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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Skills

  How to hire an idiot

Wow, I remember how idealistic I was when I was about to bring on my first employee! After dealing with bad bosses over my career, after doing a whole lot of thinking about how I was going to be a great boss, and after doing a whole lot of reading about how to hire effective people, I was really looking forward to it. I was going to:-- Hire people smarter than myself, who get things done!-- Trust them to do their job, let them do their job and give them enough resources to do it!-- Pay them WELL...

   Employee,Idiot,Work experience,Pay,Process     2011-10-24 11:47:54

  How I Became a Programmer

I posted a very brief response to a post on HackerNews yesterday challenging the notion that 8 weeks of guided tutelage on Ruby on Rails is not going to produce someone who you might consider a "junior RoR developer." It did not garner many upvotes so I figured that like most conversation on the Internet it faded into the general ambient chatter. Imagine my surprise when I woke up to couple handfuls' worth of emails from around the world asking me what I did, how I did it, an...

   Programmer,Advice,Method,Study     2011-11-24 09:14:50

  The Anatomy of a Perfect Web Site

Many sites on the web are good. They are well-designed, clear, have great information architecture and are easy to navigate. Often, web designers emphasize the “design” part too much, and neglect the other equally important things. However, there are sites which aren’t that aesthetically pleasing, but still are the best sites in the world. They may look like a big, sad bag of wrestling underwear on the outside, but their underlying user experience is really, really refine...

   Website,web design,Anatomy,Interaction,Feature     2011-11-08 09:00:34

  Will We Need Teachers Or Algorithms?

Editor’s note: This is Part III of a guest post written by legendary Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures. In Part I, he laid the groundwork by describing how artificial intelligence is a combination of human and computer capabilities In Part II, he discussed how software and mobile technologies can augment and even replace doctors. Now, in Part III, he talks about how technology will sweep through education. In my last post, I ...

   Teacher,Algorithm,Development     2012-01-16 10:17:45

  Fear of Ignorance

This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten by a real programmer within 6 months.During the interview, we had the following exchange (due to an imperfect memory, I’ll ...

   Leader,Team,Technical,Leadership,Ignorence     2011-11-21 10:03:03

  How to Ace a Google Interview

Imagine a man named Jim. He's applying for a job at Google. Jim knows that the odds are stacked against him. Google receives a million job applications a year. It's estimated that only about 1 in 130 applications results in a job. By comparison, about 1 in 14 high-school students applying to Harvard gets accepted. Jim's first interviewer is late and sweaty: He's biked to work. He starts with some polite questions about Jim's work history. Jim eagerly explains his short career. The intervi...

   Google,Interview,Questions and answers,Job     2011-12-26 09:17:36

  Learn Vim Progressively

tl;dr: Want to learn vim (the best text editor known to human kind) the fastest way possible. I suggest you a way. Start by learning the minimal to survive, then integrate slowly all tricks.Vim the Six Billion Dollar editorBetter, Stronger, Faster.Learn vim and it will be your last text editor. There isn’t any better text editor I know. Hard to learn, but incredible to use.I suggest you to learn it in 4 steps:SurviveFeel comfortableFeel Better, Stronger, FasterUse vim ...

   Vim,Learning,Skills,Tips,Steps,Progressi     2011-09-08 10:44:06

  Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good

Odds are, you don’t use a functional programming language every day. You probably aren’t getting paid to write code in Scala, Haskell, Erlang, F#, or a Lisp Dialect. The vast majority of people in the industry use OO languages like Python, Ruby, Java or C#–and they’re happy with them. Sure, they might occasionally use a “functional feature” like “blocks” now and then, but they aren’t writing functional code.And yet, for years we’v...

   Functional Programming,Hard,Difficult,Reason to learn,Good     2011-10-18 02:55:38

  A brief guide to tech internships

Planning to be an Intern in the Bay Area during Summer 2012? Make sure to read an Intern's Guide to the Bay Area, and join the 2012 Facebook group.  (via this guy, via this guy) Joel Spolsky, from the Joel On Software blog and StackOverflow, wrote an article with Advice for Computer Science College Students back in '05. According to Joel,  No matter what you do, get a good summer internship. As such: here’s everything you ever wanted to know about tech inter...

   Internship,Advice,CS student     2012-02-01 04:48:31

  Why developer-friendliness is central to API design

Today, APIs play a bigger role in software development than ever before. The evolution of computing has been dominated by ever-increasing levels of abstraction; the use of higher-level languages, of course, but also the development of platforms, libraries, and frameworks. Professor Douglass C. Smith claims the progression of this second category far outpaced the development of programming languages.  Developers are also noticing that difficulty has shifted from designing algorithms a...

   API,User friendly,Significance, Improve quality     2011-12-21 02:29:54

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