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  A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy

A programmer’s greatest enemy is getting stuck. A crucial skill in programming—and one that many of my beginning game programming students lack—is the ability to recognize when they’re stuck, to get out of being stuck, and to avoid getting stuck in the first place.Indeed, it’s a skill I’m still learning myself, although the contexts in which I still get stuck are shrinking with time, study, and experience.This morning, as I downloaded crash reports ...

   Programming,Enemy,Stuck,Game design,Crash     2011-10-15 15:06:46

  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

  Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong

Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning. Really, I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out. And it turns out that everything I thought I knew about learning is wrong. Here’s wh...

   Learning,Thought,Before,Wrong     2012-01-30 05:45:36

  <=> operator in MySQL

Have you ever seen "<=>" in a SQL query while using MySQL? Does it mean less and equals to and greater than? Actually if you consider it as the union of <= and =>, great, you are close to it. This is one form of equal operator in MySQL, it has the similar meaning to the = operator with some subtle difference. According to MySQL documentation, <=> is NULL-safe equal. This operator performs an equality comparison like the = operator, but returns 1 rather than NULL if both operand...

   MySQL,NULL safe,<=>     2014-03-24 06:23:22

  C++ 11 Memory Management

Enterprise development and networking specialist Stephen B. Morris illustrates how to handle a classic C/C++ problem by using the new features in C++ 11 in conjunction with more established techniques.Memory management has always been one of the most error-prone areas of C++. The same is true of C. One of the strengths of managed languages, such as Java and C#, is their support for automatic garbage collection. Garbage collection still isn't a feature of C++ 11, so we must still be caref...

   C++ 11,Memory management,GC,Memory leak     2012-01-10 01:14:59

  "Programmer" is an Overgeneralization

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald Knuth Earlier today, I came across a post during a google-fu session that claimed that no one should use the C++ standard library function make_heap, because almost nobody uses it correctly. I immediately started mentally ranting about how utterly ridiculous this claim is, because anyone whose gone to a basic algorithm class would know how to properly use make_heap. Then I started thinking about all the ...

   Programmer,Overgeneration,Overload     2012-03-13 08:13:16

  A Perl Regular Expression That Matches Prime Numbers

perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ || print "$_ is prime"' Can you figure out how it works? I give an explanation below, but try to figure it out yourself. Here is what happens when you run it: $ perl -lne '(1x$_) =~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ || print "$_ is prime"' 1 2 2 is prime 3 3 is prime 4 5 5 is prime 6 7 7 is prime 8 9 10 11 11 is prime Here is how it works. First, the number is converted in its unary representation by (1x$_). For example, the number 5 gets converted into 1x5, which is ...

   Perl,Regex,Regular expression,Prime number,One line     2011-12-26 08:42:00

  Learn these technical skills within one day

It takes days and days reading books, practicing and involving in real project if you want to learn a programming language well. It's just like a marathon, you will get more if you can insist longer. During this long and boring period, there are always something you can learn within a short period of time, like within one day. These skills can bring your big satisfaction. Below are a list of technical skills which you can pick up within one single day, they are advocated by Jacob Jensen, a Googl...

   Technical skill     2014-06-12 09:33:15

  What Makes A Great Programmer?

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the year 2000, Dr. Pargas was standing at the front of our data structures class talking about some data structure-y topic while an SSH session was projected on the wall in front of us. Someone asked a question, and he said something along the lines of "Well, if you want to be a real computer scientist you need to start using vi". I think he was smiling as he said it, and in hindsight his statement wasn't even slightly true, but being young and ...

   Programmer,Great programmer,Character     2012-02-15 06:14:04

  Letter to a Young Developer

I’ve been getting some emails from young developers wanting to “level up” as programmers. I’m definitely not the first to write about this topic, so I’m not sure how much I have to add. Still, for what it’s worth here are a few points off the top of my head: Work with other developers. We are at a wonderful time in the history of technology when for the first time, it doesn’t really matter where you are or who you are working for. So long as you ...

   Letter,Tips,Programmer,Developer,Opportu     2011-09-14 11:49:24