosling,Death,Praise,Comment,C     2011-10-20 02:55:58

  Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb

I realized that, paradoxically enough, good programmers need to be both lazy and dumb. Lazy, because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Lazy, because only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code – thus avoiding redundancy, the enemy of software maintenance and flexible refactoring. Mostly, the tools and processes that come out of this endeavor fired by laziness will speed up the production. This ma...

   Good programmer,Lazy,Reason,Dumb     2012-04-18 07:15:23

  Want to write some code? Get away from your computer!

I’ve recently realised something. The best place to write code isn’t in front of your computer, with your compiler, IDE and tools. The best place to write code is far, far away from any of these tools – somewhere where you can think properly. For a language with which you are fairly familiar, the mechanics of translating the program in your mind to a program that the compiler can compile (or the interpreter can interpret) is fairly easy – it’s coming ...

   Program,Goo dcode, Away, Use mind     2011-03-30 23:48:10

  If we use programming language names as building names

Today I came across some interesting building names while wandering around technology park of Singapore. Most of these names are biotech related. They are Chromos,  Centros, Matrix, Genome, Proteos, Nanos, Helios, Neuros, Immunos, Synapse and Amnios. Chromos Centros Matrix Genome Proteos Nanos Helios Neuros Immunos Synapse Amnios I am wondering whether there are building which are named with programming language names. Do you see anyone of them anywhere?...

   Buidling name,Programming language     2013-08-16 06:02:26

  XML Abuse

It’s everywhere. XML Abuse. From Domain Specific Languages to Data Serialization, XML is the most commonly abused data format I’ve ever encountered. XML is perfectly fine for (because it was designed for this): First of all: XML was designed to be written by humans and read by humans. Nearly all generated XML I’ve seen sucks badly. I think this is because XML cannot efficiently represent common data structures found in programming languages.XML is good...

   XML,Abuse,Alternative,Serialization,Data storage     2011-12-14 07:12:10

  Top 5 Reasons Not to Use Hadoop for Analytics

As a former diehard fan of Hadoop, I LOVED the fact that you can work on up to Petabytes of data.  I loved the ability to scale to thousands of nodes to process a large computation job.  I loved the ability to store and load data in a very flexible format.  In many ways, I loved Hadoop, until I tried to deploy it for analytics.   That’s when I became disillusioned with Hadoop (it just "ain't all that"). At Quantivo, we’ve explored many ways to deploy H...

   Cloud computing,Hadoop,Analytics     2012-04-17 13:43:26

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