Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Strange

  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

  Good programmer made bad designers

I got an email request to publish this article a few days ago.I was actually on the verge of moving the email to the trash when I noticed the first name of the author: Rand.For those of you not familiar with the Wheel of Time series, the main character’s name is Rand.I admit that it’s an embarrassing weak reason to respond to a strange email, but reading some 10,000 pages of a fantasy series obviously messes with your mind.Then again, it’s probably no stranger than...

   Programmer,Designer,Comparison     2011-08-29 22:06:33

  The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

Takeaway: The IT profession and the IT job market are in the midst of seismic changes that are going to shift the focus to three types of jobs. There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salar...

   IT,Potential,Consultant,Developer,Projec     2011-07-27 08:46:59

  10 things you gotta have to succeed in IT

Takeaway: Everyone seems to agree that IT is a tough field. But what does it take to overcome the adversities and become a successful IT pro? These qualities may be the key. I recently wrote a string of articles discussing various reasons to leave IT — and various alternative careers for dissatisfied IT workers. I received an amazing amount of feedback from readers who have always wanted to express similar sentiments. But that leaves out a huge swath of peo...

   Tips,IT,Development     2011-07-21 21:55:13

  There are no free lunches on the internet

Hot data: An IT technician checks the network servers at a data farm. Alamy Photograph: Juice Images/AlamyPhysics has Newton's first law ("Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed"). The equivalent forinternet services is simpler, though just as general in its applicability: it says that there is no such thing as a free lunch.The strange thing is that most use...

   Free lunch,Facebook,Google,Privacy information     2011-11-21 03:03:31

  Why Javascript is a Joy

I’m probably a bit biased – being a front-end web developer for a few years will do that – but I really enjoy writing Javascript. I’ve recently retreated from pure coding the last few months, but I got an opportunity this past week to jump back into some tasks, and it has reminded me how fun it is to dive into our[1] front-end codebase. Yes, Javascript can be surprisingly elegant yet completely infuriating, and all on the same line of code; for a long time, ...

   JavaScript,Speed,Simplicity,Malleable     2012-03-26 15:00:31

  10 design flaws of JavaScript

JavaScript's design took only ten days. Moreover, the designer didn't want to design it initially, he just wanted to complete the task assigned by company. It is now a very powerful client side programming language used in almost all the websites. It's an excellent language, but it also has some flaws. 1. Not suitable for large projects JavaScript doesn't have namespace, it's hard to be modular, there is no standard for putting codes in multiple source files. It allows defining functions with th...

   JavaScript, Design flaw, Object     2012-11-29 11:39:35

  Strangest line of python you have ever seen

The other day @HairyFotr and @zidarsk8 were doing some codegolfing with implementations of nondeterministic finite state machineand asked me to blog their results.For those of us who often forget what all of this computer science mumbo jumbo means, here’s a quick explanation from wikipedia:In the theory of computation, a nondeterministic finite state machine or nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) is a finite state machin...

   Python,Strange,Research,Work rationale     2011-11-19 02:05:03

  What do programmers really do?

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. â€“ PicassoMany people (including my mother-in-law) think that computers are becoming so smart that programmers will be no longer needed in the near future. Other people think that programmers are geniuses who constantly solve sophisticated math puzzles in front of their monitors. Even many programmers don’t have clear idea what they do.In this post I want to provide some explanation to uninformed people what programmers rea...

   Programmer,Work,Computer     2011-05-20 11:49:32

  10 New Year’s resolutions for designers

Get the new year off to a positive start with these design resolutions Wake up. I hope you enjoyed your holiday because it’s a new year and it’s time to get back to work. We did pretty good last year. We started standing up for ourselves. We stopped working for free. We started getting our financial house in order. (Please don’t make me do the contract thing again this year.) We rediscovered typography ...

   Designer,Chanllenge,2012,New UI     2012-01-18 09:11:02

RECENT