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  Why I Quit My Job to Start a Tech Company

Back in November of 2006, before NY Mag and TimeOut put startups on the cover, before the “tech bubble”, before Twitter and Foursquare were popular, before working at a startup in NY was considered a reasonable thing to do, I was a private equity investor for a $1.6 billion fund called Quadrangle Group. It was just my third year out of college and I made a little over $250,000. For a Brazilian immigrant who spent most of his childhood kind of worried he would have to do physica...

   Start,Company,Creative,Innovation,Techno     2011-08-16 08:38:35

  Best practices of front end optimization

1. Use DocumentFragment or innerHTML to replace complex elements insertion DOM operation on browser is expensive. Although browser performance is improved much, multiple DOM elements insertion is still expensive and will affect the page load speed. Assume we have an ul element on our page, we now want to retrieve a JSON list using AJAX and then update the ul using JavaScript. Usually we may write it as : var list = document.querySelector('ul'); ajaxResult.items.forEach(function(item) { // ...

   JavaScript,Front end,Optimization,Tips     2013-07-06 11:26:27

  Hey kids, just say NO to programming !

Cory Doctorow's latest talk 'The Coming War on General Purpose Computing' really puts things in perspective about life in the 21st century. This got me thinking more about functional programming languages and how they are related to the intentional limitation/crippling of turing machines by industry and government. What if Stallman is right about the intentional efforts to limit freedom of information ? What if it's even worse than we all think it is ? In relation to functional languages ...

   Programming,Factor,View,Kids,No     2012-01-16 10:16:19

  #46 – Why software sucks

No one makes bad software on purpose. No benevolent programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people and making them cry. Bad software, or bad anything, happens because making things is hard, making good things doubly so. The three things that make it difficult are: Possessing the diverse skills needed not to suck.Understanding who you’re making the thing for.Orchestrating the interplay of skills, egos and constraints over the course of...

   Software design,Sucks,Software industry     2012-03-19 13:10:37

  12 Things A Programmer Really Needs To Know

How do you answer the question, “what do I need to learn to be a good programmer?” I have written posts trying to answer that question, typically focusing on the languages that you should learn or the algorithms and other techniques you need to know. What about the rest of a programmer’s life? This is a less serious look at the life of a programmer. So, what does a programmer really need to know?Caffeine â€“ You need to find your preferred caffeine delivery system. M...

   Tips,Programmer,How,What,Logic     2011-08-31 08:46:32

  I'm Retiring from PHP

I am retiring from PHP as my language of choice for personal side projects and new programming ventures. This was not an easy decision to come to, but one that I think is necessary for my love of programming to continue. You see, I'm not only a programmer because I love programming, but because I can not do anything else. History It all started in 1999 when I was in 8th grade. The Internet was really starting to get interesting and I wanted to start programming. I had picked up...

   PHP,Scala,Programming,Language     2011-06-27 07:36:25

  Transparency in Cloud Services

37signals recently launched public “Uptime Reports” for their applications (announcement). The reaction on Hacker News was rather tepid, but I think it’s a positive development, and I applaud 37signals for stepping forward. Reliability of cloud applications is a real concern, and there’s not nearly enough hard data out there. Not all products are equally reliable; even within 37signals, the new reports show a 3:1 variation in downtime across apps. That said, ...

   Cloud,Transapency,37signals,Announcement     2012-01-10 07:24:02

  Web Symbols typeface

There are those points in every interactive designer’s career when he becomes fed up with producing the same set of graphics all over again for every website he designs. It could be the social network icons, gallery arrows or any number of his «signature» butterflies for the footer of each of his projects. Similar for interactive developers that have to slice the same GIFs and PNGs each time art-director asks them to.U...

   Web,Type face,Interactive mode,Design icon     2011-11-19 02:08:47

  From College To Silicon Valley: Tips From A Veteran

Editor’s note: Pedram Keyani has been an engineer at Facebook since 2007. He is a manager on the Site Integrity team, the inventor of Keg Presence and a Hackathon enthusiast. Looking for internships and jobs after college can be exhilarating, especially for people with engineering and other technical expertise. In an otherwise tough job market, demand for software engineers is higher than ever right now. You may find that companies are actually competing to pay you for the knowledge y...

   Career,College,Silicon valley,Transition,Experience     2012-02-20 05:34:24

  The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language

A few years ago I visited a friend who is a graduate student in linguistics. After some time he asked me if I was aware of the work by Chomsky on formal languages. I told him that yes, Chomsky work was a basis for much of the developments in theoretical computer science. More than that, I was glad to learn that there was something technical that I could share and discuss with other people in linguistics. At the time I found this was just a great coincidence. It was only recently, though, t...

   Programming language,Human language,Chomsky     2011-11-28 10:36:34

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