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  Google Dart? Don’t bet against JavaScript

Procotols, programming languages and operating systems all compete in a constantly evolving software ecosystem. Out of that ecosystem only a few technologies truly have staying power and survive over the long term. An example? How about Ethernet? It’s been a survivor over the last thirty years despite existing in a constantly changing landscape that’s been populated with many worthy competitors. Ethernetâ€...

   Google Dart,JavaScript,Comparison,Future     2011-12-06 09:49:39

  How do Silicon Valley companies recruit

There are a lot of friends asking me about the basic flow of how Silicon Valley companies recruit engineers. As a candidate, I tried Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and I received offer from all these companies. As an interviewer, I have interviewed no less than 300 people and I know about the process of recruitment. I write this article with the hope of inspiring people who want to go to Silicon Valley or who are preparing for interviews or who are in the design of the recruiting process...

   Facebook,Interview,Experience,Silicon Valley     2012-05-15 06:36:52

  Why Dynamic Programming Languages Are Slow

In a statically typed language, the compiler knows the data-type of a variable and how to represent that. In a dynamically-typed language, it has to keep flag describing the actual type of the value of the variable, and the program has to perform a data-dependent branch on that value each time it manipulates a variable.  It also has to look up all methods and operators on it. The knock-on effect of this on branching and data locality is lethal to general purpose runtime performance. T...

   Dynamic language,Slow,Analysis     2012-03-26 15:33:11

  RAM is the new disk...

Jim Gray, a man who has contributed greatly to technology over the past 40 years, is credited with saying that memory is the new disk and disk is the new tape. With the proliferation of "real-time" web applications and systems that require massive scalability, how are hardware and software relating to this meme? Tim Bray, in his discussions about grid computing before it became such a hot topic, pointed out how advances in hardware around RAM and networking were allowing for the creation...

   RAM,Flash,Memory,,Future,Disk     2011-08-12 07:34:27

  Clojure & Java Interop

About a year ago I got a phone call asking if I wanted to join another team at DRW. The team supports a (primarily) Java application, but the performance requirements would also allow it to be written in a higher level language. I'd been writing Clojure (basically) full-time at that point - so my response was simple: I'd love to join, but I'm going to want to do future development using Clojure. A year later we still have plenty of Java, but the vast majority of the new code I add is Cloj...

   Java,Clojure,Interoprability,Commit,Function call     2011-12-29 09:11:22

  PHP advisory file lock : flock

When we process a file in PHP, we may often need to acquire a lock so that other scripts cannot edit the same file at the same time. There is a flock() function in PHP which can help us lock the file we want to process. But there is one issue we should take care. Recently, ffb encountered one issue while he was trying to lock a file handle. The codes are below: $filename = "/tmp/lock.txt";      $fp = fopen($filename, "r+");   if (!$fp...

   flock(),advisory locking,PHP     2013-04-23 11:42:48

  A Different Kind of Technical Interview

Everyone who's been programming professionally for a while knows the standard format of the technical interview. You go in, there's a whiteboard in the room, and you write code on it to answer questions.Everyone also has the same basic complaints about these interviews. In a normal work environment, you have access to an API or search engine, but at a whiteboard you don't. Whiteboard questions generally don't include much in the way of overall design, and they're typically limited to simple algo...

   Interview,Programming,Methods,Pairing     2011-06-04 07:56:21

  A Python Optimization Anecdote

Hi! I’m Pavel and I interned at Dropbox over the past summer. One of my biggest projects during this internship was optimizing Python for dynamic page generation on the website. By the end of the summer, I optimized many of dropbox.com’s pages to render 5 times faster. This came with a fair share of challenges though, which I’d like to write about today:The ProblemDropbox is a large website with lots of dynamically generated pages. The more pages that are dynamically generat...

   Python,Anecodate,Optimization,Efficiency     2011-10-25 10:33:20

  Java is not the new COBOL

If you Google “Java is the new COBOL” you’ll find a glut of articles proliferating this mantra. I don’t know its origins, however I’m inclined to think it’s mostly repeated (and believed) by the Ruby community. Ruby, from a developer’s perspective is a low-friction language. A developer can just sit down at a text editor and start banging out code without really thinking about such superflous things as types. Java on the other hand, well, you h...

   Java,Ruby,Type,COBOL,Comparison     2011-11-10 10:40:56

  What programming languages should I learn?

Since I started this blog, I have gotten quite a few emails asking me “What programming languages do you recommend for X?” I often finding myself writing something along the lines ofI would honestly recommend python. Something about me being biased because I know and love it.  Usually say something about the competing technology with a back handed insult. Also if they are starting out I would recommend a language that enforces better OO (Object Orientated) practic...

   programming language,Popularity,Java,Tre     2011-09-23 13:11:57

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