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  Tom Uglow from Google : 5 steps to innovation

Google has been known for its innovation In Google there is a "welfare": each employee can spare 20% of his/her time to do what he/she likes to do so that any idea has a chance to be turned into reality. Perhaps this freedom makes Google capable of introducing new products and new ideas continuously. Google China held a small discussion session in its office in Tsinghua Science Park recently, Google Creative Director Tom Uglow shared some experience and cases of Google in production and innovat...

   Innovation,Technology,Google     2012-10-10 20:00:47

  What Makes A Great Programmer?

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the year 2000, Dr. Pargas was standing at the front of our data structures class talking about some data structure-y topic while an SSH session was projected on the wall in front of us. Someone asked a question, and he said something along the lines of "Well, if you want to be a real computer scientist you need to start using vi". I think he was smiling as he said it, and in hindsight his statement wasn't even slightly true, but being young and ...

   Tips.Programmer,Great,Great programmer     2011-06-08 03:08:04

  What Makes A Great Programmer?

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the year 2000, Dr. Pargas was standing at the front of our data structures class talking about some data structure-y topic while an SSH session was projected on the wall in front of us. Someone asked a question, and he said something along the lines of "Well, if you want to be a real computer scientist you need to start using vi". I think he was smiling as he said it, and in hindsight his statement wasn't even slightly true, but being young and ...

   Programmer,Great programmer,Character     2012-02-15 06:14:04

  printf("goodbye, Dennis");

Dennis Ritchie, a father of modern computing, died on October 8th, aged 70EVERY time you tap an iSomething, you are touching a little piece of Steve Jobs. His singular vision shaped the products Apple has conjured up, especially over the last 14 years, after Jobs returned to the helm of the company he had founded. Jobs's death in October resembled the passing of a major religious figure. But all of his technological miracles, along with a billion others sold by Apple's competitors, would be mere...

   Memory,Dennis Ritchie,C,Father of C     2011-10-22 12:42:22

  â€œNative vs Web” Is Total Bullshit

The web is dead. HTML5 is the be-all end-all of the future. Users are spending more time on apps and less time on the web. You can do anything on the web that you can in a native app. Yawn. Here’s how I feel whenever I hear/read anything about the overplayed “Native Versus Web” argument: It’s not an either-or decision Why aren’t we still arguing over “Print vs Digital”? Well, because (most) people understand that each medium has its place in thi...

   Web app,Native app,Comparison     2012-02-24 05:30:03

  Optimization Tricks used by the Lockless Memory Allocator

With the releasing of the Lockless Memory Allocator under the GPL version 3.0 license, we can now discuss more of the optimization tricks used inside it. Many of these are things you wouldn't want to use in normal code. However, when speed is the ultimate goal, sometimes we need to break a few rules and use code that is a little sneaky.The SlabA slab is a well-known technique for allocating fixed size objects. For a given object size, a chunk of memory is divided up into smaller regions of that ...

   Optimization,Memory allocation     2011-11-16 08:02:16

  What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie?

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at lea...

   C,Father,Dennis Ritchie,Death,Father of C,UNIX     2011-10-17 10:12:02

  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

  Scala feels like EJB 2, and other thoughts

At Devoxx last week I used the phrase "Scala feels like EJB 2 to me". What was on my mind?ScalaFor a number of years on this blog I've been mentioning a desire to write a post about Scala. Writing such a post is not easy, because anyone who has been paying attention to anti-Scala blog posts will know that writing one is a sure fire way of getting flamed. The Scala community is not tolerant of dissent.But ultimately, I felt that it was important for me to speak out and express my opinions. As I s...

   Scala,Module,EJB,Concurrency,Feature     2011-11-22 08:29:44

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