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  What, exactly, is a Product Manager?

I often get asked what a product manager is. What do they do? Where do they come from? Why do they like sharpies so much?In his book Inspired, Marty Cagan describes the job of the product manager as “to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”. Similarly, I’ve always defined product management as the intersection between business, technology and user experience (hint – only a product manager would define themselves in a venn diagram). A good produc...

   Product manager,Definition,Features,Career     2011-10-12 11:42:15

  CSS Rounded Corners In All Browsers (With No Images)

In the past two years, increased browser support has transformed CSS3 from a fringe activity for Safari geeks to a viable option for enterprise level websites. While cross-browser support is often too weak for CSS3 to hold up a site’s main design, front-end developers commonly look to CSS3 solutions for progressive enhancement in their sites. For instance, a developer might add a drop-shadow in Firefox, Safari and Chrome using -moz-box-shadow and -webkit-box-shadow, and the...

   CSS,Rounded corner,No image,IE,Chrome,Fi     2011-06-30 22:50:34

  Building an iPhone application.

One of my New Years resolutions was to finally learn the iOS SDK and build a 'real' application.I am happy to report that progress is going really well and wanted to share something that I have noticed about iOS programming.It only looks scary... it's not. It's actually very easy.Now, I am not building Mail, Angry Birds or Photosynth or anything, but the core concepts of the SDK are not that bad once you spend some time learning delegation. If you don't understand delegation, iOS programmi...

   Apple,iOS,Application development     2012-01-28 07:03:36

  Learn how to tell a story before building your own start-ups

Imagine one day you become a successful start-up founder like Mark Zuckerberg, then somebody will come and find you and want to shoot a movie for you with your start-up story. If you are not successful yet, then this story should be written by yourself. For start-up founders, learn how to tell a story will not only promote yourself among investors, users and medias but also can create a macro development plan for your start-ups by explaining various unexpected things will happen. Pixar storyboa...

   Start-up,rules,Pixar     2013-03-10 10:06:54

  How Technology Can Prevent Casino Cheating

Cheating has been around as long as gambling itself, which is surely since the dawn on of time. Cheating in casinos, both land based and online, can prove a huge problem, not only for those playing against the cheater, but for the individual casino operators, as well as the industry in its entirety. Preventing cheating makes casino play fairer for all involved, both operators and their clients.Fortunately, in today's day and age, we have excellent, highly developed technology that can assist cas...

   Technology,Casino     2015-07-13 02:52:44

  So, just what IS the problem with Windows Phone?

Charlie Kindel (who left Microsoft earlier this year after 21 years, most recently as a Windows Phone General Manager), posted today on an “impedance mismatch” between carriers and device manufacturers, and Windows Phone, where those carriers and OEMs are “reluctant” to push Windows Phone, while Google’s Android has taken an approach that “reduces friction with carriers & device manufacturers at the expense of end users”. Kindel seems to be imply...

   Windows Phone,Trend,Weak market,Analysis     2011-12-27 09:11:19

  A turing machine in 133 bytes of javascript

Multiply turing machine The fact it took me 20 lines of javascript to implement a nondeterministic turing machine simulatorlast week kept me up at night. All weekend. Too much code for something so simple and I kept having this gut feeling implementing a basic version shouldn’t take more than 140 bytes. Sunday afternoon I sat down for about an ...

   Turing machine,JavaScript,Simple code     2011-11-28 09:27:28

  I hate cut-and-paste

Me, I blame the IDE's.Coding used to be hard. Not because programming itself was overly hard, but mostly because editors absolutely sucked. How much the typical development environment in the 70's and 80's sucked is hard to convey (except for a very lucky few, and those would have likely been using DEC and WANG gear). I got in on the tail end of the punch card era. Punching your own program is lots of fun. Once. And if you drop a deck you get to play with the sorter, which is also lots of fun (o...

   IDE,Editor,Cut and paste,Shortcut,Blame     2011-10-24 11:33:46

  How Computers Boot Up

The previous post described motherboards and the memory map in Intel computers to set the scene for the initial phases of boot. Booting is an involved, hacky, multi-stage affair – fun stuff. Here’s an outline of the process: An outline of the boot sequence Things start rolling when you press the power button on the computer (no! do tell!). Once the motherboard is powered up it initializes its own firmware – the chipset and other tidbits – and tries to ...

   Computer,Boot-up,Rationale     2012-04-11 13:43:02

  What Makes A Great Programmer?

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the year 2000, Dr. Pargas was standing at the front of our data structures class talking about some data structure-y topic while an SSH session was projected on the wall in front of us. Someone asked a question, and he said something along the lines of "Well, if you want to be a real computer scientist you need to start using vi". I think he was smiling as he said it, and in hindsight his statement wasn't even slightly true, but being young and ...

   Tips.Programmer,Great,Great programmer     2011-06-08 03:08:04

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