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  PHP Sucks! But I Like It!

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It's been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it's rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture. A Few Mistakes The post makes quite a few mistakes and odd apples to oranges comparisons. Let me point out the major ones that I saw. No Debugger - PHP has xdebug which works quite...

   PHP,Bad design,Like     2012-04-12 06:15:42

  Selling Yourself: Why? and How!

I know many good developers who are under the impression that they either don’t have to sell themselves, or selling themselves is wrong, but is that really true?First let me clarify by defining what I mean by “selling yourself”. I don’t mean “selling out”, I mean marketing yourself, what you’re doing and what your skills are. Especially to your organization.I don’t need to sell myself, my code speaks for itself.Really? Do you think your pristin...

   Sell,Developer,Skill,Show,Resume,CV     2011-08-10 03:19:34

  Comparing Floating Point Numbers, 2012 Edition

We’ve finally reached the point in this series that I’ve been waiting for. In this post I am going to share the most crucial piece of floating-point math knowledge that I have. Here it is:[Floating-point] math is hard.You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly hard it is. I mean, you may think it’s difficult to calculate when trains from Chicago and Los Angeles will collide, but that’s just peanuts to floating-point math.Seriously. Each ti...

   Floating point number,Comparison,True value     2012-02-23 07:11:03

  How Integers Should Work (In Systems Programming Languages)

My last post outlined some of the possibilities for integer semantics in programming languages, and asked which option was correct. This post contains my answers. Just to be clear: I want practical solutions, but I’m not very interested by historical issues or backwards compatibility with any existing language, and particularly not with C and C++. We’ll start with: Premise 1: Operations on default integer types return the mathematically correct result or else trap. This is th...

   Number,Algorithm,System,Embedded system     2011-12-05 12:48:41

  The Greatest Developer Fallacy Or The Wisest Words You’ll Ever Hear?

"I will learn it when I need it"! I've heard that phrase a lot over the years; it seems like a highly pragmatic attitude to foster when you're in an industry as fast-paced as software development. On some level it actually IS quite pragmatic, but on another level I am annoyed by the phrase. It has become a mantra for our whole industry which hasn't changed said industry for the better. The problem is this, in the guise of sounding like a wise and practical developer, people use it as an exc...

   Tips, Programming, Expert     2011-04-06 11:07:43

  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

  The Mature Programmer

1. The Mature Programmer The mature programmer manages their own time and productivity well. The MP knows that maintenance is as much work as the initial writing and code always takes longer than you think. The MP knows that any changes to code can introduce bugs, no matter how seemingly trivial. The MP knows that premature optimization is foolish and dangerous. The MP knows that sexy coding like writing big complex systems from scratch is rarely the best way to go. The MP does not get...

   Mature programmer,MP,Feature,Coding standard,Efficiency     2011-12-05 13:12:00

  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

  10 Reasons Why Visual Basic is Better Than C#

Visual Basic is a better programming language than Visual C#. Who says so? This article! Here are 10 reasons why you should always choose VB over C#. 1 – “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” This is a quotation from Gertrude Stein’s 1922 play Geography and Plays. However, the poetry wouldn’t work in C#, because – unforgivably – it’s a cASe-SeNSitIvE language. This is madness! Before I start ranting, let me just acknowledge that case-sens...

   Visual basci,C#,Advantage,Comparison     2012-03-10 04:24:03

  Why I love everything you hate about Java

If you’re one of those hipster programmers who loves Clojure, Ruby, Scala, Erlang, or whatever, you probably deeply loathe Java and all of its giant configuration files and bloated APIs of AbstractFactoryFactoryInterfaces. I used to hate all that stuff too. But you know what? After working for all these months on these huge pieces of Twitter infrastructure I’ve started to love the AbstractFactoryFactories. Let me explain why. Consider this little Scala program. It uses â€...

   Java,Comparison,Modularity,API     2011-11-29 08:48:15

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