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  Today on history : Twitter cofounder Evan Williams was born

Evan Williams, born March 31, 1972. American entrepreneurs, has created a number of Internet companies, including Pyra Labs, (operational blog, Blogger) and Twitter. He was Twitter, CEO from October 2008 to October 2010. Twitter former CEO Evan WilliamsEvan Williams grew up on a farm in Nebraska Clark Village. At the University of Nebraska, he studied a year and a half, then he started to work. He did different technologies work in some tech start-ups in Key West, Dallas, Austin, Texas. In 1996...

   Twitter,Cofounder,Evan Williams,Introduction     2012-03-31 08:49:18

  Discovery kills distribution: why the web needs a new leader

[Apple and Google have locked application discovery and distribution within their app stores. VisionMobile's Andreas Constantinou explains how Facebook is using the web to disintermediate Apple/Google and why the web needs a new leader].The platform duopoly.In just the space of 3 years, the mobile platforms landscape has changed from an election race to an oligarchy. The network effects at the heart of the Apple and Google business models have created formidable barriers to entry. The growth in ...

   Web,Leader,New era,Google,Apple,Mobile     2011-10-18 02:53:29

  Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good

Odds are, you don’t use a functional programming language every day. You probably aren’t getting paid to write code in Scala, Haskell, Erlang, F#, or a Lisp Dialect. The vast majority of people in the industry use OO languages like Python, Ruby, Java or C#–and they’re happy with them. Sure, they might occasionally use a “functional feature” like “blocks” now and then, but they aren’t writing functional code.And yet, for years we’v...

   Functional Programming,Hard,Difficult,Reason to learn,Good     2011-10-18 02:55:38

  Why developer-friendliness is central to API design

Today, APIs play a bigger role in software development than ever before. The evolution of computing has been dominated by ever-increasing levels of abstraction; the use of higher-level languages, of course, but also the development of platforms, libraries, and frameworks. Professor Douglass C. Smith claims the progression of this second category far outpaced the development of programming languages.  Developers are also noticing that difficulty has shifted from designing algorithms a...

   API,User friendly,Significance, Improve quality     2011-12-21 02:29:54

  Valid JavaScript variable names

Did you know var π = Math.PI; is syntactically valid JavaScript? I thought this was pretty cool, so I decided to look into which Unicode glyphs are allowed in JavaScript variable names, or identifiers as the ECMAScript specification calls them. Reserved words The ECMAScript 5.1 spec says: An Identifier is an IdentifierName that is not a ReservedWord. The spec describes four groups of reserved words: keywords, future reserved words, null literals and boolean lite...

   JavaScript,Name convention,Standard     2012-02-22 05:16:53

  What It’s Really Like to Work at Google

Google. It’s one of the most common household words in today’s modern society, and yet for a company that is used by most of us essentially as an algorithm, it tends to trigger a highly emotional response when overheard. It’s a dream job for college students nearing graduation, a highly coveted invitation to lunch by friends and colleagues who work near campus, and the bane of existence for those who produce content for the Internet. For several years, most of the publ...

   Google,Work,Life,Workplace     2012-01-18 08:19:00

  Macro vs. Micro Optimisation

So there's recently been a bit of hype about another Colebourne article: http://blog.joda.org/2011/11/real-life-scala-feedback-from-yammer.html I'd like to respond to a few points he makes. First - You should evaluate Scala and pay attention to its benefits and flaws before adopting it.  Yes, there are flaws to Scala.   Working at typesafe makes you more aware of some of them.  We're actively working to reduce/minimize/get rid of these.   In my opinion, the negat...

   Optimization,Performance,Micro,Macro,Software     2011-11-30 12:04:25

  Unfortunate Python

Python is a wonderful language, but some parts should really have bright WARNING signs all over them. There are features that just can't be used safely and others are that are useful but people tend to use in the wrong ways. This is a rough transcript of the talk I gave at my local Python group on November 15, with some of the audience feed back mixed in. Most of this came from hanging around the Python IRC channel, something I highly recommend. [update 2011-12-19: improved "array" cr...

   Python,Defects,Deprecated methods,Warning     2011-12-20 08:27:36

  Erlang Style Concurrency

Introduction On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil, and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three1. Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential...

   Erlang,Concurrency,Lock,Message,Innovation     2012-01-03 10:44:44

  Who Uses PhoneGap/Apache Cordova?

The HTML5 Microzone is presented by DZone and Microsoft to bring you the most interesting and relevant content on emerging web standards.  Experience all that the HTML5 Microzone has to offer on our homepage and check out the cutting edge web development tutorials on Script Junkie, Build My Pinned Site, and the HTML5 DevCenter. I see questions and comments all the time with the general sentiment “it looks nice, but who really uses PhoneGap/Apach...

   PhoneGap,Apache,App,HTML5     2012-03-30 06:30:33

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