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  The trap of the performance sweet spot

This post is about JavaScript performance but I would like to start it by telling a story that might seem unrelated to JS. Please bear with me if you don’t like C.A story of a C programmer writing JavaScriptMr. C. is a C programmer as you can probably guess from his name. Today he was asked by his boss to write a very simple function: given an array of numbered 2d points calculate vector sum of all even numbered points... He opens his favorite text editor and quickly types somet...

   C,JavaScript,Sweet spot,Memory,Low level,Trap     2011-11-06 14:45:01

  Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb

I realized that, paradoxically enough, good programmers need to be both lazy and dumb. Lazy, because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Lazy, because only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code – thus avoiding redundancy, the enemy of software maintenance and flexible refactoring. Mostly, the tools and processes that come out of this endeavor fired by laziness will speed up the production. This ma...

   Good programmer,Lazy,Reason,Dumb     2012-04-18 07:15:23

  Rebirth of Microsoft?

Only from the point of view of design and products, Microsoft may seem like an ongoing decline of the old giant: IE browser market share continues to drop, PC market continues to shrink where Windows depends on and tablet PC market gets rapid expansion, Windows Mobile, Windows phone perform not so well, even CEO Steve Ballmer is often ridiculed and accused. All these seem to indicate that Microsoft's golden era is over. But on the other hand, while its net profit for the past two years has ...

   Microsoft,Rebirth,change     2012-10-05 20:09:15

  The Problem With Client-Side Analytics

Client-side analytics is broken. The numbers produced by it are trivially spoofable by competitors and nefarious characters. Most websites use client-side analytics of one type or another and the only way to get numbers you can trust is to compare numbers from multiple providers and to take an average of the closest two.This post highlights the problem and proposes a partial solution that substantially mitigates the issues with minimal effort. Our proposed solution is simply to include a digital...

   Client side,Analysis,Problem,Tricks,ASP.NET,spoof     2011-10-22 12:58:51

  What Level Programmer Are You?

Everybody's talking about how programming is the skill that we all are going to need. [Except those folks who might feel that most programming could be turned into wizard-like tools. Insert long discussion about Strong AI.] But what's a programmer? Is the guy who set up his own Apache Web Server a programmer? How about the guy who created a complex Excel spreadsheet? The guy who made his own RPG level? Minecraft players? When we say "Everybody is going to have to know programming" what, e...

   Programmer,Skill,Level,Criteria     2012-02-08 10:07:41

  Apps and web apps and the future

Dave Winer: Why apps are not the future: The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. Let’s set aside one thing right away. The browser is an app. Text editors, outliners, and web servers are apps. And, without them, there’s no web at all. Somebody has to write these things. That implies APIs and more tools ...

   App,Web app,Future,Difference     2011-12-14 07:10:43

  How to hire an idiot

Wow, I remember how idealistic I was when I was about to bring on my first employee! After dealing with bad bosses over my career, after doing a whole lot of thinking about how I was going to be a great boss, and after doing a whole lot of reading about how to hire effective people, I was really looking forward to it. I was going to:-- Hire people smarter than myself, who get things done!-- Trust them to do their job, let them do their job and give them enough resources to do it!-- Pay them WELL...

   Employee,Idiot,Work experience,Pay,Process     2011-10-24 11:47:54

  Three Simple Ways to Improve the Security of Your Web App

It seems like web app security has entered the public conscious recently, probably as a result of the press covering the activities of groups like Anonymous and incidents like security breaches at several CAs. Here are a couple of quick security tips to improve the security of your web apps. Think of these as low-hanging fruit, not as a substitute for thorough analysis of your app’s security. If there’s interest in this topic we can do more posts, too - let us know in the com...

   Web app,Security,X-FRAME-OPTIONS,SSL     2011-12-08 10:10:20

  Installing Python Packages

Now that you have you system and project environment all setup you probably want to start developing. But you likely don’t want to start writing an entire project fully from scratch, as you dive in you’ll quickly realize theres many tools helping you build projects and sites faster. For example making a request to a website there’s Requests, for handling processing images there’s Python Imaging Library, or for a full framework to help you in building a sit...

   Python,Package,Installation,Library,Unix     2011-11-02 12:57:45

  What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie?

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at lea...

   C,Father,Dennis Ritchie,Death,Father of C,UNIX     2011-10-17 10:12:02

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