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  Performance is a Feature

We've always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we're performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There's plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people will use it. [Google found that] the page with 10 results took 0.4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took 0.9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a seco...

   Website,Perfomance,Optimization     2011-07-02 01:52:12

  Getting the most out of your pixels - adapting to view state changes

In Windows 8, your apps run on a variety of screen sizes and under various view states. A user might have your app snapped to the side of a 25-inch desktop monitor, or fill the whole screen of a 10-inch widescreen tablet. In each case, you want your app to take full advantage of the available space. In this post, I show you how you can track the current size and view state of your app in code, and give you tips on how to write your app in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview to handle screen si...

   Windos 8,Metro,Resolution,Style     2012-04-23 06:13:02

  5 things my 4-year-old taught me about technology

One of the great things about being a parent is that you get to see how kids use technology. I have a 4 year-old daughter who loves to mess around with my phone, watch videos on YouTube and play Angry Birds.It’s fun to watch her interact with these things, not only because she’s already better at some of the games than me. The really interesting stuff happens when stuff doesn’t work the way she expects it to, or when she finds ways to use tech that I hadn’t thought of...

   Learning,Children,Siri,Voice,Tech,Course     2011-10-26 07:07:48

  10 Reasons Why Visual Basic is Better Than C#

Visual Basic is a better programming language than Visual C#. Who says so? This article! Here are 10 reasons why you should always choose VB over C#. 1 – “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” This is a quotation from Gertrude Stein’s 1922 play Geography and Plays. However, the poetry wouldn’t work in C#, because – unforgivably – it’s a cASe-SeNSitIvE language. This is madness! Before I start ranting, let me just acknowledge that case-sens...

   Visual basci,C#,Advantage,Comparison     2012-03-10 04:24:03

  About HTML semantics and front-end architecture

A collection of thoughts, experiences, ideas that I like, and ideas that I have been experimenting with over the last year. It covers HTML semantics, components and approaches to front-end architecture, class naming patterns, and HTTP compression. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot — “Little Gidding” About semantics Semantics is the study of the relationshi...

   HTML,SemanticsCSS,OO CSS     2012-03-16 08:42:55

  Fear of Ignorance

This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten by a real programmer within 6 months.During the interview, we had the following exchange (due to an imperfect memory, I’ll ...

   Leader,Team,Technical,Leadership,Ignorence     2011-11-21 10:03:03

  Signs that you're a bad programmer

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (...

   Sign,Programmer,Characteristics,Knowledge,Skill     2011-10-20 08:56:16

  Write Scalable, Server-side JavaScript Applications with Node.js

If you live in the Silicon Valley area, you have already heard the buzz: Node.js is being hailed as the next big thing. It’s the silver bullet that offers scale, eases development, and can be leveraged by the vast pool of client-side JavaScript developers. So, what exactly is Node.js?Node.js is a server-side JavaScript environment that uses an asynchronous event-driven model. It is based on Google's V8 JavaScript engine plus several built-in libraries. The excitement around Node.js is tha...

   Node.js,Server side,Scalable,JavaScript app     2012-03-29 13:50:50

  Java Sequential IO Performance

Many applications record a series of events to file-based storage for later use.  This can be anything from logging and auditing, through to keeping a transaction redo log in an event sourced design or its close relative CQRS.  Java has a number of means by which a file can be sequentially written to, or read back again.  This article explores some of these mechanisms to understand their performance characteristics.  For the scope of this article I will be using pre-a...

   Java,IO,Sequential,Blocking     2012-02-23 07:09:10

  CSS3 Animation With jQuery Fallbacks

In today's post, we'll be taking a look at how you can use CSS3 transitions to power your application's animations with jQuery's .animate() method as a fallback where transitions aren't supported. The benefit of transitions is that unlike JavaScript based animations, they're hardware accelerated in certain browsers and mobile devices, resulting in a potentially smoother overall animation than you would normally experience. In a lot of cases your code will work seamlessly with the solut...

   CSS3,Animation,JavaScript,jQuery,Demo     2011-08-19 08:10:58

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