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  Why developer-friendliness is central to API design

Today, APIs play a bigger role in software development than ever before. The evolution of computing has been dominated by ever-increasing levels of abstraction; the use of higher-level languages, of course, but also the development of platforms, libraries, and frameworks. Professor Douglass C. Smith claims the progression of this second category far outpaced the development of programming languages.  Developers are also noticing that difficulty has shifted from designing algorithms a...

   API,User friendly,Significance, Improve quality     2011-12-21 02:29:54

  Rediscovering the RSync Algorithm

A:Ok, you’re synchronizing this over the web; and what do you use for the synchronization? B: Oh, we implemented the rsync algorithm. A: uhu. And what do you do with really big files? B: The same. A: And you also synchronise folders? B: Yes. A: And how do you do that? B: we iterate over the folder, using the algorithm on every file, recursing over subfolders. A: Can you try 2 things for me? First, a very large file; and second, a large codebase, and see if it holds. Introduction First ...

   ReSync algorithm,Discovery     2012-02-14 10:47:24

  Put Your HTML in a Box

In the first article in this series, I walked through the basics of cascading style sheets (CSS) and showed how CSS can make your code easier to maintain. CSS allows you to keep your presentation rules separate from your content, and I showed you some of the benefits this separation provides. In this article, I’ll move forward with CSS and describe how to position elements on a page.The first step in understanding how to position elements is to understand the fundamental model of CSSâ€...

   HTML,Box,Div,Container,Format     2011-08-19 08:22:58

  Currying in Python

What is Currying? Currying is like a kind of incremental binding of function arguments. Let’s define a simple function which takes 5 arguments: 1def f(a, b, c, d, e):2    print(a, b, c, d, e) In a language where currying is supported, f is a function which takes one argument (a) and returns a function which takes 4 arguments. This means that f(5) is the following function: 1def g(b, c, d, e):2    f(5, b, c, d, e) We could emulate this behavior the...

   Python,Curring,Binding,Implement     2012-03-19 12:59:10

  How expensive is a MySQL query?

Database access speed is always the bottle neck of many applications. Many application have large amount of data to search, retrieve and display nowadays. How do we improve the performance of our applications, how do we reduce the cost of database access? Apart from the design of database, the quality of the query is also one important factor to take care.  But before that, we need to know how much network traffic a query will consume. Yunyang,Zhang from Nubee in Singapore did some research...

   MySQL,Network traffic,Query     2013-04-09 05:13:33

  Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’

Mark Lucovsky, famous for building Windows NT and watching Steve Ballmer throw a chair.Mark Lucovsky was the other man in the room when Steve Ballmer threw his chair and called Eric Schmidt a “fucking pussy.”Yes, the story is true. At least according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” but Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chai...

   VMWare,Founder,Mark Lucovsky,Microsoft,Google,Cloud Foundry     2011-11-25 03:00:39

  Why Software Projects are Terrible and How Not To Fix Them

If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process.  The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas.  Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD).  But for any particular methodology, whether it is universally accepted or only “mostly” accepted, there are a multitude of o...

   Software,Development,Debug,Design     2011-11-21 10:27:05

  #46 – Why software sucks

No one makes bad software on purpose. No benevolent programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people and making them cry. Bad software, or bad anything, happens because making things is hard, making good things doubly so. The three things that make it difficult are: Possessing the diverse skills needed not to suck.Understanding who you’re making the thing for.Orchestrating the interplay of skills, egos and constraints over the course of...

   Software design,Sucks,Software industry     2012-03-19 13:10:37

  Native Audio with HTML5

Once upon a time, audio on the web lived primarily in the world of third-party browser plug-ins like Flash, QuickTime and Silverlight. This was not a bad world, but it had its issues.For one, most plug-ins require the user to install them, but not all users are willing (or able) to install them. Also, many players built with these plug-ins are inaccessible, making it difficult for folks who use assistive technologies to access the audio or alternative content.Then there are the front-end design ...

   Audio,HTML5,Built in,Audio tag,Video     2011-10-13 13:04:07

  Coding tricks of game developers

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So w...

   Tricks,Advice,Gamedesign,Plan     2012-02-12 04:50:30

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