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  The Death of .NET and the Power of Perception

One of my long-standing issues with Microsoft is its inability to control the perceptions surrounding its own products. One of the biggest examples was during the Windows Vista years when, even after the product had been fully patched and worked fine, Apple continued to do a better job to define the image of Windows (compilation of ads here) than Microsoft did, costing Microsoft billions in lost revenue for the millions it saved on a strong advertising campaign. The firm has a history of being p...

   .NET,future,death,bottleneck,development     2011-08-10 03:13:40

  Do you really understand C? 21st International Obfuscated C Code Contest winning entries

The 21st International Obfuscated C Code Contest(IOCCC) officially launched the winning source code. IOCCC requires contestants to write the most creative and the most obfuscated C codes with the size limited to 4kb and less Work of each participant is impressive. The winners, including one French, one Korean, five Americans, one Belgian, one Israeli, one British, four Japanese and one Chinese. Here we list some codes: Best short program Seonghoon Kang  from Korea- Decodes spelled out ...

   C,Obsfucation contest     2012-10-25 12:26:55

  Why Software Projects are Terrible and How Not To Fix Them

If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process.  The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas.  Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD).  But for any particular methodology, whether it is universally accepted or only “mostly” accepted, there are a multitude of o...

   Software,Development,Debug,Design     2011-11-21 10:27:05

  Do You Make These 5 Database Design Mistakes?

Look, everyone makes mistakes. It’s true. But not all of us have the chance to make mistakes that end up costing millions of dollars in hardware and production support costs. Any one of the following five mistakes listed below will add additional costs to your company. It’s guaranteed. The costs could be hardware related (extra disk space, network bandwidth), which tend to add up quickly. The costs are also support related (bad performance, database re-design, report cre...

   Database design,Mistake,Advice,Data type,Compatibility     2012-01-03 11:25:13

   Opinion: The Elusive 'Quick Iteration' - Tips for Indie Devs

[In this reprinted #altdevblogaday-opinion piece, WB Games/Kindling Games' Kristen Bornemann offers independent developers advice on iterating and shipping their projects as fast as possible.] From agile and scrum to extreme programming, everyone's trying to nail down what it takes to iterate on products quickly and efficiently. There are a lot of methodologies that you can employ to guide you through shipping products. But today, I'll be talking specifically about video games and how, as a...

   Game,Electronic,Efficient,Development me     2011-08-15 07:41:47

  Why Programmers don’t have a High Social Status?

Up to date there is No single street name for a top programmer or computer scientist in any of the Top 20 most developed countries in the world during the last 60 years. There is no statue built in the center of a major city for a renown programmer or computer scientists. No “Presidential Medal” or “Congressional Gold Medal” has been awarded to a computer scientists or programmer. There is no nationally televised social reward ceremony for computer programmers and scie...

   Propgrammer,Social status,Remember,Achievement     2012-01-04 02:43:05

  Use Java ThreadLocal with caution

According to Oracle documentation, ThreadLocal is a class provides thread-local variables. These variables differ from their normal counterparts in that each thread that accesses one (via its get or set method) has its own, independently initialized copy of the variable. ThreadLocal instances are typically private static fields in classes that wish to associate state with a thread. In short, ThreadLocal variables are variables belong to a thread, not a class or an instance of a class. One common...

   JAVA,MEMORY LEAK, THREADLOCAL     2015-11-03 07:31:57

  SOME LESSONS LEARNED

Note: Google was kind enough to invite me to give a short talk at their Zeitgeist conference earlier this week. It was a really interesting conference and I got a chance to meet a lot of people I admire. For my talk, I decided to use material from some of my blog posts over the years that I thought might appeal to a broader audience. Unfortunately, I was still recovering from a nastly cold/flu so I didn’t deliver the talk as well as I’d like.  Below is the text.Today, I wanted...

   Investor,Startup,Lesson,Experience,Investment     2011-10-12 11:47:02

  Code reviews in the 21st Century

There's an old adage that goes something like: 'Do not talk about religion or politics'.  Why?  Because these subjects are full of strong opinions but are thin on objective answers.   One person's certainty is another person's skepticism; someone else's common sense just appears as an a prior bias to those who see matters differently.  Sadly,  conversing these controversial subjects can generate more heat than light.   All too often people can get s...

   Code review,21 Centuary     2012-02-10 06:39:14

  Interview Programming Problems Done Right

Introduction Why 37signals Doesn't Hire Programmers Based on Brainteasers and my comment on HN generated a lot of responses, so much so that I'm writing this post to properly explain the essence of a good (IMHO) interview programming problem. Pascal's Triangle Pascal's Triangle is a shortcut for getting coefficients most often used binomial probability. The root element is 1. Every other element is the sum of the one or two above it (diagonally left and diagonally right). There are severa...

   Interview,Programming problem,Pascal,Triangle     2012-01-06 09:46:43