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  Google engineer: What I learned in the war

Veteran's Day is an ideal time to hear from one of those rare folks who combine corporate and military careers. Dan Cross, a software engineer at Google (GOOG) and a 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, took a leave to serve active duty in Afghanistan, came home a year ago, and brought back lessons that he couldn't have learned in business. While he had never seen himself as the military type until a personal tragedy made him reroute his career, he's a better man for it. Cross, 34, is now an...

   Military,Marine,Google,Engineer,Lessons,Teamwork     2011-11-12 10:36:03

  Seven Ways to Boost Employee Morale

Do your employees drag themselves into work? Is office laughter a vague memory? Your employees' morale may need a boost.After all, low morale can lead to poor cooperation, low productivity and increased turnover -- and ultimately hinder a business from reaching its goals.Since employee morale can quickly build or break a company's success, effective leaders often keep a close eye on it and enlist simple and creative approaches to strengthen it. Here a few tactics to think about adapting for your...

   Employee,Working, active,Attitute,Passion,Encouragement     2011-10-09 07:37:36

  Open source code libraries suffer from vulnerabilities

A study of how 31 popular open source code libraries were downloaded over the past 12 months found that more than a third of the 1,261 versions of these libraries had a known vulnerability and about a quarter of the downloads were tainted. The study was undertaken by Aspect Security, which evaluates software for vulnerabilities, with Sonatype, a firm that provides a central repository housing more than 300,000 libraries for downloading open source components and gets 4 billion requests pe...

   Open source,Security,Vulnerability     2012-03-28 06:10:19

  Do You Make These 5 Database Design Mistakes?

Look, everyone makes mistakes. It’s true. But not all of us have the chance to make mistakes that end up costing millions of dollars in hardware and production support costs. Any one of the following five mistakes listed below will add additional costs to your company. It’s guaranteed. The costs could be hardware related (extra disk space, network bandwidth), which tend to add up quickly. The costs are also support related (bad performance, database re-design, report cre...

   Database design,Mistake,Advice,Data type,Compatibility     2012-01-03 11:25:13

  Automate Everything

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human. But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any j...

   Automate,Email,Repeative     2012-02-07 06:21:19

  Getting started with C++ TR1 regular expressions

Overview This article is written for the benefit of someone familiar with regular expressions but not with the use of regular expressions in C++ via the TR1 (C++ Standards Committee Technical Report 1) extensions. Comparisons will be made with Perl for those familiar with Perl, though no knowledge of Perl is required. The focus is not on the syntax of regular expressions per se but rather how to use regular expressions to search for patterns and make replacements. Support for TR1 ext...

   Regular expression,Replace,TR1,Extension     2011-08-14 07:25:20

  The Disruptor In The Valley

Justin Kan and Emmett Shear watched their first startup, an online calendar called Kiko, implode when Google decided to do the same thing in 2006. They sold Kiko's scraps on eBay for $258,000 and wondered what to do with their lives. So the pair did the only thing they could think of: They went to see Paul Graham at his house in Cambridge, Mass., near Harvard Square. Graham sat them down and helped bang out a plan to create Justin.tv, now the Web's biggest portal for live video, with 31 million ...

   Paul Graham,Creative,Programmer,Investme     2011-08-28 04:13:43

  The Number One Trait of a Great Developer

Maybe the best programmers aren’t those who spectacularly solve crazy problems, but those who don’t create them, which is much more silent. – Lena HerrmannWhen I look around at other companies hiring Ruby on Rails developers, I see them focusing on three major traits: Super-smart; Large community following; Deep Ruby knowledge. They’re all wrong. While these are great aspects in moderation, they all miss the number one quality of a fantastic developer: Judge...

   Developer,Trait,Judgement,No. 1     2011-11-05 06:49:19

  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

  Investment Banking in China — What I’ve Learned & Unlearned

Anyone seeking to succeed in investment banking in China should live by one rule alone: it’s not who you know, but how well you know them. In China, more than any other country where I’ve worked, the professional is also the personal. Comradeship, if not friendship, is always a necessary precondition to doing business together. If you haven’t shared a meal – and more importantly, shared a few hundred laughs – you will never share a business deal. Competence, ex...

   Business,China,Relationship,Cooperation,Advice     2011-11-18 09:13:49

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