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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Controversial

  Unfortunate Python

Python is a wonderful language, but some parts should really have bright WARNING signs all over them. There are features that just can't be used safely and others are that are useful but people tend to use in the wrong ways. This is a rough transcript of the talk I gave at my local Python group on November 15, with some of the audience feed back mixed in. Most of this came from hanging around the Python IRC channel, something I highly recommend. [update 2011-12-19: improved "array" cr...

   Python,Defects,Deprecated methods,Warning     2011-12-20 08:27:36

  Dieter Rams' 10 principles of good web design

Dieter Rams is one of the most important designers of the 20th century but his famous 10 principles for good design focused on industrial design. Here Lisbon-based designer Nuno Loureiro applies them to web design “My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality”  â€“ D...

   Web design,Principle,Innovation     2012-02-08 10:29:32

  The 15 Golden Rules of UI design and flow.

Last night a good friend of mine showed me the latest Need for Speed game on the iphone / ipad. Quite an impressive feat of rendering and a relatively good game to boot. However, the front end, wow, a classic case in UI mis-engineering. Loads of stats, pages and pages of bits and pieces to wade through – a classic case of over stimulating the player with lots of decisions they have no business making – stuff that will significantly change their game play experience but being...

   UI design,Game design,Feature     2012-04-05 12:20:18

  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

  Create successful Python projects

The ecosystem for open source Python projects is both rich and diverse. This enables you to stand on the shoulders of giants in the production of your next open source project. In addition, it means that there's a set of community norms and best practices. By adhering to these conventions and applying the practices in your project, you may gain wider adoption for your software. This article covers practi...

   Python,Project,Open Source,Team Management     2012-02-03 08:09:27

  Go Error Best Practice

Being indulged in Go for quite a while and having implemented web-related programs, grpc interfaces and Operators, I seem to be an advanced beginner now. However, I am still a raw hand in production-environmental debugging, which is cumbersome if done by querying logs or error messages. Imagine the scenario that a full-text search is called when the specific location of the error log is missing. Then what happens when those error logs are not only in one place? Yes, my error logs can no longer h...

   GO ERROR,ERROR HANDLING     2021-10-07 07:38:28

  Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’

Mark Lucovsky, famous for building Windows NT and watching Steve Ballmer throw a chair.Mark Lucovsky was the other man in the room when Steve Ballmer threw his chair and called Eric Schmidt a “fucking pussy.”Yes, the story is true. At least according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” but Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chai...

   VMWare,Founder,Mark Lucovsky,Microsoft,Google,Cloud Foundry     2011-11-25 03:00:39

  How I Learned to Program

Programming is, without a doubt, the most mentally rewarding thing I've ever done. Programming taught me that life should be fun, filled with creativity, and lived to the fullest. Programming taught me that anything is possible; I can do anything I want using only my mind. Programming also taught me that learning is fun. It showed me that the more you know, the more power you have. Programming showed me that a life filled with learning is a life worth living. Programming revealed to me wh...

   Programming,Tips,Write,Practice,Interest     2012-02-04 21:37:12

  Why Software Projects are Terrible and How Not To Fix Them

If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process.  The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas.  Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD).  But for any particular methodology, whether it is universally accepted or only “mostly” accepted, there are a multitude of o...

   Software,Development,Debug,Design     2011-11-21 10:27:05

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