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  Tips for Putting a Price on Your Work

WHEN I first started as a freelance writer, I was eager to sell myself — but not eager to have to discuss money. So I more or less took whatever was offered. Then I read somewhere that no matter what price a new client states, you always say in a polite but firm tone, “I expected more.” The first time I tried it, I was sweating and I doubt my tone was firm — it probably sounded more like pleading — but to my great surprise, it worked. With th...

   Development,Price,Worl,Negotiation     2012-01-29 04:37:17

  Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?

The prevalence of free, open WiFi has made it rather easy for a WiFi eavesdropper to steal your identity cookie for the websites you visit while you're connected to that WiFi access point. This is something I talked about in Breaking the Web's Cookie Jar. It's difficult to fix without making major changes to the web's infrastructure. In the year since I wrote that, a number of major websites have "solved" the WiFi eavesdropping problem by either making encrypted HTTPS web traffic an accou...

   Web traffic,Security,HTTPS.Encryption,Wifi     2012-02-24 05:02:58

  A Different Kind of Technical Interview

Everyone who's been programming professionally for a while knows the standard format of the technical interview. You go in, there's a whiteboard in the room, and you write code on it to answer questions.Everyone also has the same basic complaints about these interviews. In a normal work environment, you have access to an API or search engine, but at a whiteboard you don't. Whiteboard questions generally don't include much in the way of overall design, and they're typically limited to simple algo...

   Interview,Programming,Methods,Pairing     2011-06-04 07:56:21

  How to be jQuery-free?

jQuery is now the most famous JavaScript library. There are around 57.3% websites in the world using jQuery, i.e, 6 out of 10 websites are using jQuery. If we only consider those websites which use libraries, then the percentage is even higher which is 91.7%. Although jQuery is very popular, its size is still a headache to many websites maintainers. The uncompressed jQuery 2.0 has a size of 235KB, the size is 81KB after optimization.The jQuery 1.8.3 which supports IE 6/7/8 has a uncompressed si...

   jQuery,JavaScript,ECMAScript,CSS3     2013-05-13 11:53:20

  A Python Optimization Anecdote

Hi! I’m Pavel and I interned at Dropbox over the past summer. One of my biggest projects during this internship was optimizing Python for dynamic page generation on the website. By the end of the summer, I optimized many of dropbox.com’s pages to render 5 times faster. This came with a fair share of challenges though, which I’d like to write about today:The ProblemDropbox is a large website with lots of dynamically generated pages. The more pages that are dynamically generat...

   Python,Anecodate,Optimization,Efficiency     2011-10-25 10:33:20

  Five Reasons Why Microsoft's Windows Phone Will Make A Big Splash In The Smartphone Market

The rave reviews for the latest iteration of Microsoft’s Windows Phone aren’t the only reason Microsoft will do better in the smart phone industry than it did in the MP3 player market. Whereas the Zune never really offered anything substantially different from the iPod and never pushed any real boundaries, Microsoft’s latest push into the mobile operating system business is much more bold. Microsoft isn’t rushing it this time – and it shows. So far, tech ...

   WP7,Windows Phone,Zune,2012,Nokia Lumia 900     2012-01-09 08:52:52

  Decision Trees in C#

Decision trees are simple predictive models which map input attributes to a target value using simple conditional rules. Trees are commonly used in problems whose solutions must be readily understandable or explainable by humans, such as in computer-aided diagnostics and credit analysis. Download source code Download sample applications Download the full Accord.NET Framework Introduction Decision Trees give a direct and intuitive way for obtaining the classification of a new instance f...

   C#,Decision tree     2012-03-23 10:00:56

  Transparency in Cloud Services

37signals recently launched public “Uptime Reports” for their applications (announcement). The reaction on Hacker News was rather tepid, but I think it’s a positive development, and I applaud 37signals for stepping forward. Reliability of cloud applications is a real concern, and there’s not nearly enough hard data out there. Not all products are equally reliable; even within 37signals, the new reports show a 3:1 variation in downtime across apps. That said, ...

   Cloud,Transapency,37signals,Announcement     2012-01-10 07:24:02

  A re-introduction to JavaScript

Introduction Why a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world's most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. 2005 saw the launch of a number of high-profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer. It's useful to start with an idea of the language's history. JavaScript was created in 1...

   JavaScript,Types,Array,Re-introduction,OOP     2012-02-09 05:38:08

  FTP Must Die

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is specified in RFC 959, published in October 1985. The attempt in this specification is to satisfy the diverse needs of users of maxi-hosts, mini-hosts, personal workstations, and TACs, with a simple, and easily implemented protocol design.That's from the introduction. Does anyone here know what a TAC is? I don't. I had to look it up, since the acronym wasn't even expanded in the RFC. It took three tries in Google, and I finally found it in some obscur...

   FTP,Future,Death,Trend,Protocol     2012-02-06 08:13:36

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