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  Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

I got a call from a friend of a friend the other night. It was a fellow with whom I’d talked 11 months ago about a project he and his partner were looking to start. We established then that I wasn’t the guy for him, that I was likely too expensive for their big-dreams, small-means budget. Fast forward to present day: their project is still not launched, it’s still not right. They’ve paid for something between 600-700 hours of development with a firm in India, an...

   Indian programmer,Outsourcing,Poor quality,Low cost     2011-12-05 13:00:13

  What makes a great IT project manager

Since IT project management is a field in constant flux, there's no one universal definition of a great IT project manager. Still, there are some skills and features that can be easily adapted to any working environment, meeting new organizational needs and consequent challenges. A significant problem is the fact that project manager will mean different things to different people (even within the same organization!). Some say that the greatest IT project managers are those who are able to balanc...

   project management     2015-07-06 02:15:46

  Pointers, arrays, and string literals

A recently posted question on Stack Overflow highlighted a common misconception about the role of pointers and arrays held by many programmers learning C.The confusion stems from a misunderstanding concerning the role of pointers and strings in C. A pointer is an address in memory. It often points to an index in an array, such as in the function strtoupper in the following code:void strtoupper(char *str) { if (str) { // null ptr check, courtesy of Michael while (...

   char pointer,initialization,literal,cann     2011-09-22 13:29:23

  10 Tips To Make Your C Program Effective

The beauty of any code lies not only in finding the solution to a given problem but is in its simplicity, effectiveness, compactness and efficiency( memory ). Designing the code is harder than actually implementing it. Hence every programmer should keep a couple of basic things in mind while programming in C. Here we introduce you to such 10 ways of standardizing your C code. 1. Avoid unwarranted function calls Consider the following two functions: view source print? 1 void str_print( c...

   C,Tips,Efficient,Speed increment,Recursi     2011-08-05 01:34:16

  What matters in life (and what doesn’t)

I’m probably too young to be writing on this topic but observing countless souls distressed by daily life made me think hard on what is that really matters in life. Undoubtedly, there are happy and sad phases and that’s part-and-parcel of life. But what I’m really bothered about is general, daily bitching about how miserable one’s life has become. You find people complaining about work, commute, relationships, other people’s attitudes & personalit...

   Life,Matater,Relationship,Experience,Material possession,Ego     2011-10-24 11:57:27

  Python Patterns - An Optimization Anecdote

The other day, a friend asked me a seemingly simple question: what's the best way to convert a list of integers into a string, presuming that the integers are ASCII values. For instance, the list [97, 98, 99] should be converted to the string 'abc'. Let's assume we want to write a function to do this. The first version I came up with was totally straightforward: def f1(list): string = "" for item in list: string = string + chr(item) return string ...

   Python,Optimization,Anecdote,Loopup,ASCII     2011-12-18 10:52:49

   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

  What else is new in C# 5?

The big new feature in C# 5 is asynchronous programming support, which I wrote about last week. However, the C# folks have also slipped in a couple of smaller features and I thought I’d round things out by mentioning those. Method caller information There’s a complete style guide to be written on Writing Enterprisey Code, but one of my favourite “enterprisey” tells, after the use of Visual Basic, is obsessively logging every function you pass through: Function Ad...

   C# 5,New feature,Analysis     2012-03-20 07:45:11

  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

  Python Performance Tips, Part 1

To read the Zen of Python, type import this in your Python interpreter. A sharp reader new to Python will notice the word “interpreter”, and realize that Python is another scripting language. “It must be slow!” No question about it: Python program does not run as fast or efficiently as compiled languages. Even Python advocates will tell you performance is the area that Python is not good for. However, YouTube has proven Python is capable of serving 40 million videos...

   Python,Performance,Efficiency,Tips     2012-02-14 10:50:22

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