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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Creative thinking

  How to Seem (and Be) Deep

I recently attended a discussion group whose topic, at that session, was Death.  It brought out deep emotions.  I think that of all the Silicon Valley lunches I've ever attended, this one was the most honest; people talked about the death of family, the death of friends, what they thought about their own deaths.  People really listened to each other.  I wish I knew how to reproduce those conditions reliably.I was the only transhumanist present, and I was extremely careful not...

   Deep,Work,Smart,Work style,Study     2011-10-23 11:46:11

  Building A Strong Indie Game Development Team

Are you looking to set up an independent game development team?  You’ll need a team that covers all areas of game development including programming, art, design, sound, project management and business.  You need to pick the right people that can work together for months or even years.  Below are some tips for putting the right team together to increase your chances of success. Roles Game development involves a number of common roles as well as some overlooked ones.  I...

   Software design,Game design,Team work,Pr     2011-08-24 02:16:32

  How GitHub Works: Hours are Bullshit

Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote the seminal analysis of management and efficiency in 1911 with The Principles of Scientific Management. He took the first scientific approach towards maximizing efficiency in manufacturing jobs. Time is money. Faster is better. More hours are better. Hours are bullshit Hours are great ways to determine productivity in many industries, but not ours. Working in a startup is a much different experience than working in a factory. You can’t throw more time at a...

   Work,Style,Time,Efficiency,Code,Enforcem     2011-08-19 07:42:32

  Becoming a Better Developer Part 3: Enjoy the Panorama

If you're trying to grow your startup you've come to the right place. Get my 170-page ebook on how to grow a startup and join thousands of self-funded entrepreneurs by subscribing to my newsletter at right. I’m writing this while sitting on a beach chair overlooking the Gulf of Guinea near Cape Coast in Ghana, West Africa. Although it’s slightly overcast the view is amazing, with whitewater stretching out in both directions as far as my laser-corrected eyes can see. Bein...

   Developer,Tips     2011-06-29 08:41:33

  Testing is not a Feature

I pointed out to someone at work today that PyDev 2.5.0 now offers really cool TDD support. I’m not a huge TDD proponent or anything, but this stirred up a discussion. This guy, let’s call him John, said that â€œTDD may shorten the time it takes to develop a feature, but sometimes a feature is so urgent we may want to deliver it as quickly as possible and test it later”.Sentences like that make me weep. I tried to explain that without testing, the...

   Testing,Feature,Software testing     2012-04-24 06:30:09

  Hackers vs. Coders

Photo Credit: Pranav MistryBeing a good hacker is an invaluable skill. But is being a coder the same as being a hacker? Is it possible that coders are at a creative disadvantage to hackers who don’t know how to code?Here’s a story that helped me see the difference.I was recently invited to mentor at Startup Weekend. On Friday night, we gathered to eat pizza, pitch ideas, create teams and discuss launch plans. At the end of the day, everyone was feeling great about what theyâ...

   Hacker,Coder,Comparison,Innovation     2011-05-11 02:11:09

  Why I Quit My Job to Start a Tech Company

Back in November of 2006, before NY Mag and TimeOut put startups on the cover, before the “tech bubble”, before Twitter and Foursquare were popular, before working at a startup in NY was considered a reasonable thing to do, I was a private equity investor for a $1.6 billion fund called Quadrangle Group. It was just my third year out of college and I made a little over $250,000. For a Brazilian immigrant who spent most of his childhood kind of worried he would have to do physica...

   Start,Company,Creative,Innovation,Techno     2011-08-16 08:38:35

  The Balanced Developer

In preparation for a recent team offsite, I spent some time thinking about what I hold dear as a software developer. One idea I kept coming back to is the notion of balance. I see balance manifesting itself several ways in the work of a successful developer, some of which follow.Speed Versus QualityThe most obvious example is the balance of development speed and quality. When building software, it’s never a good idea to write code as fast as possible without any attention toward maintaina...

   Balance,Software,Development,Speed,Quality     2011-11-15 03:02:19

  "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

  The history of the name Google

Google now is known almost by everyone who has internet access. It's the most frequently accessed search engine around the world and it provides fast speed and high quality search results. While you are using Google, have you ever wondered how the name Google comes? According to Steven Levy, the author of the book In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. The original name for the project was named BackRub and was coded by Sergey Brin. He was thinking that web pages made thei...

   GOOGLE,HISTORY,GOOGLE NAME,GOOGOL     2016-12-03 20:58:06

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