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

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Ruby on Rails



  Learning Is More Important Than Knowing

Although DuckDuckGo's success is based more on ideology than technology, you'd have to be a pretty arrogant technologist to not appreciate and be impressed with what this small team (for a long time, 1 person) has accomplished. And while DuckDuckGo teaches us a number of valuable lessons (about business, and privacy), to me, the most important, is that good programmers should be measured by what they can learn, not what they already know. Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo's creator, has been wo...

   Learning,Knowing,Google,DuckDuckGo     2012-04-18 07:17:53

  Why Objective-C is Hard

As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or J...

   Objective-C,difficult,hard,reason,analysis     2012-03-07 05:11:28

  The Number One Trait of a Great Developer

Maybe the best programmers aren’t those who spectacularly solve crazy problems, but those who don’t create them, which is much more silent. – Lena HerrmannWhen I look around at other companies hiring Ruby on Rails developers, I see them focusing on three major traits: Super-smart; Large community following; Deep Ruby knowledge. They’re all wrong. While these are great aspects in moderation, they all miss the number one quality of a fantastic developer: Judge...

   Developer,Trait,Judgement,No. 1     2011-11-05 06:49:19

  Write HTML easily with Emmet and Haml

Writing HTML codes is very boring and tedious as it has many tags and it's static. One solution is to use template, filling content based on other's skeleton. One another solution is high speed writing. We can write HTML codes with Emmet and Haml. These two ways have similar functions but with different characteristics. Haml is based on Ruby, so when working on Ruby/Rails projects, we recommend to use Haml, otherwise we recommend to use Emmet. 1. Emmet Emmet is a editor plugin, the official webs...

   HTML,Emmet,Haml     2013-06-11 19:46:02

  What does a contemporary web developer need to know?

The early ages of web era mainly consisted of webpages of text and links. At that time,Netscape was the still dominant of web browser market. As a web developer, you could develop web apps(or better to call web pages) easily with knowledge of HTML only. But with the evolution of web, new technologies came out, we can see more robust web apps around us everywhere. Today as a web developer, the ability to run and configure a web server and edit HTML to create some simple web pages has lost almost ...

   Web design,Advice     2013-12-20 06:31:51

  Content based HTTP Cache

Browsers may cache the webpages we visited, when user types a URL on the address bar, the browser may cache the webpage returned from server while displaying it. If there is no update on the webpage, then next time when the browser requests the same page, it will not download the page again, instead it will load the cached page. If the website explicitly specify that the page is updated, then the browser will download the page again from the server. What's HTTP Cache? You may be familiar with th...

   HTTP Cache,Web crawler     2013-05-24 05:12:59

  XML Abuse

It’s everywhere. XML Abuse. From Domain Specific Languages to Data Serialization, XML is the most commonly abused data format I’ve ever encountered. XML is perfectly fine for (because it was designed for this): First of all: XML was designed to be written by humans and read by humans. Nearly all generated XML I’ve seen sucks badly. I think this is because XML cannot efficiently represent common data structures found in programming languages.XML is good...

   XML,Abuse,Alternative,Serialization,Data storage     2011-12-14 07:12:10

  Why PHP Was a Ghetto

Note: I wrote this over a month ago, but decided not to publish it until now.I was talking with the Co-founder of a pretty cool start-up in DUMBO the other day about why the non-PHP development world generally has such disdain for PHP and the community surrounding it. He brought up an interesting point that stuck with me, largely because I hadn’t heard it before.If you’re unaware of the usual beef most developers have with PHP, it tends to revolve around:Ug...

   PHP,Framework,MVC     2011-05-06 00:35:37

  PHP Sucks! But I Like It!

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It's been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it's rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture. A Few Mistakes The post makes quite a few mistakes and odd apples to oranges comparisons. Let me point out the major ones that I saw. No Debugger - PHP has xdebug which works quite...

   PHP,Bad design,Like     2012-04-12 06:15:42

  What programming languages should I learn?

Since I started this blog, I have gotten quite a few emails asking me “What programming languages do you recommend for X?” I often finding myself writing something along the lines ofI would honestly recommend python. Something about me being biased because I know and love it.  Usually say something about the competing technology with a back handed insult. Also if they are starting out I would recommend a language that enforces better OO (Object Orientated) practic...

   programming language,Popularity,Java,Tre     2011-09-23 13:11:57