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  Open Source (Almost) Everything

When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were faced with an interesting question:Should we open source Grit or keep it proprietary?Keeping it private would provide a higher hurdle for competing Ruby-based Git hosting sites, givin...

   Open source,Benefits,Popularity,Advertisement,Advantage     2011-11-23 07:58:15

  Going Fullscreen with Canvas

As notes in the Release Notes, Firefox Aurora introduced the Fullscreen API. This means that it will appear in the release version of Firefox in about 3 months.This is one of several features that will be fantastic for games on the web. Other exciting APIs are theGamepad, Canvas, and Audio. Some of these APIs still need work to be suitable for real-time games, but it’s a great time to be involved in building games for the web.I wanted to try out the Fullscreen API so I...

   HTML5,Canvas,Full screen,2D,Drawing     2011-11-22 08:37:23

  Python internals: how callables work

[The Python version described in this article is 3.x, more specifically - the 3.3 alpha release of CPython.] The concept of a callable is fundamental in Python. When thinking about what can be "called", the immediately obvious answer is functions. Whether it’s user defined functions (written by you), or builtin functions (most probably implemented in C inside the CPython interpreter), functions were meant to be called, right? Well, there are also methods, but they’re not very ...

   Python,Callable work,Rationale     2012-03-24 05:20:27

  How To Make The Most of Your Least Productive Time

Everybody talks about mastering the art of staying productive. Not many people willingly accept that such efforts are futile. It’s impossible to stay productive 100% of the time, and this will never change. Something that I believe to be just as important, if not more so, is what we make of our least productive time. We all have the capacity to be extremely productive for some part of the day. Even the world’s grandest underachievers. But I believe that to be successful runni...

   Productive time,Limit time,Effort     2012-02-06 07:49:47

  Transparency in Cloud Services

37signals recently launched public “Uptime Reports” for their applications (announcement). The reaction on Hacker News was rather tepid, but I think it’s a positive development, and I applaud 37signals for stepping forward. Reliability of cloud applications is a real concern, and there’s not nearly enough hard data out there. Not all products are equally reliable; even within 37signals, the new reports show a 3:1 variation in downtime across apps. That said, ...

   Cloud,Transapency,37signals,Announcement     2012-01-10 07:24:02

  Why I Won’t Hire You

I will be very honest with you in this post. Most interview articles only show obvious mistakes, as if most people don’t know showing up late is bad form. I will tell you the things I didn’t really know about until I was the one interviewing, and interviewing for a variety of positions and person-types. No interview prep article ever prepared me in the right way for how interviewers really think. That is what I will be sharing with you today. When you first walk in...

   Career,Hire,Preparartion,CV,Resume     2012-01-11 04:38:19

  Why is Design the Body Language of the Web?

Good web design is not just about the looks. It is also about the message being delivered to the user and this is probably much more important that it being pretty. Designing a visual message which will contain text has to be easily understood by the people you deliver that message to.Given this, you have to master the method of connecting to the people that visit your website. Besides knowing what they want and what they are looking for, you will have to know how to make it comfortable for them...

   Web design,Body language,Visual,Connection,Focus,Communication     2011-10-26 03:24:53

  Week 1 : Research - Elements of Successful iPhone Games.

This weekend I started work on my first full blown game for the iPhone. I’m not ready to share the details of what the game will be specifically as I’m sure these will change dramatically over the coming weeks. All I’m sure on is it will be a platform game built with Corona SDK. To get me started I’ve been downloading a bunch of games from the app store, jotting down some of the areas contributing to their addictiveness and success. Short levels I do most of my ...

   iPhone,Game design,Mobile,Facors     2012-01-16 09:47:53

  From College To Silicon Valley: Tips From A Veteran

Editor’s note: Pedram Keyani has been an engineer at Facebook since 2007. He is a manager on the Site Integrity team, the inventor of Keg Presence and a Hackathon enthusiast. Looking for internships and jobs after college can be exhilarating, especially for people with engineering and other technical expertise. In an otherwise tough job market, demand for software engineers is higher than ever right now. You may find that companies are actually competing to pay you for the knowledge y...

   Career,College,Silicon valley,Transition,Experience     2012-02-20 05:34:24

  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

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