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  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

  What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie?

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at lea...

   C,Father,Dennis Ritchie,Death,Father of C,UNIX     2011-10-17 10:12:02

  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

  Seven Java projects that changed the world

O\'Reilly is celebrating the release of Java 7, and our inaugural OSCON Java conference: July 25-27 in Portland, Ore. Java\'s open source ecosystem is strong and healthy, one of the primary reasons for our creation of OSCON Java. Over the last decade, several projects have traveled beyond mere adoption and had effects dominating the Java world, into software development in general, and some even further into the daily lives of users. JUnit Ported to Java by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma from Be...

   Java,Projects,Prominent,Eclipse,Sue     2011-07-26 02:50:42

  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

  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

  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

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