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

SEARCH KEYWORD -- RUBY

  My life as a freelancer

In the summer of 2006 a work buddy, George, has told me that I could make some extra money programming on a site named Rent A Coder. I’ve signed up the same day. After losing some time on a project that never started I lost my interest in “coding for money”. I almost forgot about RAC.Fast-forward two years, I was a PhD student at a small North American University with a student visa and … nothing else in my pockets. For a few months I was able to make a living from ...

   Life,Freelancer,C,Rent a Coder,RAC     2011-11-07 02:53:03

  API Design is UI for Developers

I’ve been thinking a lot about APIs and their design recently.I stumbled on this fantastic quote from Greg Parker: A programming language is a user interface for developers. Language authors should learn from HCI principles.22/02/2012 19:10 via webReplyRetweetFavorite@gparkerGreg ParkerWhen I first started learning C++ (back in the bad old days) I was convinced that any 1st year student could design a better programming language. One which behaved in a sane fashion without a lot of le...

   API design,UI,developers,PHP     2012-03-11 13:21:43

  10 Questions with Facebook Research Engineer – Andrei Alexandrescu

Today we caught up with Andrei Alexandrescu for a “10 Question” interview. He is a Romanian born research engineer at Facebook living in the US, you can contact him on his website erdani.com or @incomputable. We will talk about some of the juicy stuff that going on at Facebook, so let’s get started. Hello Andrei, welcome on Server-Side Magazine. 1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where and what do you work? Who am I? Ah, the coffee breath of one talki...

   C++,Facebook,PHP,Future,Machine learning     2012-02-06 08:08:12

  Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.  The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works.  ...

   Career,Programmer,Advice,Low level,Development     2011-10-29 07:09:23

  How Duff’s Device Works

I like C, but I have to admit that, sometimes, “The Old Man of Programming” can be a bit of a killjoy. This is one of the most exciting eras in computer history, but lately, C’s acting like he doesn’t evenwant to have a good time. While the cool kids like Ruby and Haskell are living it up, C’s over in the corner obsessing over bits and bytes and memory alignment and pointers and the stack and machine architecture and unreachable allocations and multiple indi...

   Duff device,Algorithm,Switch,Case     2011-05-27 14:10:18

  HTML5 and Accessibility

Accessibility for people with disabilities is a legal responsibility in many countries. It's also the right thing to do, and one of the characteristics distinguishing professional developers from the WWWs: WYSIWYG-wielding wannabes. But for many, accessibility has been a somewhat black art, requiring adding extra stuff to your code like alt text, table summaries, ARIA information that can be difficult to test by developers who are not assistive technology users themselves.The arrival of HTML5 ha...

   HTML5,Accessibility,Video,Music,Canvas     2011-08-19 08:13:44

  The Essence of Google Dart: Building Applications, Snapshots, Isolates

WÑ–th thousands of programming languages floating around, why is Google introducing Google Dart? What can it possibly add? The short answer: the Google Dart team wanted a language well suited to modern application development, both on the server and the (mobile) client. Some of Dart's features address problems that languages like Java or Javascript have long had. Dart's Snapshots resemble Smalltalk images, allowing (nearly) instant application startup and wi...

   Dart,Google,Client side,Web,Language,Snapshort,Isolate     2011-10-24 11:41:16

  What the Heck are Algebraic Data Types? ( for Programmers )

This post is meant to be a gentle introduction to Algebraic Data Types. Some of you may be asking why you should learn Algebraic Data Types and how will they change your world?  I am not going to answer that, but suffice it to say that Algebraic Data Types are the underpinning of the type systems to the ML derived languages, Haskell and OCaml included, and their construction and properties allow for the power (and inference) that accompanies these type systems.  They are cropping...

   Algebraic Data Type,Set,Operator,Programmer     2011-12-30 08:31:43

  Prototypes in JavaScript

Following on from his previous article, David Chisnall explores JavaScript as an example of prototype-based object orientation. In this article, he shows how it's possible to implement more complex object models on top of this simple abstraction.My previous article, Prototypes and Object Orientation, considered the differences between class-based and prototype-based object orientation. In this article, we'll look in a bit more detail at the workings of the JavaScript object model, since it'...

   JavaScript,Prototype,Object oriented,Obj     2011-09-02 11:44:12

  Dart is to JavaScript as C# is to C++

Given the background of Lars Bak, the Google engineer whose V8 JavaScript interpreter upended Firefox's claim on speed, it was reasonable to suspect Google's new Web development language might look a lot like Smalltalk. But that might have taken the Web in a strange and different direction. Today, on the day of a Web developers' conference in Denmark, Google and members of the Chromium open source development team raised the curtain on Dart, the company's bid for a new and somewhat more str...

   Dart,Google,JavaScript,Virtual Machine,Chromium     2011-10-21 08:40:09

RECENT