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SEARCH KEYWORD -- 2011



  Are older people better programmers?

Peter Knego states something interesting: “It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.”. He uses reputation and other metrics from StackOverflow to corroborate his point. His summary is: Number of coders drops significantly with age. Top developer numbers, at age 27, drop by half every 6-7 years.Developers in their 40s answer roughly twice as much and ask half the questions compared to colleagues in their 20s. It seems younger generation learns and older generatio...

   Programming,Age,Experience,Skill,Advanta     2011-07-28 09:02:23

  Test-Driven Development? Give me a break...

Update: At the bottom of this post, I've linked to two large and quite different discussions of this post, both of which are worth reading... Update 2: If the contents of this post make you angry, okay. It was written somewhat brashly. But, if the title alone makes you angry, and you decide this is an article about "Why Testing Code Sucks" without having read it, you've missed the point. Or I explained it badly :-)Some things programmers say can be massive red flags. When I h...

   Test driven,Application design,tool     2011-10-17 10:19:16

  7 big mistakes that make your layout a disaster

Even though the web design field has become a real industry, building a website is part art, part science. The design of a website may attract people but it may also make them run away, it depends on the work of the web designer. The experience, the talent and the capacity of endeavor are the greatest tools of a web designer, a good layout is based on all of these and, besides that, it is a very time consuming activity.Making a good layout is difficult and judging its value is subjective, a desi...

   Web design,Mistakes,Content,White space     2011-11-24 03:36:23

  Readability in Programming Languages

I saw a side by side comparison of a bunch of scripting languages online recently. Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby My first, and second reaction was yuck! Now I have my biases – biases which may  not be shared by others of course. But I like readable code and for me anytime I see a special character (anything not an alphanumeric) it slows me down. This got me thinking about where we are going in design of programming languages? Are we moving forward (what ever ...

   Programming,Style,Coding style,Readabili     2011-09-22 09:20:03

  Communicating Between Widgets in a Rich Internet Application

As a part of our October Free Dojo Support initiative, we received the following question from Manu Subramanian about how to manage communication between distinct components in a rich internet application: We are building an application with dojo. It does have many inter connected interface parts. For example it does have a top bar with drop down buttons. The menu items opens tabs in a tab controller. In general we need to call functions from different widgets or there are many interconne...

   Internet application,Rick internet,Widget,comminucation     2012-03-16 10:49:36

  Transparency in Cloud Services

37signals recently launched public “Uptime Reports” for their applications (announcement). The reaction on Hacker News was rather tepid, but I think it’s a positive development, and I applaud 37signals for stepping forward. Reliability of cloud applications is a real concern, and there’s not nearly enough hard data out there. Not all products are equally reliable; even within 37signals, the new reports show a 3:1 variation in downtime across apps. That said, ...

   Cloud,Transapency,37signals,Announcement     2012-01-10 07:24:02

  10 Things Beginner Developers Should Know

If you are a novice developer, it might be confusing about where you should start, because the field is broad and provides many options for you. There are so many questions you might ask yourself, such as “What programming language should I learn?” or “Should I also know front-end, or only back-end?” And I am sure there are much more than that. Well, in order for you to be able to start with an advantage against the others, I’ve decided to help you start your ...

   Advice,Software developer,Beginner     2011-12-29 01:41:04

  What to Look for in PHP 5.4.0

PHP 5.4.0 will arrive soon. The PHP team is working to bring to some very nice presents to PHP developers. In the previous release of 5.3.0 they had added a few language changes. This version is no different. Some of the other changes include the ability to use DTrace for watching PHP apps in BSD variants (there is a loadable kernel module for Linux folks). This release features many speed and security improvements along with some phasing out of older language features (Y2K ...

   PHP,5.4,New feature,Built-in server,Trait     2011-12-21 10:20:12

  Marissa Mayer brings 2nd Googler to Yahoo

A week ago, Anne Espiritu who was responsible for Google's public relations before leaving Google joined Yahoo, she became the first Googler Mayer brought to Yahoo. According to CNBC's Jon Fortt on Twitter, Google's former project manager Patricia Moll Kriese also left Google, formally joined Yahoo! as Senior Director of Yahoo's corporate projects.Although this news has not been confirmed by both companies, Patricia Moll Kriese's personal page on LinkedIn revealed that she left Google in August,...

   Yahoo,Marissa Mayer,Googler     2012-08-10 13:38:15

  What, exactly, is a Product Manager?

I often get asked what a product manager is. What do they do? Where do they come from? Why do they like sharpies so much?In his book Inspired, Marty Cagan describes the job of the product manager as “to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”. Similarly, I’ve always defined product management as the intersection between business, technology and user experience (hint – only a product manager would define themselves in a venn diagram). A good produc...

   Product manager,Definition,Features,Career     2011-10-12 11:42:15