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SEARCH KEYWORD -- James Whittaker

  I've moved again

I've surprised myself and made another career change. I had a great time at Google, met lots of interesting people, but I met some folks outside doing something completely outrageous, and after much anguish decided to leave Google.I'm now at a small startup called Liquid Robotics They have a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles that rove the ocean collecting data from a variety of onboard sensors and uploading it to the cloud. The robots have a pile of satellite uplink/GSM/WiMax commun...

   James Gosling,Google,Liquid Robotics,Aut     2011-08-31 08:59:39

  Why I left Google

Ok, I relent. Everyone wants to know why I left and answering individually isn’t scaling so here it is, laid out in its long form. Read a little (I get to the punch line in the 3rd paragraph) or read it all. But a warning in advance: there is no drama here, no tell-all, no former colleagues bashed and nothing more than you couldn’t already surmise from what’s happening in the press these days surrounding Google and its attitudes toward user privacy and software develo...

   James Whittaker,Google,Leave,Microsoft,Ad     2012-03-14 13:43:44

  I've run out of adjectives

The news of Dennis Ritchie's passing hit hard. So much has been written in the past day. His impact was enormous, and outside the tech world, mostly unknown - but very much felt. C underpins everything. My whole career has grown out of C and Unix. Wow.For most engineers working today, it's hard to understand the euphoria I felt in the 70s when a programming language finally came along that I (and everyone else) could use to move up from writing in assembler to a real programming l...

   Dennis Ritchie,James Gosling,Death,Praise,Comment,C     2011-10-20 02:55:58

  Twitter prosecuted five companies

Recently Twitter sought help from law enforcement agencies because they can not stand spam emails. On Thursday, Twitter prosecuted five separate companies which provide tools so that spam on Twitter can be spread easier.Twitter said in a statement, Twitter now has 140 million active users, and the number of users are still increasing quickly, as Twitter continues to grow, spam also began looking to come to. Although the content of the spam on Twitter is not the proportion, it still gave rise to ...

   Twitter,Spam,Prosecution     2012-04-06 01:58:37

  Scala, Patterns and The Perl Effect

He tried to understand that one concept for a couple of months before it made sense to him. Admittedly, partial functions are not intuitive for anyone who has been schooled in traditional programming, but still, looking at the problem he was trying to solve it seemed like James was required to expend too much effort relative to the simplicity of the problem (as he pointed out, now that he understands the concept it seems straightforward). He showed me the code, and it was basically a situa...

   Scala,Perl,Pattern,Partial function,Template     2011-12-21 09:25:41

  Is 99.8% Secure Secure?

A group of researchers (Arjen Lenstra and collaborators  from EPFL Lausanne and James Hughes from Palo Alto) published a study, Ron was wrong Whit is right, of new vulnerabilities of cryptosystems. The New York Times picked up the story. Although Lenstra et al discuss several cryptosystems, their results are particularly relevant to those based on RSA. The title mirrors their conviction that cryptosystems based on a single random element have fewe...

   Security,Percentage,Security index     2012-02-27 04:48:06

  Moving from Java to C++: An Interview with Rogers Cadenhead

In this interview, co-author of Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours, 5th Edition Rogers Cadenhead discusses moving from Java to C++, what brought him to C++, and the best tactics for learning C++.Danny Kalev: For how long were you a Java programmer? Can you tell us a bit about the nature of the projects in which you took part at that time?Rogers Cadenhead: I've been a Java programmer since the language was launched by Sun Microsystems in 1995. I was doing website develop...

   Java,C++,Transfer,Transform,New challeng     2011-09-03 11:01:26

  Location matters for your startup

18 months ago I relocated from my home town of Glasgow, to London, just 400 miles away. An important reason for the move was because I had just started working on my new startup, Teamly, and I know that location matters, even when running an internet business. Don’t kid yourself otherwise, your chance of success is seriously improved when you’re in a startup hub.18 months later and moving to London has proved to be a smart move, for all the expected reasons, as well as  t...

   Startup,Location,Company,Brand,Popular location     2011-10-22 13:01:39

  Your Code is My Hell

It occurred to me recently that my experience as a Rails developer may be somewhat unique.I often get brought in to help preexisting Ruby/Rails projects evolve and mature in a sustainable way. As a result, the vast majority of Ruby projects I’ve worked on have been well-established by the time I arrived. In fact, offhand I can only think of one commercial greenfield Ruby project I’ve participated in. All the rest have been “legacy” from my perspective, in the ...

   Code style,Clean code,Code paradigm     2011-09-15 08:39:16

  Functional Programming For Object Oriented Programmers

After recently remarking about how I finally "got" functional programming I was asked by one of my millions of twitter followers... ¬_¬ to write up an explanation of a small F# program spoken in terms that fellow O-O programmers would understand. Before I become too entrenched into the functional programming way of thinking, that is, and can't explain it anymore. As a former tutor this is one of the major problems with being able to teach something once you understand it. You've ...

   Functional programming,OOP,F#,Pattern     2011-11-25 13:49:16

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