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  Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.  The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works.  ...

   Career,Programmer,Advice,Low level,Development     2011-10-29 07:09:23

  The trap of the performance sweet spot

This post is about JavaScript performance but I would like to start it by telling a story that might seem unrelated to JS. Please bear with me if you don’t like C.A story of a C programmer writing JavaScriptMr. C. is a C programmer as you can probably guess from his name. Today he was asked by his boss to write a very simple function: given an array of numbered 2d points calculate vector sum of all even numbered points... He opens his favorite text editor and quickly types somet...

   C,JavaScript,Sweet spot,Memory,Low level,Trap     2011-11-06 14:45:01

  The Ultimate GetElementsByClassName, Anno 2008

Two and a half years ago, I released the first version of getElementsByClassName. With how web browsers has evolved since, I thought I’d release a real ultimate version, dated 2008. Native Web Browser SupportSafari 3.1 has native getElmentsByClassName support, and upcoming Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 will have it too. It only leaves out, you’ve guessed it, Internet Explorer.The Necessity Of This ScriptLiving in a world where Microsoft is halting every possible way t...

   JavaScript,geElementsByClassName,Cross browser compatible,Implementation     2011-11-26 02:46:20

  JavaScript Attack/Defend

As developers and designers we work hard to build visually attractive, fast and easy to maintain applications. Our goals are to make sure the applications we build stick to users and keep them coming back for more. Security is not always at the forefront of our minds. No one intentionally builds insecure software but often a lack of security knowledge leads developers to build vulnerabilities into their applications. In this article we are going to examine two web security attacks, how they are ...

   JavaScript,Attack,Defend,Security,Cross site     2011-10-13 13:09:11

  PHP: a fractal of bad design

Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us have the slightest clue what we’re doing. Combine with Sturgeon’s Law, and I have a lifetime’s worth of stuff to gripe about. This is not the same. PHP is not merely awkward to use, or ill-suited for what I want, or suboptimal, or...

   PHP,Design,Analysis     2012-04-11 13:46:57

  FTP Must Die

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is specified in RFC 959, published in October 1985. The attempt in this specification is to satisfy the diverse needs of users of maxi-hosts, mini-hosts, personal workstations, and TACs, with a simple, and easily implemented protocol design.That's from the introduction. Does anyone here know what a TAC is? I don't. I had to look it up, since the acronym wasn't even expanded in the RFC. It took three tries in Google, and I finally found it in some obscur...

   FTP,Future,Death,Trend,Protocol     2012-02-06 08:13:36

  HTML5 and Accessibility

Accessibility for people with disabilities is a legal responsibility in many countries. It's also the right thing to do, and one of the characteristics distinguishing professional developers from the WWWs: WYSIWYG-wielding wannabes. But for many, accessibility has been a somewhat black art, requiring adding extra stuff to your code like alt text, table summaries, ARIA information that can be difficult to test by developers who are not assistive technology users themselves.The arrival of HTML5 ha...

   HTML5,Accessibility,Video,Music,Canvas     2011-08-19 08:13:44

  A Python Optimization Anecdote

Hi! I’m Pavel and I interned at Dropbox over the past summer. One of my biggest projects during this internship was optimizing Python for dynamic page generation on the website. By the end of the summer, I optimized many of dropbox.com’s pages to render 5 times faster. This came with a fair share of challenges though, which I’d like to write about today:The ProblemDropbox is a large website with lots of dynamically generated pages. The more pages that are dynamically generat...

   Python,Anecodate,Optimization,Efficiency     2011-10-25 10:33:20

  Decision Trees in C#

Decision trees are simple predictive models which map input attributes to a target value using simple conditional rules. Trees are commonly used in problems whose solutions must be readily understandable or explainable by humans, such as in computer-aided diagnostics and credit analysis. Download source code Download sample applications Download the full Accord.NET Framework Introduction Decision Trees give a direct and intuitive way for obtaining the classification of a new instance f...

   C#,Decision tree     2012-03-23 10:00:56

  CSS3 Animation With jQuery Fallbacks

In today's post, we'll be taking a look at how you can use CSS3 transitions to power your application's animations with jQuery's .animate() method as a fallback where transitions aren't supported. The benefit of transitions is that unlike JavaScript based animations, they're hardware accelerated in certain browsers and mobile devices, resulting in a potentially smoother overall animation than you would normally experience. In a lot of cases your code will work seamlessly with the solut...

   CSS3,Animation,JavaScript,jQuery,Demo     2011-08-19 08:10:58

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