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  What Separates Good Designers from Great Ones

Most of the design books you read, including my own, are about how to be a good, competent designer. They are about how to make strong, reasoned design decisions and about design methods and tools. But what they won’t—can’t—teach you is how to become a great designer. The only way to be a great designer is to produce great products. Everything else is…well, everything else. I’m convinced that the people who are great designers, while assure...

   Designer,Feature,Great designer,Good designer,Comparison     2011-12-06 02:25:17

  HP To Apple: You Win.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a cafe. Around me, there are five people on laptops — four of them are MacBooks. Four other people are using tablets — all four are iPads. Welcome to the Post-PC world. That phrase was one of the first things that jumped to my mind today when I heard the news that HP was not only killing off their TouchPad and Pre webOS-based products, but also trying to spin-off their PC business. The largest PC busine...

   HP,Apple,Palm,Competition,webOs     2011-08-19 07:38:41

  The Singular Secret of the Rockstar Programmer

Before all the laws of software, before the purpose of software, before the science of software design itself, there is a singular fact that determines the success or failure of a software developer. This fact makes the difference between the senior engineer who can seem to pick up new languages in a day and the junior developer who struggles for ten years just to get a paycheck, programming other people’s designs and never improving enough to get a promotion. It differentiates the poor...

   Programming,Tip,Great developer,Rockstar     2011-08-07 23:42:09

  My life as a freelancer

In the summer of 2006 a work buddy, George, has told me that I could make some extra money programming on a site named Rent A Coder. I’ve signed up the same day. After losing some time on a project that never started I lost my interest in “coding for money”. I almost forgot about RAC.Fast-forward two years, I was a PhD student at a small North American University with a student visa and … nothing else in my pockets. For a few months I was able to make a living from ...

   Life,Freelancer,C,Rent a Coder,RAC     2011-11-07 02:53:03

  Twitter service down incidents summary

This Thursday, Twitter encountered a global service down incident. This is the second service down incident since last month. Later Twitter updated its website and stated that users might not be able to access Twitter temporarily.Twitter admitted the service down incident and explained that this time's service down was caused by problems of their both data centers.Ok, now lets summarize the service down incidents encountered by Twitter in past few years.in May 2008, Twitter's new engineer team w...

   Twitter,Service down,History     2012-07-28 12:36:39

  Coder or Clown?

That’s the challenge. Sit down with someone you’ve never met and try to work out if they are a coder or a clown. I don’t mean to insult anyone, of course, and I’m the first to acknowledge the years of training and effort that goes into being a professional clown. But some coders, oh boy. Like the time I interviewed a recent graduate. I’ll call her Ada. Full of sympathy for the novice programmer I started with a gentle warm-up, a soft-ball question to break the ...

   Coder,Clown,State,Profile,Category     2011-08-28 23:04:46

  In praise of impractical programming

Although it’s become a cultural mainstay now, I still remember when I first saw that thick book — the one with the wizard on the cover — about a school for magic where wonders are easily conjured by those who know the proper spells. Of course, I’m talking about the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There was that other book with the spells, but the “Wizard Book” sincerely claimed to teach magic. For the past few years, I’ve been ...

   Impractical Programming,Structure,Scheme,Practical     2011-12-05 12:28:58

  Good ways to build communities around a web product

If a product wants to be successful, there are must be a group of loyal users of the product. Though their influence, more and more people get to know and product and start to use the product and again promote the product. The most difficult thing to promote a product after building an excellent product is to find the first bunch of users. For web products, same conditions apply, but the ways to promote the product may be more abundant. Besides the advertisement, there are other ways a web produ...

   Web product,Community,Promotion     2014-03-12 07:37:05

  How Speeding The "Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime" Could Change This Modern World

Math breakthroughs don't often capture the headlines--but MIT researchers have just made one that could lead to all sorts of amazing technological breakthroughs that in just a few years will touch every hour of your life. Last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms was presented by a group of MIT researchers. It's possible that under cert...

   FFT,Speed-up,Fast fourier transform     2012-03-20 07:47:04

  How to teach "Modern" Perl?

Since I started my Perl Tutorial series a couple of people commented on what and how I am teaching.Some people asked why did I show "open or die" and why not using autodie. Others recommended the use IO::All instead of open.Another complaint was the introduction of time and localtime instead of DateTime.While I was mostly writing parts of my regular training material these comments led me to think about it again. I wonder how to teach Perl in 2012?When I started to write the tutorial I still cal...

   Perl,Trainning,Teach,Modern,Modern Perl     2011-11-15 08:40:18

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