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  How to hire an idiot

Wow, I remember how idealistic I was when I was about to bring on my first employee! After dealing with bad bosses over my career, after doing a whole lot of thinking about how I was going to be a great boss, and after doing a whole lot of reading about how to hire effective people, I was really looking forward to it. I was going to:-- Hire people smarter than myself, who get things done!-- Trust them to do their job, let them do their job and give them enough resources to do it!-- Pay them WELL...

   Employee,Idiot,Work experience,Pay,Process     2011-10-24 11:47:54

  How I Became a Programmer

I posted a very brief response to a post on HackerNews yesterday challenging the notion that 8 weeks of guided tutelage on Ruby on Rails is not going to produce someone who you might consider a "junior RoR developer." It did not garner many upvotes so I figured that like most conversation on the Internet it faded into the general ambient chatter. Imagine my surprise when I woke up to couple handfuls' worth of emails from around the world asking me what I did, how I did it, an...

   Programmer,Advice,Method,Study     2011-11-24 09:14:50

  So you want to write JavaScript for a living?

What do you need to know if you are interviewing for a job that involves Javascript development? What kind of expectations do employers have of candidates now that the state of client side development has been changed with the rise of asynchronous JavaScript and the often slick, supporting interfaces? These were questions I was asking myself after a friend pointed me to an interesting job posting over at Meebo that included some JavaScript puzzlers on logical operators, DOM odditi...

   JavaScript,Career,Skills,Knowledge     2011-10-22 12:53:11

  Speed Hashing

A given hash uniquely represents a file, or any arbitrary collection of data. At least in theory. This is a 128-bit MD5 hash you're looking at above, so it can represent at most 2128 unique items, or 340 trillion trillion trillion. In reality the usable space is substantially less; you can start seeing significant collisions once you've filled half the space, but half of an impossibly large number is still impossibly large. Back in 2005, I wondered about the difference between a checksum and...

   Speed hashing,Security,MD5     2012-04-07 10:35:15

  Python internals: adding a new statement to Python

This article is an attempt to better understand how the front-end of Python works. Just reading documentation and source code may be a bit boring, so I’m taking a hands-on approach here: I’m going to add an until statement to Python. All the coding for this article was done against the cutting-edge Py3k branch in the Python Mercurial repository mirror. The until statement Some languages, like Ruby, have an until statement, which is the complement to while (until num == 0 is equi...

   Python,New statement,Research,Addition     2012-03-12 07:32:24

  PHP: a fractal of bad design

Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us have the slightest clue what we’re doing. Combine with Sturgeon’s Law, and I have a lifetime’s worth of stuff to gripe about. This is not the same. PHP is not merely awkward to use, or ill-suited for what I want, or suboptimal, or...

   PHP,Design,Analysis     2012-04-11 13:46:57

  A brief guide to tech internships

Planning to be an Intern in the Bay Area during Summer 2012? Make sure to read an Intern's Guide to the Bay Area, and join the 2012 Facebook group.  (via this guy, via this guy) Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05. According to Joel,  No matter what you do, get a good summer internship. As such: here’s everything you ever wanted to know about tech inter...

   Internship,Advice,CS student     2012-02-01 04:48:31

  Why developer-friendliness is central to API design

Today, APIs play a bigger role in software development than ever before. The evolution of computing has been dominated by ever-increasing levels of abstraction; the use of higher-level languages, of course, but also the development of platforms, libraries, and frameworks. Professor Douglass C. Smith claims the progression of this second category far outpaced the development of programming languages.  Developers are also noticing that difficulty has shifted from designing algorithms a...

   API,User friendly,Significance, Improve quality     2011-12-21 02:29:54

  Top 10 Reasons to Use HTML5 Right Now

So you’re still not using HTML5, huh? I guess you probably have your reasons; it’s not fully adopted yet, it doesn’t work in IE, you don’t like users, you’re out of touch or you are just passionately in love with writing strict XHTML code. HTML5 is the revolution that the web needed and the fact is, it is the future whether you like it or not — suck it up and deal. HTML5 isn’t hard to use or understand and even though it’s not fully a...

   HTML5,Accessibility,Cross browser compatibility     2011-12-08 02:52:38

  10 Ways to Be a More Productive Web Developer

We could all be more productive. There are many things we can do — some big, some small — that will enhance the way we work and improve the outcomes of our activities.Although I can’t promise that I’ll be able to help you cure all your productivity ailments, I do hope that I can provide you with a few useful, solid tips on streamlining your web development workflow and making every part of the development cycle move quickly and smoothly.Follow each one of these tips a...

   Ways,Efficiency,Web development,API,Fram     2011-09-26 11:25:29

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