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  Why I left Google

Ok, I relent. Everyone wants to know why I left and answering individually isn’t scaling so here it is, laid out in its long form. Read a little (I get to the punch line in the 3rd paragraph) or read it all. But a warning in advance: there is no drama here, no tell-all, no former colleagues bashed and nothing more than you couldn’t already surmise from what’s happening in the press these days surrounding Google and its attitudes toward user privacy and software develo...

   James Whittaker,Google,Leave,Microsoft,Ad     2012-03-14 13:43:44

  Why developer-friendliness is central to API design

Today, APIs play a bigger role in software development than ever before. The evolution of computing has been dominated by ever-increasing levels of abstraction; the use of higher-level languages, of course, but also the development of platforms, libraries, and frameworks. Professor Douglass C. Smith claims the progression of this second category far outpaced the development of programming languages.  Developers are also noticing that difficulty has shifted from designing algorithms a...

   API,User friendly,Significance, Improve quality     2011-12-21 02:29:54

  VIM Plugins for C/C++ developers

Following up on my previous post on Essential Vim Plugins for Web Developers, I have decided to tell you about the awesomeness of the C / C++ plugin for Vim in this article.Now to get things going, let’s start by thinking what are the basic stuffs that you would be carrying out as a C / C++ developer? Include header files, some functions, loops, conditional statements and a main function. These are some repetitive boring tasks that you would rather have someone else do it for you. We...

   Plugin,Vim,C,C++,developer,Vim for C     2011-09-28 09:23:55

  Stop obsessing over HTML5 and CSS3

As web designers, we all seem obsessed by HTML5 and CSS3 at the moment. Endless posts, tutorials and discussion about them dominate the blogosphere. But how much are we learning that can be applied today? Don’t get me wrong. We all need to understand HTML5 and CSS3. And a lot of it can be used today. My point is that we seem to be spending a disproportionate about of time reading up on the subject when so many other areas deserve our attention. While others are reading yet another tut...

   Clients, Opinion, Web Designers     2011-06-24 00:55:06

  The most stupid C bug ever

I have been programming for a number of years already. I have seen others introduce bugs, and I have also introduced (and solved!) many bugs while coding. Off-by-one, buffer-overflow, treating pointers as pointees, different behaviors or the same function (this is specially true for cross-platform applications), race conditions, deadlocks, threading issues. I think I have seen quite a few of the typical issues. Yet recently I lost a lot of time to what I would call the most stupid C bug in my ca...

   C,Bug,Stupid,Bug code,All     2011-08-26 02:37:29

  An open letter to those who want to start programming

First off, welcome to the fraternity. There aren’t too many people who want to create stuff and solve problems. You are a hacker. You are one of those who wants to do something interesting. “When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability." – WhyTheLuckyStiff Take the words below with a pinch of salt. All these come from me – a bag-and-tag programmer. I love to get things working, rather than sit at something and over-o...

   Programming,Tips     2011-06-09 23:45:45

  An open letter to those who want to start programming

First off, welcome to the fraternity. There aren’t too many people who want to create stuff and solve problems. You are a hacker. You are one of those who wants to do something interesting. “When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability." – WhyTheLuckyStiff Take the words below with a pinch of salt. All these come from me – a bag-and-tag programmer. I love to get things working, rather than sit at something and over-o...

   Tips,Programming,C,C++,Java,Skill,Develo     2011-08-11 11:24:50

  Avoiding and exploiting JavaScript's warts

One's sentiment toward JavaScript flips between elegance and disgust without transiting intermediate states. The key to seeing JavaScript as elegant is understanding its warts, and knowing how to avoid, work around or even exploit them. I adopted this avoid/fix/exploit approach after reading Doug Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts: Doug has a slightly different and more elaborate take on the bad parts and awful parts, so I'm sharing my perspective on the four issues that ha...

   JavaScript,warts,Exploit,with,variable,this     2012-02-15 05:51:21

  The most stupid C bug ever

I have been programming for a number of years already. I have seen others introduce bugs, and I have also introduced (and solved!) many bugs while coding. Off-by-one, buffer-overflow, treating pointers as pointees, different behaviors or the same function (this is specially true for cross-platform applications), race conditions, deadlocks, threading issues. I think I have seen quite a few of the typical issues. Yet recently I lost a lot of time to what I would call the most stupid C bug in ...

   C,Bug,Comment,Back slash     2012-04-22 03:40:49

   Python – parallelizing CPU-bound tasks with multiprocessing

In a previous post on Python threads, I briefly mentioned that threads are unsuitable for CPU-bound tasks, and multiprocessing should be used instead. Here I want to demonstrate this with benchmark numbers, also showing that creating multiple processes in Python is just as simple as creating multiple threads. First, let’s pick a simple computation to use for the benchmarking. I don’t want it to be completely artificial, so I’ll use a dumbed-down version of factorization...

   Python,Multitasking,Multiprocessing,CPU bound     2012-01-17 11:38:22

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