Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Benefits

  What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie?

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at lea...

   C,Father,Dennis Ritchie,Death,Father of C,UNIX     2011-10-17 10:12:02

  How to choose a jQuery plug-in?

jQuery plug-in provides a good way to save time and simplify the development, programmers don't need to write each component from scratch. However, the plug-in will also be a destabilizing factor in your code library. A plug-in saves countless development time, but a poor quality plug-in will cost more than the actual time to write your own component from scratch. Luckily, usually you have many pls to choose from, but even if you have only one plug-in, you also need to know whether it's worth us...

   jQuery, plug-in     2012-10-27 03:51:40

  Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process. Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a ...

   Web design,Paradigm,Advice,User experience,Flow     2012-01-05 08:16:18

  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

  How to Be an Optimist in a Pessimistic Time: A Techonomy Manifesto

Gapminder WorldIt’s no secret that technology is changing the world. Unfortunately, there are a surprising number of people who don’t get it. Many of them, even more unfortunately, are important leaders in business, other powerful instutitions, and governments. To meet the challenges that face us—whether as leaders of organizations, as leaders of countries, or as the global community addressing our collective challenge—we will only be successful if we unreservedly emb...

   Technology,World,Evolution,Dominant     2011-11-21 03:00:33

  A Baseline for Front-End Developers

I wrote a README the other day for a project that I’m hoping other developers will look at and learn from, and as I was writing it, I realized that it was the sort of thing that might have intimidated the hell out of me a couple of years ago, what with its casual mentions of Node, npm, Homebrew, git, tests, and development and production builds. Once upon a time, editing files, testing them locally (as best as we could, anyway), and then FTPing them to the server was the essential ...

   Front-end,JavaScript,Baseline     2012-04-18 07:13:49

  Front-end Style Guides

We all know that feeling: some time after we launch a site, new designers and developers come in and make adjustments. They add styles that don’t fit with the content, use typefaces that make us cringe, or chuck in bloated code. But if we didn’t leave behind any documentation, we can’t really blame them for messing up our hard work. To counter this problem, graphic designers are often commissioned to produce style guides as part of a rebranding project. A style guide ...

   Design,Guideline,CSS,Style,System     2011-12-07 08:54:59

  About HTML semantics and front-end architecture

A collection of thoughts, experiences, ideas that I like, and ideas that I have been experimenting with over the last year. It covers HTML semantics, components and approaches to front-end architecture, class naming patterns, and HTTP compression. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot — “Little Gidding” About semantics Semantics is the study of the relationshi...

   HTML,SemanticsCSS,OO CSS     2012-03-16 08:42:55

  Taking C Seriously

Dennis Ritchie, a co-creator of Unix and C, passed away a few weeks ago, and was honored with many online tributes this weekend for a Dennis Ritchie Day advocated by Tim O’Reilly.It should hardly be necessary to state the importance of Ritchie’s work. C is the #2 language in use today according to the TIOBE rankings (which, while criticized in some quarters, are at least the best system we currently have for gauging such things). In fact, TIOBE’s pre...

   C,Efficiency,Memorization,Dennis Ritchie     2011-11-03 13:42:14

  Top Ten Tips for Correct C++ Coding

Brian Overland, long-time Microsoft veteran and author of C++ Without Fear: A Beginner's Guide That Makes You Feel Smart, 2nd Edition, shares 10 of his most hard-earned, time-saving insights from decades of writing and debugging C++ code.My first introduction to the C family of languages was decades ago (yes, I know this dates me horribly). Later I learned C++. I wish someone back then had steered me around the most obvious potholes; it might have saved me hundreds of frustrating hours.I ca...

   C++,Tips,Top,Ten,Magic number,Integer di     2011-09-03 10:58:35

RECENT