Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Programming problem

  A Better Way to Learn How to Program

Learning how to program can be a nightmare. An aspiring coder has to jump through many unpleasant hoops and mysterious error messages just to get "Hello, World!" printed on the screen. Then, she's left wondering, "OK, now what? How do I actually build something?"As game developers seeing someone struggle through this, we should be screaming, “NOOOOO!” The whole thing reeks of bad game design: a lot of work with no reward, unclear failure cases, advanced features pushed on new players...

   Programming pattern,Game design,Derivati     2011-09-19 13:51:17

  Writing unit tests for legacy code – an open letter to developers I work with

This is an email I sent today to developers who work with me, it is exactly as I wrote it except for project and developer names which I’ve redacted. Dear Developers, S asked me a difficult question today, and I think the answer (which took me a few minutes to arrive at) is worth sharing with all developers, mainly because many of you will surely face the exact same problem especially in [maintenance and enhancement] projects. By now I think it is crystal clear that one of our non-ne...

   Unit testing,Open letter     2012-02-09 05:39:56

  Programming is a Super Power

In a society where technology and the Internet have become incredibly prominent elements of our daily lives, being able to program is akin to having a super power. In fact, a programmer is able to not only easily interact with cutting edge technology, but also to take advantage of said technology to transform pure thoughts into something as tangible and useful as software.I would argue that there has never been a more exciting time for being able to program. While being a part of our industry ba...

   Programming,Programmer,Super power     2011-04-01 00:12:13

  C programming tips in SPARC architecture

If you are a newbie of C programmers in SPARC architecture (For example, working on Solaris), you should pay attention to the following tips:(1) By default, SPARC is big-endian (For Endianness, you can refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness). It means for an integer (short, int, long, etc), the MSB will be stored in the lower address, while the LSB will be stored in the higher address. (2) SPARC requires byte-alignment. It means for a short (2 bytes long) variable, the star...

   C     2014-06-01 03:56:30

  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

  Accessing Reddit top posts using OAuth

Previously one can use the https://www.reddit.com/r/rprogramming/top.json API to access one subreddit's top posts. This API doesn't require any access token to fetch the data. However, this API may not work all the time. Reddit may block the API's request if it finds that you are using a script or some app which accesses the API now and then. For an app or script which needs to fetch the data routinely, what should we do? Reddit provides one method which can be used to fetch this kind of to...

   REDDIT,OAUTH,TOP POSTS,HOT POSTS     2023-12-16 07:24:14

  Why you should be careful about optimizations

In one of my current javascript projects, I have to deal with 3D voxel coordinates. And, sometimes, I have floating points coordinates which must be converted to integers in order to convert them into proper array index. Javascript is a wonderful language, really. However, implementations are sometimes weird, and the way to do something can sometimes have very huge impacts on the performances. Worse, sometimes the classical way is more expensive than the tricky one. So, some peo...

   JavaScript,Bitwise,Floor,Trick,Optimization     2012-05-02 11:29:20

  The Hungry Programmer

Programming is a lot like eating. Tonight I was hungry. I wasn't at home. I couldn't go to the kitchen for a snack. I looked around and saw only McDonald's across the street. Then I was struck with the same dilemma that I face whenever I leave the comfort of my own home for any decent spread of time: Do I eat crappy food now and satisfy that hunger? Or do I stay hungry for a little longer and eat a healthy meal back at home? As I pondered this dilemma I couldn't help but notice how much i...

   Programmer,Hungry,Coder,Coding     2012-01-19 11:04:30

  Coming full circle

Experts often end up where they started as beginners.If you’ve never seen the word valet, you might pronounce it like VAL-it. If you realize the word has a French origin, you would pronounce it val-A. But the preferred pronunciation is actually VAL-it.Beginning musicians play by ear, to the extent that they can play at all. Then they learn to read music. Eventually, maybe years later, they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see.Beginning computer science stu...

   Expert,Life cycle,Work,Begin,End,Cycle     2011-10-30 12:18:33

  Buffcacher

What should a ‘cache’ be? It means a lot of things, but to my mind the default programming type should be: “keep around expensive-to-generate bits of read-only data in case we need them again, or until the computer really needs that RAM for something else” I was writing a custom video editing program in Python (interesting choice of language for that problem) and I wanted to cache decoded frames; but I just wasn’t happy with the memory management of explici...

   Buffer,Cache,Web browser,Memory,RAM     2012-02-24 05:10:10

RECENT