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  What, exactly, is a Product Manager?

I often get asked what a product manager is. What do they do? Where do they come from? Why do they like sharpies so much?In his book Inspired, Marty Cagan describes the job of the product manager as “to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”. Similarly, I’ve always defined product management as the intersection between business, technology and user experience (hint – only a product manager would define themselves in a venn diagram). A good produc...

   Product manager,Definition,Features,Career     2011-10-12 11:42:15

  What do programmers really do?

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. â€“ PicassoMany people (including my mother-in-law) think that computers are becoming so smart that programmers will be no longer needed in the near future. Other people think that programmers are geniuses who constantly solve sophisticated math puzzles in front of their monitors. Even many programmers don’t have clear idea what they do.In this post I want to provide some explanation to uninformed people what programmers rea...

   Programmer,Work,Computer     2011-05-20 11:49:32

  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

  Coding tricks of game developers

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So w...

   Tricks,Advice,Gamedesign,Plan     2012-02-12 04:50:30

  Erlang Style Concurrency

Introduction On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil, and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three1. Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential...

   Erlang,Concurrency,Lock,Message,Innovation     2012-01-03 10:44:44

  True Scala complexity

Update 2: Sorry for the downtime. Leave it to the distributed systems guy to make his blog unavailable. Nginx saves the day.It’s always frustrating reading rants about Scala because they never articulate the actual complexities in the core language.Understandable—this post is intended fill that gap, and it wasn’t exactly easy to put together. But there’s been so much resistance to the very thought that the complexity exists at all, even from on up high, that I thou...

   Scala,Complexity     2012-01-10 07:17:07

  Signs that you're a bad programmer

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (...

   Sign,Programmer,Characteristics,Knowledge,Skill     2011-10-20 08:56:16

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