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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Innovation works

  The Five Stages of Hosting

As a proud VPS survivor, I thought it might be fun to write up five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of 'cloudiness'. People who aren't interested in this kind of minutia would be wise to pull the rip cord right here. 1. The Monastery You run your site on an 'application platform' like Heroku, Azure, or Google App Engine. You design your application around whatever metaphors and APIs the service lays out, and in return you are veiled from all t...

   Website hosting,Recommendations,Stages,Advantages     2012-01-30 05:43:42

  Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For September 16, 2011

Between love and madness lies HighScalability:Google now 10x better: MapReduce sorts 1 petabyte of data using 8000 computers in 33 minutes; 1 Billion on Social Networks;Tumblr at 10 Billion Posts; Twitter at 100 Million Users; Testing at Google Scale: 1800 builds, 120 million test suites, 60 million tests run daily.From the Dash Memo on Google's Plan: Go is a very promising systems-programming language in the vein of C++. We fully hope and expect that Go become...

   Scalability,Go,Google,MapReduce,Muppet,M     2011-09-20 11:22:36

  How to Think Creatively

I grew up hungry to do something creative, to set myself apart. I also believed creativity was magical and genetically encoded. As early as the age of 8, I began sampling the arts, one after another, to see if I'd inherited some gift.Eventually, I became a journalist. For many years, I told other people's stories. I was successful, but I rarely felt truly creative.The first hint I might have sold myself short came in the mid-1990s. In the course of writing a book called What Really Matters, Sear...

   Creative thinking,Saturation,Incubation,Illumination,Verification     2011-11-14 08:39:11

  Hash Tables in Javascript

IntroductionHash tables are a permutation of associative arrays (i.e. name => value pairs). If you use PHP, then you are very familiar with this type of data structure already since all PHP arrays are associative.The Javascript language implements very loose and somewhat limited support for associative arrays. Any JavaScript array can use other objects as keys, making it a hash, but there exists no formal constructor for initializing them and it is more or less unweildy to work with. A short ...

   JavaScript,Hashtable,Implementation,Array     2011-11-26 02:43:40

  Method chaining and lazy evaluation in Ruby

Method chaining has been all the rage lately and every database wrapper or aything else that’s uses queries seems to be doing it. But, how does it work? To figure that out, we’ll write a library that can chain method calls to build up a MongoDB query in this article. Let’s get started! Oh, and don’t worry if you haven’t used MongoDB before, I’m just using it as an example to query on. If you’re using this guide to build a querying library...

   Ruby,Method chaining,Lazy evaluation,Implementation     2011-11-29 08:51:17

  Coder or Clown?

That’s the challenge. Sit down with someone you’ve never met and try to work out if they are a coder or a clown. I don’t mean to insult anyone, of course, and I’m the first to acknowledge the years of training and effort that goes into being a professional clown. But some coders, oh boy. Like the time I interviewed a recent graduate. I’ll call her Ada. Full of sympathy for the novice programmer I started with a gentle warm-up, a soft-ball question to break the ...

   Coder,Clown,State,Profile,Category     2011-08-28 23:04:46

  How NOT to teach a computer language

For the past year or so my wife has been taking online classes to get a computer science degree. For most of her classes she’s done great, she’s been flying through HTML and SQL, even up to the point where she can handle multilevel joins and optimizing through indexes. That was until she hit her vb.net class. I had no idea why she was having problems with a language has easy as vb.net so I started helping her out and find out why she was having so many problems. I’ve also ad...

   Programming,Teach,Book,Grade,Method,Computer     2011-11-06 14:52:13

  A Better Way to Learn How to Program

Learning how to program can be a nightmare. An aspiring coder has to jump through many unpleasant hoops and mysterious error messages just to get "Hello, World!" printed on the screen. Then, she's left wondering, "OK, now what? How do I actually build something?"As game developers seeing someone struggle through this, we should be screaming, “NOOOOO!” The whole thing reeks of bad game design: a lot of work with no reward, unclear failure cases, advanced features pushed on new players...

   Programming pattern,Game design,Derivati     2011-09-19 13:51:17

  Live in Beijing and Thinking about Starting a Tech Company? Read. This. Post. Now.

The Disrupt Beijing Hackathon starts in a little more than 24 hours, and we’ve been working hard over the last few days to make it even more of a no-brainer for local Beijing developers to attend.In addition to the chance to be the next GroupMeor win valuable prizes, we have decided to give all Hackathon attendees who complete a hack and present in the 24-hour period free tickets to the Disrupt conference Monday and Tuesday. That’s a $1,000-plus value for s...

   Startup,Beijing,TechCrunch,Disrupt,2011     2011-10-28 12:41:43

  Building a Modern Web Stack for the Real-time Web

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this cen...

   Web design,Real-time web,web stack     2012-02-15 05:54:41

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