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  Tips for a better first-time hackathon experience

Here are a few things you can consider. These are by no means the only way to go about hackathons, just what's worked for me.ProjectI strongly strongly recommend doing something you haven't done before. Even if you're going into a hackathon with the intention of winning, trying something new is always fun and will keep you engaged throughout the event. Jump into mobile development, try hardware hacking, write a compiler, whatever; it's always fun to try out new things.Sticking to things you're c...

   hackathon     2014-03-31 07:25:09

  Less Is More

I originally assumed that open source was simply a means of producing technology. But technology is just a lovely byproduct, the real goal is social. Not all open source projects work this way, but perhaps they should. I stumbled upon this realization while maintaining fog as it grew and grew and grew. Leaving issues open seemed unbearable, but over time the volume far exceeded my ability to keep up. Over time I saw the promise of a better way, but my expectations of open source would need to a...

   Open source,Less is more,Mentoring,Bug report     2011-11-28 10:45:47

  Thoughts on Running an Open Source Project

I spoke in the unconference at PHPUK last week, on running an open source project. I thought I would collect together my thoughts into one place before I lose the scratty piece of paper I wrote them down on. I'm not sure I'm the right person to be giving advice exactly, but these are the things that, having been project lead on joind.in for a while, I think are important. Community I love it when people share their code, just make something and publish it, but to my mind it isn't an open...

   Open source,Management,Readme,Community     2012-03-06 05:25:27

  The story behind Sublime Text

Sublime Text is a cross-platform text and source code editor, with a Python application programming interface (API). The graphical user interface design was inspired by Vim.Its functionality is also extendable with plugins; Post its release, it gained much attention and wide popularity. Do you know what's the story behind Sublime Text? Jon Skinner left his job as a software engineer at Google in order to pursue a dream: to build a better text editor. The end result is the popular Sublime Text t...

   Sublime Text,Story,History     2013-09-22 11:05:36

  Why you should be careful about optimizations

In one of my current javascript projects, I have to deal with 3D voxel coordinates. And, sometimes, I have floating points coordinates which must be converted to integers in order to convert them into proper array index. Javascript is a wonderful language, really. However, implementations are sometimes weird, and the way to do something can sometimes have very huge impacts on the performances. Worse, sometimes the classical way is more expensive than the tricky one. So, some peo...

   JavaScript,Bitwise,Floor,Trick,Optimization     2012-05-02 11:29:20

  Many Chinese applicants to US universities may be affected by Gmail cut out

Just after Christmas, many Chinese found that they could not connect to Gmail anymore in mainland China. Since Google announced leaving from China in 2010, the web version of Gmail was not accessible anymore. But people from China could still access Gmail through some Gmap apps. This time, Gmail is not accessible even with these apps. It is said that all the mail service protocols of Gmail including IMAP/POP/SMTP have been cut out by Chinese government. This means no mails can be sent to or rece...

   Gmail, China, Gmail cut out     2014-12-30 00:35:28

  Some thoughts about Facebook native app

On Techcrunch Disrupt last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's remarks about their mobile app sparked a denunciation against Web App. HTML 5 seems to have become the bottleneck of poor experience of all related mobile applications. From the user perspective, Facebook native iOS App rates from the 1.5 star to four star now; since the introduction of new native app, the user usage is doubled. It's not easy to have a huge rise of user usage for such a big app like Facebook. Especially consid...

   Facebook, Native app, Analysis     2012-10-12 20:38:11

  How to maintain a software project?

For a software engineer, at least from my own experience, maintaining an existing software project would take up a considerable amount of time: adding new features, fixing tricky bugs, and so on. In this post, I will share some some tips about how to become a veteran from a novice quickly when facing a new project. (1) Get familiar with the background knowledge of the project. Every software has its own purposes and users: a device driver serves the specified hardware, whilst a SMS gateway helps...

       2017-08-05 02:20:46

  How to prevent next HeartBleed bug?

How to ensure the security of open source projects is a concern for many open source users including individual users and companies. But it's not an easy task to ensure the security of open source projects. Because everyone can see the source code, there is much higher possibility that a bug may be found by someone. Once a bug is disclosed, people may exploit it and do evil things, this may cause loss of money either for individuals or companies, some of the bugs may even have big impact to the...

   Open source,HeartBleed,Security     2014-04-24 09:07:05

  Why do business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

People get paid less than their employers' "reservation price" (the most they would ever pay), and more than their "marginal product" (the least they would ever work for). Your actual pay on that spectrum is based on your bargaining power, relative to your employer.Say your services to your company are worth $1000 a day. Under the gun, he would pay you that if he had no other choice. Say you would work for $100 a day if you had no other options. That's your range.Say you're new and independent a...

   Programmer,Program manager,Salary,Difference,Bargain power,Economic     2011-11-21 03:06:30