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  Becoming a Better Developer, Part 1: Making Fans

If you're trying to grow your startup you've come to the right place. Get my 170-page ebook on how to grow a startup and join thousands of self-funded entrepreneurs by subscribing to my newsletter at right. This is the first of what I hope to become an ongoing series about non-technical ways to improve yourself as a developer. Becoming a better developer involves more than learning new technical skills; learning about your company and co-workers will dramatically improve the software y...

   Developer,Tips     2011-06-29 08:38:26

  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

  Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong

Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning. Really, I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out. And it turns out that everything I thought I knew about learning is wrong. Here’s wh...

   Learning,Thought,Before,Wrong     2012-01-30 05:45:36

  Webinar Best Practices For A Webinar Experience Your Audience Will Love

The web conferencing technology has been getting a lot of attention lately, and for good reason. With global lockdowns and social distancing norms in effect, video conferencing has emerged as an economical way of staying in touch with office colleagues, friends, and family members. However, if that’s all you are using this technology for, you may not fully understand what is web conferencing and its immense potential. For instance, lately, web conferencing technology is being used to deliv...

   WEB CONFERENCE,WEBINAR     2020-11-07 04:19:52

  From College To Silicon Valley: Tips From A Veteran

Editor’s note: Pedram Keyani has been an engineer at Facebook since 2007. He is a manager on the Site Integrity team, the inventor of Keg Presence and a Hackathon enthusiast. Looking for internships and jobs after college can be exhilarating, especially for people with engineering and other technical expertise. In an otherwise tough job market, demand for software engineers is higher than ever right now. You may find that companies are actually competing to pay you for the knowledge y...

   Career,College,Silicon valley,Transition,Experience     2012-02-20 05:34:24

  Making Your Tech Conference Presentation, and Experience, Not Suck

Tech conferences are incredibly expensive, and not just in dollars. Even free conferences like BarCamps incur the expense of the attendee’s time. Taking time off from work or family is a hassle at the very least, and it’s time that isn’t billable. The draw of the conference boils down to those 45 minute sessions, and speaker and attendee alike should make the most of it. Speakers often start off by wasting time. They front-load the presentation with worthless informatio...

   Soft skill,Tech presentation,Advice,Highlight     2011-12-20 08:50:00

  Techies: Let's Not Forget Brain Hacking

A close-up of a jellyfish Description automatically generated with low confidence Credit: SergeyNivens via Canva The world of cyber security never fails to surprise us with bolder and more sophisticated cyber-attacks and...

   HACKING     2022-02-03 21:43:11

  Could coding be the next mass profession?

Like farming was in the 17th century, factory work during the industrial revolution, construction during the Great Depression, and manufacturing after World War II. Better, because writing code is a creative act which can be done with or without a traditional (antiquated?) office-based job, and can create enormous personal and economic value. Most young people start in jobs that don’t have much of a future. Most don’t get higher education – only a third get a...

   Coder,Learning,Training,Profession     2012-01-05 08:02:50

  How to be an excellent programmer

To use a programming language is very easy for a programmer, but it's a dream for many programmers to be an expert software developer. There are five levels of programmers: Novice, Senior novice, competent, proficient, and expert. Most programmers are senior novice. And programmer living in this level are a lot of people who have 1 to 10 years work experience.As a programmer, how to find the bottlenecks for your improvement and how to improve yourself quickly? This is really not an easy question...

   Programming,Tips,Habit     2013-03-26 09:53:38

  Are older people better programmers?

Peter Knego states something interesting: “It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.”. He uses reputation and other metrics from StackOverflow to corroborate his point. His summary is: Number of coders drops significantly with age. Top developer numbers, at age 27, drop by half every 6-7 years.Developers in their 40s answer roughly twice as much and ask half the questions compared to colleagues in their 20s. It seems younger generation learns and older generatio...

   Programming,Age,Experience,Skill,Advanta     2011-07-28 09:02:23

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