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SEARCH KEYWORD -- 2012

  Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?

What you do when compiling can ruin your life. And not just when compiling, but when waiting for any short computer operation to finish. That time is ridiculously tiny compared to the rest of your workday, yet it can have a huge impact on your productivity and well-being overall. Yes, that’s a big fat claim. And by the way, this article is not just about coders or programmers. It’s about any smart people working with computers. And there will be pictures! Let’s rock and ro...

   Programming.Net,ASP.NET,Platform     2012-02-23 07:14:11

  Short SASS tutorial

If you learned CSS before, you should know that CSS is not a programming language. You can use it to design webpage style, but you cannot use it for programming, i.e, CSS is what designer uses, not what programmer uses. Programmer may think that CSS is very troublesome, it has no variables, no conditional statements, it just allows line-by-line description of HTML elementsLuckily, CSS preprocessor appear which makes CSS programmable. The general idea of CSS preprocessor is using a programming la...

   CSS,SASS,programmable,variable,condition,comment     2012-06-22 08:38:18

  Reducing Code Nesting

"This guy’s code sucks!" It’s something we’ve all said or thought when we run into code we don’t like. Sometimes it’s because it’s buggy, sometimes it’s because it conforms to a style we don’t like, and sometimes it’s because it just feels wrong. Recently I found myself thinking this, and automatically jumping to the conclusion that the developer who wrote it was a novice. The code had a distinct property that I dislike: lots of ...

   Code nesting,Readability,Maintainability,Reduction     2012-01-02 08:13:46

  Why cannot Renren be China's Facebook?

Yizhou Chen, CEO of China's SNS community Renren, shouted "one war, three battles". We do not know now how the battle progresses. Currently Renren's net market value is $1.3 billion where 900 million of them are in cash, it means the market values Renren 400 million US dollars only which is far lower than Facebook. Why cannot Renren be China's Facebook? This is a very interesting topic, many users share their opinions, Some of the main points are summarized as follows:Facebook pay more attentio...

   Renren, Facebook,SNS     2012-11-22 11:44:33

  What Level Programmer Are You?

Everybody's talking about how programming is the skill that we all are going to need. [Except those folks who might feel that most programming could be turned into wizard-like tools. Insert long discussion about Strong AI.] But what's a programmer? Is the guy who set up his own Apache Web Server a programmer? How about the guy who created a complex Excel spreadsheet? The guy who made his own RPG level? Minecraft players? When we say "Everybody is going to have to know programming" what, e...

   Programmer,Skill,Level,Criteria     2012-02-08 10:07:41

  It takes hard work. Do the hard work.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the idea of simply trying harder with everything I choose to spend my time on. It seems like an elusive thing, the idea of optimal focus and maximum effort. However, I think there is something to be gained from stopping for a moment and considering how focused we are when we do our daily activities. I think two things apply here: single-mindedness and massive effort. To truly excel at something, we need to be very focused. We can...

   Development,Hard work,     2012-01-29 04:40:13

  Embrace open source

In past few days, there are many tech news which are related to open source. For example, Microsoft enables Linux on its Windows Azure cloud, Facebook open sourced its C++ library Folly and Samsung joined Linux foundation. Now more and more big companies realize the power of open source and are willing to contribute to the open source community. It will benefit not only developers but also these big companies as well.By providing some open source libraries or projects, developer may reduce their...

   Open source,Microsoft,Samsung,Facebook,Linux     2012-06-06 05:37:59

  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

  JavaScript's Two Zeros

JavaScript has two zeros: -0 and +0. This post explains why that is and where it matters in practice. The signed zero Numbers always need to be encoded to be stored digitally. Why do some encodings have two zeros? As an example, let’s look at encoding integers as 4-digit binary numbers, via the sign-and-magnitude method. There, one uses one bit for the sign (0 if positive, 1 if negative) and the remaining bits for the magnitude (absolute value). Therefore, -2 and +2 are encoded as f...

   JavaScript,zeros     2012-03-24 05:21:49

  Why Objective-C is Hard

As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or J...

   Objective-C,difficult,hard,reason,analysis     2012-03-07 05:11:28

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