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

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Hard

  Dieter Rams' 10 principles of good web design

Dieter Rams is one of the most important designers of the 20th century but his famous 10 principles for good design focused on industrial design. Here Lisbon-based designer Nuno Loureiro applies them to web design “My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality”  â€“ D...

   Web design,Principle,Innovation     2012-02-08 10:29:32

  A Peek Inside the Erlang Compiler

Erlang is a complex system, and I can’t do its inner workings justice in a short article, but I wanted to give some insight into what goes on when a module is compiled and loaded. As with most compilers, the first step is to convert the textual source to an abstract syntax tree, but that’s unremarkable. What is interesting is that the code goes through three major representations, and you can look at each of them. Erlang is unique among functional languages in its casual scop...

   Erlang,Peek,Erlang compiler     2012-02-08 10:12:04

  The Future of JavaScript � take a peek today!

The ECMA committee is working hard on designing the next version of JavaScript, also known as "Harmony". It is due by the end of next year and it is going to be the most comprehensive upgrade in the history of this language. Chrome and V8 are committed to pushing JavaScript forward and have already started implementing the new features. You can try some of them today in the latest dev channel release. Here’s a summary: Lexical scoping. Now "let" is the new "var" – traditional "var...

   JavaScript,Future,Feature     2012-02-12 04:56:37

  Chrome’s WebRTC roadmap

Last January, Chrome was the first major browser to preview WebRTC, HTML5's new real time audio and video stack. Since then, we've been hard at work keeping up with the evolving specification, fixing bugs and listening to the web community’s feedback. The main parts of the WebRTC specification are now stable and are coming soon to all 200M+ Chrome users. With this blog post, we want to help developers plan for what will be introduced in this first stable release later this year. ...

   WebRTC,Google,Open source,Roadmap     2012-04-12 10:27:51

  What we still can’t do client-side

With the rise of all these APIs and the browser race to implement them, you’d think that currently we can do pretty much everything in JavaScript and even if we currently can’t due to browser support issues, we will once the specs are implemented. Unfortunately, that’s not true. There are still things we can’t do, and there’s no specification to address them at the time of this writing and no way to do them with the APIs we already have (or if there is a ...

   Chanllenge,Client side,Server side     2012-01-10 07:22:31

  I hate cut-and-paste

Me, I blame the IDE's.Coding used to be hard. Not because programming itself was overly hard, but mostly because editors absolutely sucked. How much the typical development environment in the 70's and 80's sucked is hard to convey (except for a very lucky few, and those would have likely been using DEC and WANG gear). I got in on the tail end of the punch card era. Punching your own program is lots of fun. Once. And if you drop a deck you get to play with the sorter, which is also lots of fun (o...

   IDE,Editor,Cut and paste,Shortcut,Blame     2011-10-24 11:33:46

  Advice on improving your programming skills

Programming is cool. But behind the scenes it's also difficult for many people. Many people are defeated at the early stage of learning programming. When you are not so familiar with programming, you may find you don't know where to start and what to start with first and where to apply the knowledge. Once you go though the tough period of the learning phase, you will find a whole new world. Below are some advice which can help you improve your programming skills quickly. Write more code.  T...

   Programming,Advice     2014-02-21 08:59:04

  Why Google+ Doesn’t Care If You Never Come Back

Ad targeting. Google+ is designed to power ad targeting, and for that it only needs you to sign up once. This lets it combine the biographical information you initially enter such as age, gender, education, employers, and places you’ve lived with your activity on Search, Gmail, Maps and all its other products to create an accurate identity profile. And this powers targeting of more relevant ads it can charge more for. So despite comScore showing that the average Google+ user only sp...

   Google+,Ads,comScore,Identity     2012-02-29 05:04:19

  Why We Moved Off The Cloud

Cloud computing is often positioned as a solution to scalability problems. In fact, it seems like almost every day I read a blog post about a company moving infrastructure to the cloud. At Mixpanel, we did the opposite. I’m writing this post to explain why and maybe even encourage some other startups to consider the alternative.First though, I wanted to write a short bit about the advantages of cloud servers since they are ideal for some use cases.Low initial costs. Specifically, you...

   Cloud,Cloud computing,Mixpanel,Get off,Disadvantage,Drawback     2011-10-28 10:22:32

  10 things you gotta have to succeed in IT

Takeaway: Everyone seems to agree that IT is a tough field. But what does it take to overcome the adversities and become a successful IT pro? These qualities may be the key. I recently wrote a string of articles discussing various reasons to leave IT — and various alternative careers for dissatisfied IT workers. I received an amazing amount of feedback from readers who have always wanted to express similar sentiments. But that leaves out a huge swath of peo...

   Tips,IT,Development     2011-07-21 21:55:13

RECENT