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  Mastering a New Programming Language: A Professional Guide

Introduction Learning a new programming language can seem daunting, but with the right approach, anyone can become proficient in a new language. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced programmer, mastering a new language can open up new opportunities in your career and enable you to tackle new and exciting programming challenges. In this guide, we'll provide you with a step-by-step process for mastering a new programming language. Step 1: Choose a Language and Set Goals The first step in ma...

   PROGRAMMING,GUIDE,TIPS     2023-04-22 02:52:00

  We trade a lot more than just time to practice our craft

I was recently having one of those “life, the universe and everything” conversations with a close industry (web) friend. Mid-conversation I dropped that I’d identified three kinds of stress that we face as creators – it felt somewhat poetic at the time, so I thought I’d take some time to describe it. Physical, the kind of stress you’re under when you’ve been eating poorly, drinking too much, exercising too little, or working too long. Weâ€...

   Stress,Programmer,Creator,Emotional stress     2011-12-09 07:45:48

  Letter to a Young Developer

I’ve been getting some emails from young developers wanting to “level up” as programmers. I’m definitely not the first to write about this topic, so I’m not sure how much I have to add. Still, for what it’s worth here are a few points off the top of my head: Work with other developers. We are at a wonderful time in the history of technology when for the first time, it doesn’t really matter where you are or who you are working for. So long as you ...

   Letter,Tips,Programmer,Developer,Opportu     2011-09-14 11:49:24

  Learning Ruby and Ruby vs Lisp

The company I work for has a lot of legacy Ruby code, and as Ruby has become kind of a mainstream language, I decided to get a book about it and learn how it works. As my learning resource, I chose The Ruby Programming language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto as that receives great customer reviews, covers Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9 and is authoritative because the language creator is one of the authors. The book makes a good read in general. There are plen...

   Ruby,Feature,Functional,OOP,Lisp,Difference     2011-12-12 07:42:01

  Open Letter to sites with annoying interfaces

Remember those childhood games where you are given two nearly identical images and your objective was to find some number of subtle differences? Well, I shouldn't have to play that game when I'm using your damn website. I show here two examples of a common practice that is plaguing the modern web. First, a clipping from a project page on github.com.     And now the second image:     See the difference? My question is this: why? That edit button is the only component of...

   Web design,User interface,User friendly,Layout     2011-12-27 09:32:10

  Why Do So Many Gifted Kids Think They Don't like Math?

Why do so many bright and gifted kids think they don't like math? Experience and the reading of lots of research leads me to believe that boredom, under-instruction and poor instruction throughout elementary and middle school lie behind the problem. My best girlfriend since high school is a math teacher north of Philly. We've talked about this a lot. She and I are both aware that our own math instruction lacked a lot. As I give IQ tests, too, I see something that I thought many people woul...

   Bright kids,Math,Hate,Gifted,Boring     2011-12-06 09:00:49

  "Programmer" is an Overgeneralization

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald Knuth Earlier today, I came across a post during a google-fu session that claimed that no one should use the C++ standard library function make_heap, because almost nobody uses it correctly. I immediately started mentally ranting about how utterly ridiculous this claim is, because anyone whose gone to a basic algorithm class would know how to properly use make_heap. Then I started thinking about all the ...

   Programmer,Overgeneration,Overload     2012-03-13 08:13:16

  Siri in Practice

Some quick comments on using Siri in practice—for things other than asking it to open the pod bay doors. Siri’s voice recognition is very impressive, and the scope of what it understands is very good given the difficulty of what it’s doing. But it has a lot of trouble with certain sorts of names—Irish names, for example, which often are not written as pronounced. For example there are a lot of people in Ireland named “Aoife”—it’s a very popul...

   Siri,Apple,Practice,Artificial Intelligence,AI     2011-10-15 15:01:13

  Practice of using spinlock instead of mutex

Spinlock and mutex are two important concepts in multithreading programs. They are used to lock some shared resource to prevent concurrent access which may affect data consistency. But they do have differences, what are the differences? when should we use spinlock instead of mutex? The Theory In theory, when a thread tries to lock a mutex and it does not succeed, because the mutex is already locked, it will go to sleep, immediately allowing another thread to run. It will continue to sleep until...

   Spinlock,Mutex,Concurrency     2014-04-19 21:54:12

  A couple of tips for beginning programmers

Whether it is football, quantum physics, a new foreign language or programming, the beginnings are problematic. What is more, no amount of advice can teach you as much as your own experience. Nevertheless, the following tips will help you avoid some mistakes, save your time and develop good programmer habits from the very beginning.Practise logical thinkingAlthough some may laugh at the stereotype of a programmer being a Maths genius, there is no use denying that learning Maths and Logics prepar...

   Programming,Tips,Beginner     2014-06-17 07:47:31

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