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  Are college students learning?

In his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President Obama proposed several measures to lower college tuition. University leaders responded cautiously, warning that cost-cutting reforms might also cut into instructional quality. But here's the big open secret in American higher education: Most institutions have no meaningful way to measure the quality...

   College students,Learning,Survey     2012-02-02 07:10:02

  Using JavaScript to operate clipboard

Browsers allow JavaScript to read and write data on clipboard. Generally script should not modify user's clipboard to avoid impacting user expectation, but there are cases where this can indeed bring convenience to users. For example, for some code snippet, user can copy it to clipboard with one click instead of select and copy manually. There are three options for clipboard operation provided in JavaScript/browser: document.execCommand() Asynchronous Clipboard API copy and paste events This p...

   JAVASCRIPT,CLIPBOARD,NAVIGATOR.CLIPBOARD     2021-01-23 23:23:34

  Static Code Analysis

The most important thing I have done as a programmer in recent years is to aggressively pursue static code analysis.  Even more valuable than the hundreds of serious bugs I have prevented with it is the change in mindset about the way I view software reliability and code quality.It is important to say right up front that quality isn’t everything, and acknowledging it isn’t some sort of moral failing.  Value is what you are trying to produce, and quality is only one a...

   Static code,Analysis,Quality,Microsoft 360,Value     2011-12-24 06:50:18

  Understand GoLang WaitGroup internals and how it works

Background Before getting into the main content, let me give a brief introduction to WaitGroup and its related background knowledge. Here, the focus is on the basic usage of WaitGroup and the fundamental knowledge of system semaphores. For those who are familiar with these, you can skip this section directly. WaitGroup WaitGroup is one of the most common concurrency control techniques in Golang, and its function can be roughly compared to the join() in concurrency control of other languages' mul...

   GOLANG,WAITGROUP,SOURCE CODE     2023-04-26 08:02:01

  12 Things A Programmer Really Needs To Know

How do you answer the question, “what do I need to learn to be a good programmer?” I have written posts trying to answer that question, typically focusing on the languages that you should learn or the algorithms and other techniques you need to know. What about the rest of a programmer’s life? This is a less serious look at the life of a programmer. So, what does a programmer really need to know?Caffeine â€“ You need to find your preferred caffeine delivery system. M...

   Tips,Programmer,How,What,Logic     2011-08-31 08:46:32

  Before Python

This morning I had a chat with the students at Google's CAPE program. Since I wrote up what I wanted to say I figured I might as well blog it here. Warning: this is pretty unedited (or else it would never be published :-). I'm posting it in my "personal" blog instead of the "Python history" blog because it mostly touches on my career before Python. Here goes.Have you ever written a computer program? Using which language?HTMLJavascriptJavaPythonC++COther - which?[It turned out the students ha...

   Python,History,Programming language,B     2012-01-18 08:08:53

  Three Simple Ways to Improve the Security of Your Web App

It seems like web app security has entered the public conscious recently, probably as a result of the press covering the activities of groups like Anonymous and incidents like security breaches at several CAs. Here are a couple of quick security tips to improve the security of your web apps. Think of these as low-hanging fruit, not as a substitute for thorough analysis of your app’s security. If there’s interest in this topic we can do more posts, too - let us know in the com...

   Web app,Security,X-FRAME-OPTIONS,SSL     2011-12-08 10:10:20

  What makes a great IT project manager

Since IT project management is a field in constant flux, there's no one universal definition of a great IT project manager. Still, there are some skills and features that can be easily adapted to any working environment, meeting new organizational needs and consequent challenges. A significant problem is the fact that project manager will mean different things to different people (even within the same organization!). Some say that the greatest IT project managers are those who are able to balanc...

   project management     2015-07-06 02:15:46

  Why I left Google

Ok, I relent. Everyone wants to know why I left and answering individually isn’t scaling so here it is, laid out in its long form. Read a little (I get to the punch line in the 3rd paragraph) or read it all. But a warning in advance: there is no drama here, no tell-all, no former colleagues bashed and nothing more than you couldn’t already surmise from what’s happening in the press these days surrounding Google and its attitudes toward user privacy and software develo...

   James Whittaker,Google,Leave,Microsoft,Ad     2012-03-14 13:43:44

  Valid JavaScript variable names

Did you know var π = Math.PI; is syntactically valid JavaScript? I thought this was pretty cool, so I decided to look into which Unicode glyphs are allowed in JavaScript variable names, or identifiers as the ECMAScript specification calls them. Reserved words The ECMAScript 5.1 spec says: An Identifier is an IdentifierName that is not a ReservedWord. The spec describes four groups of reserved words: keywords, future reserved words, null literals and boolean lite...

   JavaScript,Name convention,Standard     2012-02-22 05:16:53

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