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  Google engineer: What I learned in the war

Veteran's Day is an ideal time to hear from one of those rare folks who combine corporate and military careers. Dan Cross, a software engineer at Google (GOOG) and a 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, took a leave to serve active duty in Afghanistan, came home a year ago, and brought back lessons that he couldn't have learned in business. While he had never seen himself as the military type until a personal tragedy made him reroute his career, he's a better man for it. Cross, 34, is now an...

   Military,Marine,Google,Engineer,Lessons,Teamwork     2011-11-12 10:36:03

  SOME LESSONS LEARNED

Note: Google was kind enough to invite me to give a short talk at their Zeitgeist conference earlier this week. It was a really interesting conference and I got a chance to meet a lot of people I admire. For my talk, I decided to use material from some of my blog posts over the years that I thought might appeal to a broader audience. Unfortunately, I was still recovering from a nastly cold/flu so I didn’t deliver the talk as well as I’d like.  Below is the text.Today, I wanted...

   Investor,Startup,Lesson,Experience,Investment     2011-10-12 11:47:02

  What is good design?

Some quotes about good design from a Germany designer Dieter Rams in documentary "Objectified": Good design should be innovative Good design should make a product useful Good design is aesthetic design Good design will make a product understandable Good design is honest Good design is unobtrusive Good design is long-lived Good design is consistent in every detail Good design is environmentally friendly Good design is as little design as possible This brings up a question -- what...

   METRO,SIMPLICITY,GOOD DESIGN,PRINCIOPLE,UNIX PHILOSOPHY     2012-05-09 06:48:11

  Google+ is sick

Google says that Google+ now has over 170million registered users, but according a new research report of Fast Company about Google+,  Google+ is just a virtual ghost town.This research selected a sample of 40,000 random Google+ users. The result is :The average post on Google+ has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-shareRoughly 30% of users who make a public post never make a second oneEven after making five public posts, there is a 15% chance that a user will not ...

   Google+,Sick,Research     2012-05-16 05:41:35

  Lessons Learned About Documentation

Here at Kendo UI, we have always encouraged you to give us feedback.  Whether it’s through our forums, or the Kendo UI User Voice site, what you think is important to us.  We take your thoughts very seriously.  We receive a lot of feature requests, enhancement requests and other various pieces of product feedback. One of the things that we heard loud and clear from our users was that our documentation could be better.  We took a good look at what we had, and we ag...

   Documentation,Lessons,Programming     2012-02-15 05:53:28

  Lessons from the Trenches

I believe that making a game is part art and part science, so it's no wonder that managing a game project is also part art and part science. Clearly if it was all science then the industry would get a collective F for not having made any significant progress over the last decade - all one has to do is just glance at the published postmortems to see that the same patterns are repeated over and over.A game has to be fun, engaging, grab users in the first two minutes and also keep their a...

   Game,Trenches,Tips,Game design,pattern     2011-10-10 05:08:50

  Lessons Learned while Introducing a New Programming Language

I've used a lot of languages (professionally) over the years: (off the top of my head) Cold Fusion, HTML, Javascript, php, SQL, CSS, ASP(classic & .net), C#, Ruby, Flex, Java, & Clojure. Each language has pros and cons. Being a programmer, it's easiest to discuss the cons - and in general I believe it was best said:I hate all programming languages - Matt FoemmelI think it's important to start with this in mind. At some point you're going to hate what you're advocating, so imagine h...

   Experience,New language,Tips,Risk     2012-03-05 05:13:59

  A Few Lessons I Learned After Having Failed

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.- Michael JordanIt was mid 2008 and Younique was doing reasonably well. However, I had an itch that I needed to scratch. I wanted to build a mobile advertising platform – think DoubleClickmeets AdMob. At the time the mobile adverti...

   Lesson,Career,Success,Failure,Mobile advertising     2011-10-17 11:21:55

  Becoming a Better Developer, Part 1: Making Fans

If you're trying to grow your startup you've come to the right place. Get my 170-page ebook on how to grow a startup and join thousands of self-funded entrepreneurs by subscribing to my newsletter at right. This is the first of what I hope to become an ongoing series about non-technical ways to improve yourself as a developer. Becoming a better developer involves more than learning new technical skills; learning about your company and co-workers will dramatically improve the software y...

   Developer,Tips     2011-06-29 08:38:26

  Learning Is More Important Than Knowing

Although DuckDuckGo's success is based more on ideology than technology, you'd have to be a pretty arrogant technologist to not appreciate and be impressed with what this small team (for a long time, 1 person) has accomplished. And while DuckDuckGo teaches us a number of valuable lessons (about business, and privacy), to me, the most important, is that good programmers should be measured by what they can learn, not what they already know. Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo's creator, has been wo...

   Learning,Knowing,Google,DuckDuckGo     2012-04-18 07:17:53