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  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

  #46 – Why software sucks

No one makes bad software on purpose. No benevolent programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people and making them cry. Bad software, or bad anything, happens because making things is hard, making good things doubly so. The three things that make it difficult are: Possessing the diverse skills needed not to suck.Understanding who you’re making the thing for.Orchestrating the interplay of skills, egos and constraints over the course of...

   Software design,Sucks,Software industry     2012-03-19 13:10:37

  Go vs C benchmark. Could Go be faster than C?

During last semester I was attending Multiprocessor Architectures course, given at Facultad de Informática where I study my Computer Science degree. As part of the assignments due to pass the course, we had to do several programs written in C to benchmark matrix multiplication by testing different techniques and technologies. First of all we had to do a secuential program in three different versions: A normal one where the result matrix is ordered by rows and the loops range the matrix by ...

   Gp,C,Benchmark,Faster,Speed,Comparison     2012-02-08 10:09:07

  Cache them if you can

“The fastest HTTP request is the one not made.” I always smile when I hear a web performance speaker say this. I forget who said it first, but I’ve heard it numerous times at conferences and meetups over the past few years. It’s true! Caching is critical for making web pages faster. I’ve written extensively about caching: Call to improve browser caching(lack of) Caching for iPhone Home Screen AppsRedirect caching deep diveMobile cache file sizesImproving app ...

   Cache,HTTP request,Websiite     2012-03-27 12:54:02

  For Google CEO Larry Page, a Difficult Premiere Role

When Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page announced that he would take over as chief executive earlier this year, he promised that he would shake up the Internet search giant to speed up decision making. Instead, much of the shaking up has happened to the new CEO.Challenges have piled up for Mr. Page since he assumed his post in April. They include a broad U.S. antitrust probe of the company's practices; the settlement of a long-running criminal investigation into Google's adver...

   Google,CEO,Lary Page,Motorola,Role     2011-08-31 08:55:43

  Don't write on the whiteboard

I recently interviewed at a major technology company. I won't mention the name because, honestly, I can't remember whether I signed an NDA, much less how strong it was.I did well. Mostly because of luck. I normally step over myself when I interview. I guess I've improved over the years. Here are a few tips to ace your own interview.1. Don't write on the whiteboardWhen I interviewed at Palantir around 5 years ago, I had a lot of trouble with this. Yes, I knew next to nothing about compu...

   Interview,Preparation,Whiteboard,Note,Python     2012-01-11 11:31:32

  Secret Symphony: The Ultimate Guide to Readable Web Typography

Right now, there’s a mathematical symphony happening on your website.Every single one of your readers is subconsciously aware of this symphony, and more important, they are all pre-programmed to respond to it in a particular way.The question is this:Is your site’s symphony pleasing and inviting to your readers, or does it turn them off and make it harder to communicate with them? The Mathematical Symphony of TypographyAs it turns out, this symphony is not unique to websites. You...

   Web design,Typography,Math,Golden rule     2011-12-23 07:48:10

  10 rules of PHP-masters

1. Use PHP only when it is necessary – Rasmus Lerdorf There is no better source than the creator of PHP, to learn what he can do. Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP in 1995. Since then, the language has spread like a wildfire rate in the developer community, incidentally changing the face of the Internet. However, Rasmus did not create PHP with these intentions. PHP was created for the needs of web development. As is the case with many other projects wi...

   PHP,Master,Experience,Advice     2011-12-16 09:38:07

  Processing Unicode Data in Python - A Primer to Understand Non-English Data Processing

Introduction: Currently we live in a world where people of diverse cultures/backgrounds use electronic devices to express their ideas, do their daily work that earns them their daily bread, and entertain themselves using content that is created using their own language and so on. Naturally, in order to make all these things happen, any computational instrument, be it a laptop or a desktop computer, or a smartphone, or something else, should be capable enough to serve all of these things in a man...

   PYTHON,UNICODE,UTF-8,NON-ENGLISH DATA,ASCII CODE     2019-04-10 00:55:19

  Python internals: adding a new statement to Python

This article is an attempt to better understand how the front-end of Python works. Just reading documentation and source code may be a bit boring, so I’m taking a hands-on approach here: I’m going to add an until statement to Python. All the coding for this article was done against the cutting-edge Py3k branch in the Python Mercurial repository mirror. The until statement Some languages, like Ruby, have an until statement, which is the complement to while (until num == 0 is equi...

   Python,New statement,Research,Addition     2012-03-12 07:32:24

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