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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Innovation works



  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

  The Basics of jQuery

So, a while back I had an internal presentation at work about this topic. A few good friends in the community took a look at my slides, and they thought it would make a nice blog post because “there can’t be too many good posts about jQuery introduction and best-practices.” Whether this post is going to be good or not, is up to you but I’ll try to outline what jQuery is, and how you can start working with it. For most of you, this will just be a re-cap and probably...

   JavaScript,jQuery,Framework,Basic     2012-03-01 04:57:18

  The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem.

A friendly reminder: The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem. –Steven Pressfield Some stuff is just hard. We start thinking we messed up. That it’s an issue with us. But it’s not. The work is hard and the problem is hard. You need to solve the problem, not fix yourself. The quote above is from Steven Pressfield’s incredible Do the Work. The audiobook (that’s a store link) is about 90 minutes long, so it fits in a s...

   Business,Problem,Strategy     2011-12-07 08:37:29

  PHP Sucks! But I Like It!

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It's been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it's rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture. A Few Mistakes The post makes quite a few mistakes and odd apples to oranges comparisons. Let me point out the major ones that I saw. No Debugger - PHP has xdebug which works quite...

   PHP,Bad design,Like     2012-04-12 06:15:42

  How to teach "Modern" Perl?

Since I started my Perl Tutorial series a couple of people commented on what and how I am teaching.Some people asked why did I show "open or die" and why not using autodie. Others recommended the use IO::All instead of open.Another complaint was the introduction of time and localtime instead of DateTime.While I was mostly writing parts of my regular training material these comments led me to think about it again. I wonder how to teach Perl in 2012?When I started to write the tutorial I still cal...

   Perl,Trainning,Teach,Modern,Modern Perl     2011-11-15 08:40:18

  How to undo git changes?

When using git for version control, there is frequent need on undoing commits due to some unexpected changes. This post will introduce how to undo changes with git command in different cases. Undo commit A common undo case is that some commit needs to be reverted as the commit contains error. In this case, the code is already committed. The command to revert the commit is git revert HEAD This command will add new a commit to the existing head to undo the previous commit. It will not change the p...

   GIT,GIT RESET,GIT REVERT,GIT CHECKOUT     2019-12-28 02:21:47

  Gracefully exiting from console programs in Ruby

Imagine you write a CLI program or a Rake task which loops through some data performing some work on it. You run it and then you remembered something. You’d love to kill the process with ctrl-c, but that will raise an exception somewhere in the loop. What you want is for the iteration to complete and then you want the program to quit. You could handle the Interrupt exception or add some conditions. But how about a cleaner and reusable way? No problem - you can trap signals, which...

   Ruby,Exit,Command window,Console,Graceful     2012-03-14 13:42:16

  Strangest line of python you have ever seen

The other day @HairyFotr and @zidarsk8 were doing some codegolfing with implementations of nondeterministic finite state machineand asked me to blog their results.For those of us who often forget what all of this computer science mumbo jumbo means, here’s a quick explanation from wikipedia:In the theory of computation, a nondeterministic finite state machine or nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) is a finite state machin...

   Python,Strange,Research,Work rationale     2011-11-19 02:05:03

  5 essential job search tips for web designers

Being a web designer is about many things – an in-depth technical knowledge, a flair for great aesthetics and excellent communication skills. Even if it sounds complex (and perhaps precisely because it does), the job can be immensely rewarding and creatively stimulating. How to break in and go straight for success in this profession? Here are 5 essential tips for getting lots of web design work. 1. Develop technical skills that matter Before you enter the job market, you'll need to have a ...

   job search tips, job seekers, job search     2015-04-17 10:17:19

  Stub Mixlib::ShellOut and shell_out in Ruby unit testing

Unit testing is part of software development to ensure the tiny component of a function can work as designed. Different frameworks and tools can be used to run unit testing for different programming languages. In Ruby, one popular unit testing framework is Rspec, or Chefspec if you are writing Chef recipes. While writing Chef recipes, some low level commands(DOS commands or shell commands) need to be executed on the managed resource to perform actions or gather information. For example, lis...

   RUBY,UNIT TESTING,RSPEC,CHEFSPEC,SHELL_OUT     2016-11-11 00:14:46