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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Good software

  Designing Great API Docs

Writing documentation is one of those things that is dreaded by many developers. It takes a lot of effort and time to get right. And too often, people take shortcuts. This is sad, because well designed documentation is the key to getting people excited about your project, whether it's open source or a developer focused product. In fact, I argue that the most important piece of UX for a developer product isn't the homepage or the sign up process or the SDK download. It's the API documentati...

   API docs,Design API docs,Advice     2012-03-09 23:15:00

  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

  Guest Post from a CodeBoy: The Five Stages of Debugging

Being confronted with a serious and difficult-to-diagnose bug can be one of the most traumatic and stressful experiences of a professional programmer's career. Those who have been through such an ordeal rate the stress as on a par with that accompanying serious injury, divorce, or the death of a family member. Researchers who have studied the psychology of computer programming have lately constructed a framework to understand the stages through which the programmer's mind progresses as she...

   Debug,Steps,Stages     2012-05-01 06:39:38

  Why developers need a Mac

I am by no means an Apple fan. For one thing, I find Windows (and Linux) stable and fast, so you are not going to hear me argue that my computing life was transformed once I made that Switch (with a capital letter). Admittedly that is partly because I am familiar with how to fix and tune Windows and remove foistware, but it is not that hard. For another, I am not an admirer of Apple’s secretive approach, or the fact that most requests for comment from journalists are responded to wi...

   Apple,Mac,Development,iOS,Windows     2011-12-07 03:12:17

  Why using + to concatenate string in Java loop is not a good option

String concatenation is a common operation in Java programming. It is to concatenate multiple strings into a single string. Java provides a String class which is an immutable class which means the object cannot be mutated once instantiated. Once a String object is instantiated, its properties cannot be changed anymore, so when concatenating strings, it's actually create a new String instance to store the concatenated string values. For example, below is a simple string concatenation example. Str...

   JAVA,STRING,JAVA 8     2019-01-18 22:07:12

  Making Computer Science a Requirement?

This US News article points out a growing interest among colleges and universities to make basic computer science a required course for all students. Georgia Tech already does this. The article points out that universities not normally considered to be science/technology-heavy are leaning this way too: Every student at Montclair State University in New Jersey must complete a computer science in order to graduate. For most students, that course is Introduction for Computer Appl...

   Computer science,Requirement,CS     2012-04-05 11:33:04

  â€œNative vs Web” Is Total Bullshit

The web is dead. HTML5 is the be-all end-all of the future. Users are spending more time on apps and less time on the web. You can do anything on the web that you can in a native app. Yawn. Here’s how I feel whenever I hear/read anything about the overplayed “Native Versus Web” argument: It’s not an either-or decision Why aren’t we still arguing over “Print vs Digital”? Well, because (most) people understand that each medium has its place in thi...

   Web app,Native app,Comparison     2012-02-24 05:30:03

  Code to Create Custom Share Buttons

Interested in sharing your B2B content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or delicious? Do multi-option social media sharing tools such as ShareThis seem like overkill?That was our conclusion after researching the social media sites on which readers are most likely to share content from our blog focused on solutions to a wide range of business challenges, What Works for Business. We decided that Facebook, LinkedIn, delicious, and Twitter were the sites on which our target busines...

   Share button,Web content,Facebook,Custom     2011-08-24 10:40:29

  Lisp: It's Not About Macros, It's About Read

Note: the examples here only work with outlet lisp. Refer to your version of lisp/scheme’s documentation for how read works (and possibly other forms) I know it’s an old post by now, but something about the article Why I love Common Lisp and hate Java, part II rubbed me the wrong way. The examples just aren’t that good. The usage of macros is plain baffling, when a function would have been fine. The author admits this, but still does it. There’s a follow-up post wh...

   Lisp,Macro,Read,Java     2012-02-19 06:12:19

  How to create a language in one day

About a year ago I worked on a very interesting project which involved creating a unique world with all its history, people, physics, metaphysics and so forth. I like fictional worlds that are thoroughly created and I have always marveled at people like Tolkien or Richard Garriot who go such great lengths and even create languages for their worlds. I have since many years felt that it would be awesome to create my own language and I’m probably not alone in feeling that.When I started stud...

   Language,Develop,Short period,Programming language     2011-10-19 14:15:24

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