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  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

  Writing API clients in Perl and Python

I recently released a couple of API clients for the Ge.tt file sharing service, one in Perl and one in Python. (I am just a fan of the service, not an employee or contractor.) I would judge myself an "intermediate" pythonista mostly due to inexperience. It's a culture shock coming from a background of CPAN. The old joke is that Perl is just a life support system for CPAN and that is arguably true, but I am here to tell you: you may not appreciate how good Perl hackers have it with respe...

   API,Perl,Python,API Writing,Pattern     2011-12-23 08:02:38

  Is working experience really so important?

When I browse the recruiting information in the website, I always see the following requirements:"The candidate must have more than 3 years experience in C++ programming" or "The candidate must have more than 3 years experience in iOS development". I would like to ask the recruiter:"Is working experience really so important?" In my opinion, the working experience is not a good measurement to decide whether a candidate is fit or not, and use this rule just like using the lines of code to judge th...

       2014-09-20 07:14:58

  Why Software Projects are Terrible and How Not To Fix Them

If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process.  The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas.  Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD).  But for any particular methodology, whether it is universally accepted or only “mostly” accepted, there are a multitude of o...

   Software,Development,Debug,Design     2011-11-21 10:27:05

  Say good bye to netbook

Asus and Acer are the last two manufacturers of netbooks, but these two companies announced that they would not manufacture netbooks starting from January 1, 2013. Prior to them, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard and Dell stopped production of the netbooks. This means that the life cycle of netbook officially ended.Back to 2009, the U.S. market research firm ABI Research was very optimistic about netbook's future, they said netbook would open a new era for PC market and predicted netbook shipments would ...

   Netbook,Tablet PC, Comparison     2013-01-02 11:53:33

  Web Design 101: Get Your Color Contrasts Right

Great web design is hard.  It requires imagination, a keen eye, and the ability to project ideas onto a, generally digital, medium.  In today’s world this calls for a conflation of both artist and technologist.  I am not one of these people. I am a technologist, but I am no artist (thankfully I know some great artists!). Nonetheless, I’ve always had a good eye for things that look good and for sites that look like they were built with an early version of Micro...

   Web design,Structure,UI,Contrast     2012-02-04 21:42:50

  How To Write A Good Programming Test

I’ve taken and marked a lot of programming tests in the past. I love doing them as it’s always good to see what challenges different programmers have come up with when designing them. Unfortunately, however, most of them aren’t very good. Below is a list of general ideas to help increase the quality of programmer tests. 1. Keep it relevant Too many of the tests have questions on content that simply isn’t relevant to the job. The whole idea behind a programming test i...

   Programming test,Interview,Questions,Pro     2011-08-26 02:46:44

  Chrome is dominating the browser world

Microsoft has announced recently that their Edge browser will abandon its own kernel and switch to use Google Chromium. This by no means indicates that Microsoft admitted it lost the war against Google on browser. For Microsoft, making such a decision is certainly not easy, but it is absolutely a wise decision. After all, the market share of both parties are not at the same competing level anymore. According to NetMarketShare's statistics, Chrome's market share in desktop world has reached 67.29...

   CHROME,CHROMIUM,EDGE     2019-02-01 08:02:53

  Stuff Everyone Should Do (part 2): Coding Standards

Another thing that we did at Google that I thought was surprisingly effective and useful was strict coding standards. Before my time at Google, I was sure that coding standards were pointless. I had absolutely no doubt that they were the kind of thing that petty bureaucrats waste time writing and then use to hassle people who are actually productive. I was seriously wrong. At Google, I could look at any piece of code, anywhere in Google's codebase, and I could read it. The fact that I wa...

   Programming,Code standards,Rules,Stringe     2011-08-15 07:33:02

  Are You a Good Programmer?

If someone asks you to recommend a good programmer, who comes to mind? Do you consider yourself a good programmer? What criteria do you use to judge? In thinking about this, I realized that there are different ways that a programmer can be good. So I present to you The Four Kinds of Good Programmers. And in celebration of Whyday, I include quirky Why-styled illustrations* for your viewing pleasure! The Philosopher The PhilosopherThe philosopher loves to write well-defined, well-structured...

   Programmer,Inventor,Philosopher,Conquero     2011-08-23 07:56:26