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  Programming Language Readability

Lets compare some Python to Haskell for solving the same problem.  The problem we’ll pick is Trie data-structure for auto-completions.  We are interested not so much in the nitty gritty of the algorithm, but in the language style itself.  Auto-complete has been in the programming news a lot recently; both a Python and a Haskell solver have turned up. (I suspect this post got flagged on Hacker News :(  It never got on the front-page despite the rapid upvoting on a n...

   Programming,Readability,Python,Haskell     2012-02-27 04:52:02

  What I learned from a month of blogging and 250k visits

Roughly a month ago, I decided to give blogging another try, in earnest. I put out an article most days and up to 3 per day when I was experimenting with new channels.It has been fascinating.That being said, this is not a post about blogging tactics. It’s about what the experience has taught me about startups.Find the customers first, then build for themIt took me a long time to understand YC’s motto that you should:Make something people want.The first time I heard that, ...

   SEO,Promote,Website,Advice,Traffic     2011-11-10 10:58:40

  What’s Your Start-up’s “Bus Count”? 7 Myths of Entrepreneurship and Programming

Software development is a rapidly evolving field that got off to a very rocky start. Conventional wisdom for many years was that software engineering should be like other types of engineering: design carefully, specify precisely, and then just build it – exactly to spec. Just like building a bridge, right? The problem with this approach is that software is just that. Soft. It’s endlessly malleable. You can change software pretty much any time you want, and people do. A...

   Start-up,technical,company,tips     2011-07-04 07:44:54

  JavaScript Needs Blocks

While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby’s blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript’s “first class functions”. Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both JavaScript and Ruby have a mechanism to do so makes it natural to assume equivalence. In fact, when people talk about why Ruby’s blocks are different ...

   JavaScript,Block,Style,Format,Maintainebility     2012-01-11 11:59:35

  FUCK PASSWORDS

I'm so tired of passwords. So, so, so tired. Most people don't understand this. Most people use the same password everywhere. Most people can just mechanically type out password3 in every password box, smirking to themselves at how clever they are, because who would ever guess 3 instead of 1? I don't do that. Let me tell you what i do. I generate a different password for every service, based on a convoluted master password and the name of the thing. I do this because it's what you're...

   Security,Password,Random generation,Hard to remember     2011-12-05 11:32:45

  Feature: The History Of Mobile Gaming

Mobile phones have come a long way since the unsightly bricks of the 1980s. The sleek handsets of today are a fraction the size of their ancestors, yet exponentially more powerful. While the implications for communication have been profound, there have been many other applications for this technology. Modern devices are capable of supporting increasingly complex software, innovative interfaces and networking capabilities, and the gaming sector has been one of the biggest benefactors of this.Much...

   Game,Mobile,History,Feature, Game on mobile device     2011-10-12 11:44:30

  Don't write on the whiteboard

I recently interviewed at a major technology company. I won't mention the name because, honestly, I can't remember whether I signed an NDA, much less how strong it was.I did well. Mostly because of luck. I normally step over myself when I interview. I guess I've improved over the years. Here are a few tips to ace your own interview.1. Don't write on the whiteboardWhen I interviewed at Palantir around 5 years ago, I had a lot of trouble with this. Yes, I knew next to nothing about compu...

   Interview,Preparation,Whiteboard,Note,Python     2012-01-11 11:31:32

  Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?

What you do when compiling can ruin your life. And not just when compiling, but when waiting for any short computer operation to finish. That time is ridiculously tiny compared to the rest of your workday, yet it can have a huge impact on your productivity and well-being overall. Yes, that’s a big fat claim. And by the way, this article is not just about coders or programmers. It’s about any smart people working with computers. And there will be pictures! Let’s rock and ro...

   Programming.Net,ASP.NET,Platform     2012-02-23 07:14:11

  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

  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