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  Whatever works for you

In my earlier 20s when I knew everything, I was a much bigger evangelist for my technology choices. I’m accused of fanboyism a lot more these days, but only because Hacker News keeps sending huge waves of people here who tell me I’m an idiot. But I used to be much more annoying with pushing my choices onto others. I’ve naturally reduced such evangelism as I approach 30 and realize I don’t know anything, but I’m now making a much more conscious effort to s...

   Choice,Product,Usability,Fittability     2011-11-29 08:39:09

  Do you have this kind of comments in your source code?

Writing runnable code is the essential skill of a programmer, writing understandable comment is also a skill a programmer should acquire. There is some famous saying that bad comment is worth than no comment. Usually your code will be maintained by other people, if you provide them some difficult to understand or misguided comments, this will be nightmare to them. While at some other time, programmers may put some funny comments in their codes which may make others laugh. Today we...

   COMMENT,HUMOR     2016-08-01 10:25:14

  Error handling style in C

Following are three error handling styles in C.Which one you like the most? Or you don't like any one?1. /* Problem : Not enough. Easy to be wrong */int foo(int bar){        int return_value = 0;        int doing_okay = 1;        doing_okay = do_something( bar );        if (doing_okay)        { ...

   C,Error handling style,Goto,Nested if     2012-04-24 06:51:00

  HTTP Streaming and Internet Explorer

In early 2006, Alex Russell posted about a neat hack that the Google Talk team in Gmail use to support Comet in Internet Explorer, a trick which works as far back as IE 5.01. What great news! A reliable way to stream Comet messages to Microsoft’s browsers. If only it were that easy. I have not been alone in the following findings: after connecting the htmlfile ActiveX object as a streaming Comet transport to my Comet server, everything works perfectly for a few messages, but then abruptly...

   IE,Streaming,JavaScript,htmlfile,ActiveX     2011-09-05 04:05:23

  Thoughts on Running an Open Source Project

I spoke in the unconference at PHPUK last week, on running an open source project. I thought I would collect together my thoughts into one place before I lose the scratty piece of paper I wrote them down on. I'm not sure I'm the right person to be giving advice exactly, but these are the things that, having been project lead on joind.in for a while, I think are important. Community I love it when people share their code, just make something and publish it, but to my mind it isn't an open...

   Open source,Management,Readme,Community     2012-03-06 05:25:27

  Some Thoughts on Twitter's Availability Problems

As a regular user of Twitter I've felt the waves of frustration wash over me these past couple of weeks as the service has been hit by one outage after another. This led me to start pondering the problem space [especially as it relates to what I'm currently working on at work] and deduce that the service must have some serious architectural flaws which have nothing to do with the reason usually thrown about by non-technical pundits (i.e. Ruby on Rails is to blame). Some of my suspicions ...

   Twitter,Architecture,Availability,Design     2011-08-12 07:39:21

  Programming: the benefits of taking a break

This post lists several benefits of taking a break during programming.You work smarter, not harder. Once, I worked really hard on a feature. For two weeks, 12 hours a day, I put in a lot of effort. After those two weeks, I took a break and came up with several ideas that made much of the work unnecessary.You think more clearly. Being tired has a similar effect as being drunk. At the end of a day, I often kid myself that I’ll just get this one thing finished quickly to have a fre...

   Programming,Break,Rest,Refresh,New idea     2011-11-08 08:50:45

  Building an iPhone application.

One of my New Years resolutions was to finally learn the iOS SDK and build a 'real' application.I am happy to report that progress is going really well and wanted to share something that I have noticed about iOS programming.It only looks scary... it's not. It's actually very easy.Now, I am not building Mail, Angry Birds or Photosynth or anything, but the core concepts of the SDK are not that bad once you spend some time learning delegation. If you don't understand delegation, iOS programmi...

   Apple,iOS,Application development     2012-01-28 07:03:36

  Bug caused by using changeable value as the default in "python method overload"​

In python we can set the passed in parameter's default value to make the function has the same running feature as the method overload in Java. Define a function like this: def testFunction(self, param1, param2=None, param3=None): Normally we use "None" as the parameter's default value. We can also use str/bool as the default value, but is it OK we use empty list [] as its default value? This is our test program: """ A test program using empty list as the passed-in parameter's default value. ...

   PYTHON     2019-03-11 08:52:52

  Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don’t vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much?Joel Spolsky gave a couple answers to this question in his most recent podcast. First, programmer productivity varies tremendously across the profession, but...

   Productivity,Salary,Efficiency,Programmer,Not match     2011-11-16 08:12:00

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