Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Hard

  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

  Inspiration vs. Imitation

Every now and then I get a really lovely email from an aspiring letterer that is about to publish a passion project of his or her own. They tell me my work was an inspiration and that they can’t wait to share their creation with the world. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside for a moment…until I click on their link and realize that much of what they intend to publish is nearly a direct tracing of my work. A lot of established illustrators and designers deal with the same ...

   Designer,Copy,Divisify,Classification,Judgement,History     2011-12-05 12:26:38

  What Separates Good Designers from Great Ones

Most of the design books you read, including my own, are about how to be a good, competent designer. They are about how to make strong, reasoned design decisions and about design methods and tools. But what they won’t—can’t—teach you is how to become a great designer. The only way to be a great designer is to produce great products. Everything else is…well, everything else. I’m convinced that the people who are great designers, while assure...

   Designer,Feature,Great designer,Good designer,Comparison     2011-12-06 02:25:17

  The Singular Secret of the Rockstar Programmer

Before all the laws of software, before the purpose of software, before the science of software design itself, there is a singular fact that determines the success or failure of a software developer. This fact makes the difference between the senior engineer who can seem to pick up new languages in a day and the junior developer who struggles for ten years just to get a paycheck, programming other people’s designs and never improving enough to get a promotion. It differentiates the poor...

   Programming,Tip,Great developer,Rockstar     2011-08-07 23:42:09

  Why you don’t need a programmer

Once or twice a month I get the question from an aspiring entrepreneur that’s been pushing their idea forward in hopes to (very soon) create a company out of what they’ve been working so hard on.  They’ve spent countless hours working through all the details of what this new product will do, who they’re going to partner with and what they’re going to charge for it. They may even be on the Lean Startup bandwagon and actually talked with potential custo...

   Programmer,Necessary,No need     2012-03-30 07:37:39

  Scala, Patterns and The Perl Effect

He tried to understand that one concept for a couple of months before it made sense to him. Admittedly, partial functions are not intuitive for anyone who has been schooled in traditional programming, but still, looking at the problem he was trying to solve it seemed like James was required to expend too much effort relative to the simplicity of the problem (as he pointed out, now that he understands the concept it seems straightforward). He showed me the code, and it was basically a situa...

   Scala,Perl,Pattern,Partial function,Template     2011-12-21 09:25:41

  Productivity tips for freelance web designers

There are lots of great things about freelance, such as not being tied to a desk, flexible working hours and little, if any, supervision. All freelance web designers probably realize that one of the biggest challenges of their job is the issue of productivity. How to motivate yourself and stay productive every day with no external supervisors telling us to complete a task right now? Here are five practical productivity hacks for all freelance web designers who want to boost their performance. 1....

   productivity tips, freelance, web designers, productivity hacks     2015-02-13 01:40:29

  How Query Optimizer Works in RDBMS

In a previous post, we discussed how the various relational operators are implemented in relational database systems. If you have read that post, you probably still remember that there are a few alternative implementations for every operator. Thus, how should RDBMS determine which algorithm (or implementation) to use? Obviously, to optimize the performance for any query, RDBMS has to select the correct the algorithm based on the query. It would not be desirable to always use the same algori...

   DATABASE,DATABASE DESIGN,DATABASE OPTIMIZATION     2019-04-20 07:26:32

  Replacing small C programs with Haskell

C is the classic go-to tool for small programs that need to be really fast. When scripts.mit.edu needed a small program to be a glorified cat that also added useful HTTP headers to the beginning of its output, there was no question about it: it would be written in C, and it would be fast; the speed of our static content serving depended on it! (The grotty technical details: our webserver is based off of a networked filesystem, and we wanted to avoid giving Apache too many credentials in ca...

   C,Haskell,Small program     2012-01-03 10:51:39

  git reset vs git revert

When maintaining code using version control systems such as git, it is unavoidable that we need to rollback some wrong commits either due to bugs or temp code revert. In this case, rookie developers would be very nervous because they may get lost on what they should do to rollback their changes without affecting others, but to veteran developers, this is their routine work and they can show you different ways of doing that. In this post, we will introduce two major ones used frequently by develo...

   GIT,GIT RESET,GIT REVERT     2019-02-02 08:26:39

RECENT