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  The 15 Golden Rules of UI design and flow.

Last night a good friend of mine showed me the latest Need for Speed game on the iphone / ipad. Quite an impressive feat of rendering and a relatively good game to boot. However, the front end, wow, a classic case in UI mis-engineering. Loads of stats, pages and pages of bits and pieces to wade through – a classic case of over stimulating the player with lots of decisions they have no business making – stuff that will significantly change their game play experience but being...

   UI design,Game design,Feature     2012-04-05 12:20:18

  5 things my 4-year-old taught me about technology

One of the great things about being a parent is that you get to see how kids use technology. I have a 4 year-old daughter who loves to mess around with my phone, watch videos on YouTube and play Angry Birds.It’s fun to watch her interact with these things, not only because she’s already better at some of the games than me. The really interesting stuff happens when stuff doesn’t work the way she expects it to, or when she finds ways to use tech that I hadn’t thought of...

   Learning,Children,Siri,Voice,Tech,Course     2011-10-26 07:07:48

  Making Computer Science a Requirement?

This US News article points out a growing interest among colleges and universities to make basic computer science a required course for all students. Georgia Tech already does this. The article points out that universities not normally considered to be science/technology-heavy are leaning this way too: Every student at Montclair State University in New Jersey must complete a computer science in order to graduate. For most students, that course is Introduction for Computer Appl...

   Computer science,Requirement,CS     2012-04-05 11:33:04

  Create an adaptable website layout with CSS3 media queries

With the rise of both very large screens and mobile devices, web developers have to be able to create websites that display correctly and look good whatever the device is. Sure, you can use good old techniques like fluid layouts, but I’ve got something better to show you today. This tutorial will teach you how you can create an adaptable website layout using CSS3.Getting startedView demo (Horizontally resize your browser to view it in action)Download filesCreating the default layoutT...

   CSS3,Media,Mobile device,Resize,PC,@medi     2011-09-20 12:38:27

  5 Reasons to Join a Startup After Graduating

After I wrote my last post, a surprising number of people emailed me asking why I decided to join a startup after graduating from Duke. Many of those I heard from face similar decisions today: either they are college seniors choosing between a big company and a startup, or they are recent graduates who work at a big company and are thinking about making the switch. What’s interesting is that most are already leaning towards the startup career path: it seems they just want someone to ...

   Startup,Graduation,Work,Advice,Passion,Learn     2011-11-23 08:12:13

  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

  How I Learned to Program Computers

I’ve been asked this question a lot lately, especially after I built YouTube Instant. So, here’s the answer, once and for all, for those who are interested.In short:I learned how to program by building lots of websites.The full story:I learned how to program by working on lots of different website projects starting from a pretty young age. What follows is a full account of all the major websites I’ve built, back to the very first site I made when I was 11 years old. Wha...

   Programming,Computer,Tips,Feross Aboukhadijeh     2011-10-17 10:25:32

  How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates

David Coursey from Forbes has a nice article on Gates titled - How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates?There were a couple of line in Coursey's article that rang very true.All that money you think Gates stole from you? He’s giving it back, with interest, to the world’s poorest.All that money you think Apple has overcharged people? Apple still has it and Steve got and kept his share.Steve Jobs has fittingly had a long list of tributes. He was among the greatest technologists, busi...

   Bill Gates,Steve Jobs,Glory,Competition,Good guy     2011-11-05 07:08:56

  A Python Optimization Anecdote

Hi! I’m Pavel and I interned at Dropbox over the past summer. One of my biggest projects during this internship was optimizing Python for dynamic page generation on the website. By the end of the summer, I optimized many of dropbox.com’s pages to render 5 times faster. This came with a fair share of challenges though, which I’d like to write about today:The ProblemDropbox is a large website with lots of dynamically generated pages. The more pages that are dynamically generat...

   Python,Anecodate,Optimization,Efficiency     2011-10-25 10:33:20

  Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good

Odds are, you don’t use a functional programming language every day. You probably aren’t getting paid to write code in Scala, Haskell, Erlang, F#, or a Lisp Dialect. The vast majority of people in the industry use OO languages like Python, Ruby, Java or C#–and they’re happy with them. Sure, they might occasionally use a “functional feature” like “blocks” now and then, but they aren’t writing functional code.And yet, for years we’v...

   Functional Programming,Hard,Difficult,Reason to learn,Good     2011-10-18 02:55:38

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