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  Never create Ruby strings longer than 23 characters

Looking at things through a microscopesometimes leads to surprising discoveries Obviously this is an utterly preposterous statement: it’s hard to think of a more ridiculous and esoteric coding requirement. I can just imagine all sorts of amusing conversations with designers and business sponsors: “No… the size of this <input> field should be 23… 24 is just too long!” Or: “We need to explain to users that their subject lines should be les...

   Ruby,Specification,String,Interpreter,Optimization,23     2012-01-05 07:58:07

  Nokia is still alive and lives a good life indeed

1 Do you believe that Nokia, which you thought had gone bankrupt, not only survived but is still one of the world's most profitable technology companies, making trillions of dollars in profit every year? In 2022, Nokia's annual revenue reached 24.9 billion euros. Its net profit of 4.25 billion euros also hit a new high in nearly a decade. Moreover, as early as 2017, it quietly returned to the Fortune Global 500. In the telecommunications field, it is the world's third-largest telecommunications...

   5G,APPLE,NOKIA     2023-03-11 22:49:36

  Preparing for the real costs of cloud computing

Computerworld - At a cloud computing conference in New York in June, a number of speakers pointed out that the cloud is moving past the hype stage and is beginning to deliver tangible benefits to organizations. These improvements include increased flexibility and agility. But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them. While these types of costs ...

   Cloud computing,Cost,Chanllenges,Platfor     2011-08-23 07:48:24

  Erlang Style Concurrency

Introduction On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil, and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three1. Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential...

   Erlang,Concurrency,Lock,Message,Innovation     2012-01-03 10:44:44

  Signs that you're a bad programmer

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (...

   Sign,Programmer,Characteristics,Knowledge,Skill     2011-10-20 08:56:16

  The 15 Golden Rules of UI design and flow.

Last night a good friend of mine showed me the latest Need for Speed game on the iphone / ipad. Quite an impressive feat of rendering and a relatively good game to boot. However, the front end, wow, a classic case in UI mis-engineering. Loads of stats, pages and pages of bits and pieces to wade through – a classic case of over stimulating the player with lots of decisions they have no business making – stuff that will significantly change their game play experience but being...

   UI design,Game design,Feature     2012-04-05 12:20:18

  Linus Torvalds’s Lessons on Software Development Management

If anyone knows the joys and sorrows of managing software development projects, it would be Linus Torvalds, creator of the world's most popular open-source software program: the Linux operating system. For more than 20 years, Torvalds has been directing thousands of developers to improve the open source OS. He and I sat down to talk about effective techniques in running large-scale distributed programming teams – and the things that don’t work, too.Torvalds says there are...

   Linux,Software development,Linus Tonalds     2011-09-28 09:16:02

  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

  Your Code is My Hell

It occurred to me recently that my experience as a Rails developer may be somewhat unique.I often get brought in to help preexisting Ruby/Rails projects evolve and mature in a sustainable way. As a result, the vast majority of Ruby projects I’ve worked on have been well-established by the time I arrived. In fact, offhand I can only think of one commercial greenfield Ruby project I’ve participated in. All the rest have been “legacy” from my perspective, in the ...

   Code style,Clean code,Code paradigm     2011-09-15 08:39:16

  Why I Hate Android

Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse. I should probably explain. Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. That is to say, I don’t hate the concept of Androi...

   Android,Hate,Feature     2012-01-10 07:19:27

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