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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Sucks

  Open Source (Almost) Everything

When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were faced with an interesting question:Should we open source Grit or keep it proprietary?Keeping it private would provide a higher hurdle for competing Ruby-based Git hosting sites, givin...

   Open source,Benefits,Popularity,Advertisement,Advantage     2011-11-23 07:58:15

  Reducing Code Nesting

"This guy’s code sucks!" It’s something we’ve all said or thought when we run into code we don’t like. Sometimes it’s because it’s buggy, sometimes it’s because it conforms to a style we don’t like, and sometimes it’s because it just feels wrong. Recently I found myself thinking this, and automatically jumping to the conclusion that the developer who wrote it was a novice. The code had a distinct property that I dislike: lots of ...

   Code nesting,Readability,Maintainability,Reduction     2012-01-02 08:13:46

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41

  All Programming is Web Programming

Michael Braude decries the popularity of web programming:The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else. They don't understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven't got a clue why I'd use an interface or an abstract class. They don't understand: virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# struc...

   Programming,Web programming,Opposite,Views,Web app     2011-11-12 10:38:00

  API Design is UI for Developers

I’ve been thinking a lot about APIs and their design recently.I stumbled on this fantastic quote from Greg Parker: A programming language is a user interface for developers. Language authors should learn from HCI principles.22/02/2012 19:10 via webReplyRetweetFavorite@gparkerGreg ParkerWhen I first started learning C++ (back in the bad old days) I was convinced that any 1st year student could design a better programming language. One which behaved in a sane fashion without a lot of le...

   API design,UI,developers,PHP     2012-03-11 13:21:43

  Kicking ass together: How to improve coding skills as a group

Over the last year and a half, I have worked with a small group of students and staff to create an excellent online learning community at Mendicant University. Unfortunately, because Mendicant is something that we’re intentionally scaling at a very slow pace, we won’t directly reach as many people as we’d like to any time soon. In this post, I’ve collected some of the things that I think contribute to making Mendicant University a great place to learn. I’d love...

   Code skill,Group,Improvement,Efficiency     2012-01-31 23:59:33

  Performance is a Feature

We've always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we're performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There's plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people will use it. [Google found that] the page with 10 results took 0.4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took 0.9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a seco...

   Website,Perfomance,Optimization     2011-07-02 01:52:12

  Don't. Waste. Time.

Stuff we startups do that doesn't delight users:Office spaceLaunch partiesHealth insurance plansSalary negotiationsFounder equity splitsSeries F stockOffice Food Team-building activitiesCRM systemsBookkeepingHead countWorking in SOMAConvertible debt capsValuationsTechCrunchKarma scoresISOsPowerpointBusiness CardsBanksLawyersDesks1099sBug TrackersAgile ProcessesAdvisory BoardsHiringCap TablesPayrollMeetupsMeetingsOf course, much of this stuff still needs to get done.  At some point.&nbs...

   Time management,Work,Startup,How to     2011-11-21 09:55:06

  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

  YOU'RE A DEVELOPER, SO WHY DO YOU WORK FOR SOMEONE ELSE?

As a developer, you are sitting on a goldmine. Do you even realize it? No, seriously, a @#$% goldmine!Never in modern history has it been so easy to create something from scratch, with little or no capital and a marketing model that is limited only by your imagination.Think about the biggest websites you visit or use on a regular basis: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, or even Google for that matter -- all of them were created by developers who created something from little more than an id...

   Developer,Work,Startup,Money,Idea,Time     2011-11-06 14:35:48

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