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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Hard work

  Automate Everything

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human. But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any j...

   Automate,Email,Repeative     2012-02-07 06:21:19

  Thoughts on Running an Open Source Project

I spoke in the unconference at PHPUK last week, on running an open source project. I thought I would collect together my thoughts into one place before I lose the scratty piece of paper I wrote them down on. I'm not sure I'm the right person to be giving advice exactly, but these are the things that, having been project lead on joind.in for a while, I think are important. Community I love it when people share their code, just make something and publish it, but to my mind it isn't an open...

   Open source,Management,Readme,Community     2012-03-06 05:25:27

  Should a startup focus on good user experience or ship something out quickly?

For a startup, there are always arguments about whether to build a good experience or instead ship something workable out quickly. These two seem contradict with each other and it is usually hard to decide for many startup founders. But in order to win over competitors and gain large portion of market shares as soon as possible, founders must think fast and make their life change decisions. So how should we decide whether we should focus on good user experience or we should ship out the product...

   User experience,Startup     2014-01-20 06:48:28

  My life as a freelancer

In the summer of 2006 a work buddy, George, has told me that I could make some extra money programming on a site named Rent A Coder. I’ve signed up the same day. After losing some time on a project that never started I lost my interest in “coding for money”. I almost forgot about RAC.Fast-forward two years, I was a PhD student at a small North American University with a student visa and … nothing else in my pockets. For a few months I was able to make a living from ...

   Life,Freelancer,C,Rent a Coder,RAC     2011-11-07 02:53:03

  Productivity is just work

The other day, I wrote a post declaring that I will no longer try to increase my productivity. This doesn't mean I won't read productivity blogs, and tweak things, and manage my "system". It means I no longer think about any of that stuff as having anything to do with productivity. Productivity is what happens when you're doing work. Enhancing your productivity is what happens when you do a lot of work, for long enough to get better at it. Look, throw all your stuff in Dropbox, live yo...

   Productivity,Work,Enhancement     2012-01-05 08:18:36

  The False Ideals of the Web

WE who love the Internet love the fact that so many people contribute to it. It’s hard to believe that skeptics once worried about whether anyone would have anything worthwhile to say online. There is, however, an outdated brand of digital orthodoxy that ought to be retired. In this worldview, the Internet is a never-ending battle of good guys who love freedom against bad guys like old-fashioned Hollywood media moguls. The bad guys want to strengthen copyright law, and make ...

   Web,False idea,Free,SOPA     2012-01-19 10:24:25

  XML Abuse

It’s everywhere. XML Abuse. From Domain Specific Languages to Data Serialization, XML is the most commonly abused data format I’ve ever encountered. XML is perfectly fine for (because it was designed for this): First of all: XML was designed to be written by humans and read by humans. Nearly all generated XML I’ve seen sucks badly. I think this is because XML cannot efficiently represent common data structures found in programming languages.XML is good...

   XML,Abuse,Alternative,Serialization,Data storage     2011-12-14 07:12:10

  How to fire an employee who is not good enough?

It's always a tough decision to make to fire an employee. No matter he/she performs how bad, it's hard for the boss to say one person is fired. How to fire an employee who is not good enough? On Quora, there is one such question asked and we think one answer is very attractive and useful. The answer is given by Michael O. Church who is a New York functional programmer. The best employees are multipliers who make others more productive, and next are the adders (workhorses). Subtracters are the g...

   Fire,Career,Talent     2012-09-13 20:04:34

  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

  The business of software

Inspired by a talk I gave yesterday at the BOS conference. This is long, feel free to skip!My first real job was leading a team that created five massive computer games for the Commodore 64. The games were so big they needed four floppy disks each, and the project was so complex (and the hardware systems so sketchy) that on more than one occasion, smoke started coming out of the drives.Success was a product that didn't crash, start a fire or lead to a nervous breakdown.Writing software...

   Software,Design,Business,Software design     2011-10-29 07:22:09

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