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  Why programmers work at night

A popular saying goes that Programmers are machines that turn caffeine into code. And sure enough, ask a random programmer when they do their best work and there’s a high chance they will admit to a lot of late nights. Some earlier, some later. A popular trend is to get up at 4am and get some work done before the day’s craziness begins. Others like going to bed at 4am. At the gist of all this is avoiding distractions. But you could just lock the door, what’s so special a...

   Programmer,Sleep,Later,Efficiency,Habit     2011-12-16 10:13:27

  The Singular Secret of the Rockstar Programmer

Before all the laws of software, before the purpose of software, before the science of software design itself, there is a singular fact that determines the success or failure of a software developer. This fact makes the difference between the senior engineer who can seem to pick up new languages in a day and the junior developer who struggles for ten years just to get a paycheck, programming other people’s designs and never improving enough to get a promotion. It differentiates the poor...

   Programming,Tip,Great developer,Rockstar     2011-08-07 23:42:09

  Here Are The 10 Highest-Paying Jobs At Google

South African job listing site JobVine compiled the following chart of the top ten salaries at Google, compiled from Glassdoor.The top pay is for contract positions leading software development. It's not uncommon to see contractors earn more salary than full-time employees at big tech companies, because they're often not able to get stock options and perks.For jobs within the company, it looks like directors of product management are the highest paid, which is fitting with Google's new...

   Google,Salary,Statistics,Job,Salary level     2011-10-14 11:24:42

  Coder or Clown?

That’s the challenge. Sit down with someone you’ve never met and try to work out if they are a coder or a clown. I don’t mean to insult anyone, of course, and I’m the first to acknowledge the years of training and effort that goes into being a professional clown. But some coders, oh boy. Like the time I interviewed a recent graduate. I’ll call her Ada. Full of sympathy for the novice programmer I started with a gentle warm-up, a soft-ball question to break the ...

   Coder,Clown,State,Profile,Category     2011-08-28 23:04:46

  IE ActiveX(”htmlfile”) Transport, Part II

In my last post I discussed using the ActiveX(”htmlfile”) technique to provide a usable streaming transport in Internet Explorer. The solution I provided will work, but since writing the last article I’ve made significant progress in understanding why IE behaves the way it does with respect to the streaming transport. The previous solution amounted to creating an array of messages, pushing messages on that array from the htmlfile iframe, and popping messages off of the array i...

   IE,Http,Streaming,htmlfile,Transport,Act     2011-09-05 04:07:02

  How Speeding The "Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime" Could Change This Modern World

Math breakthroughs don't often capture the headlines--but MIT researchers have just made one that could lead to all sorts of amazing technological breakthroughs that in just a few years will touch every hour of your life. Last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms was presented by a group of MIT researchers. It's possible that under cert...

   FFT,Speed-up,Fast fourier transform     2012-03-20 07:47:04

  Replacing small C programs with Haskell

C is the classic go-to tool for small programs that need to be really fast. When scripts.mit.edu needed a small program to be a glorified cat that also added useful HTTP headers to the beginning of its output, there was no question about it: it would be written in C, and it would be fast; the speed of our static content serving depended on it! (The grotty technical details: our webserver is based off of a networked filesystem, and we wanted to avoid giving Apache too many credentials in ca...

   C,Haskell,Small program     2012-01-03 10:51:39

  6 Reasons Why Devs Should Learn Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails has during the last ten years become an increasingly popular framework for web app development. The current shaky economy and rapidly changing tech environment requires the art of app building to be faster and more cost-effective. That's why becoming fluent in Rails might be a great way for developers to expand their knowledge, which can land them a number of great jobs or interesting projects, as well as grant access to a thriving community. Let's start with the basics – wha...

   Ruby on Rails,Advantage     2014-07-25 10:56:29

  Stop Making Apps

There are a bunch of iPhone apps I own though I have no clue what they do. These apps include but aren’t limited to; FLUD, Apptitude, Cartoonatic, Can’t Wait!, Punch, Pah, Prize Claw, Traveler, Concur, Jajah, Fast Customer, Pimple Popper and many more whose names I can’t even remember.Occupying my valuable homescreen real estate are also a bunch of apps whose purpose I remember only because they were built by people I know or am friends with, but that I sadly never use. And ...

   App,Apple,Android,Stop     2011-11-12 10:54:42

  Silicon Valley won’t dominate the tech world forever

Yesterday  I published a piece about Newry in Northern Ireland, which is looking to help boost its economy by encouraging a startup ecosystem. A little later, a post entitled ‘You will not be the next Silicon Valley, please stop trying‘ appeared over on Pando Daily, in which the author decided pull a bunch of Irish stereotypes out of the bag to attack the idea. Now, I could detail everything that’s wrong with the article, but the comments there do a perfect job of rippi...

   Silicon Valley,Domination,Technology,Startup,Trend     2012-02-13 05:21:57

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