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   Move.Me Writing Your Own WebSocket Server

The WebSocket protocol has applications beyond plain vanilla web development.  I will explain how the protocol works, how to implement your own server and share some insights I had along the way. Before we get down and dirty, I will explain what I’ve been doing with it. At this point I expect many of you are saying “I’m not working on a web game this doesn’t seem relevant to me.” Well, neither am I. I embed a WebSocket server into my game engine and wit...

   Socket,NetWorking,WebSocket,Server development     2012-01-28 07:06:43

  Sass Style Guide: A Sass Tutorial on How to Write Better CSS Code

Writing consistent and readable CSS that will scale well is a challenging process. Especially when the style sheets are getting larger, more complex, and harder to maintain. One of the tools available to developers to write better CSS are preprocessors. A preprocessor is a program that takes one type of data and converts it to another type of data, and in our case CSS preprocessors are preprocessing languages which are compiled to CSS. There are many CSS preprocessors that front-end develop...

   CSS,SASS,TUTORIAL     2015-09-17 06:40:47

  Programming Achievements: How to Level Up as a Developer

How does a good developer become a great developer?Forget greatness for a moment: How does a decent developer become a good developer?There is no definitive path from Step 1 to Step n. Heck, it's not even clear what Step n is. And as logically-minded developer types, the lack of a well-defined route can make for a daunting journey from novice to master.I've spent a fair bit of time over the last few years bumping up against this conundrum. What's next? How do I go from being a goo...

   Good developer,Great developer,Comparison,Knowledge,Skill,Platform     2011-11-09 02:12:58

  Signs that you're a bad programmer

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (...

   Sign,Programmer,Characteristics,Knowledge,Skill     2011-10-20 08:56:16

  Linus Torvalds’s Lessons on Software Development Management

If anyone knows the joys and sorrows of managing software development projects, it would be Linus Torvalds, creator of the world's most popular open-source software program: the Linux operating system. For more than 20 years, Torvalds has been directing thousands of developers to improve the open source OS. He and I sat down to talk about effective techniques in running large-scale distributed programming teams – and the things that don’t work, too.Torvalds says there are...

   Linux,Software development,Linus Tonalds     2011-09-28 09:16:02

  Your Code is My Hell

It occurred to me recently that my experience as a Rails developer may be somewhat unique.I often get brought in to help preexisting Ruby/Rails projects evolve and mature in a sustainable way. As a result, the vast majority of Ruby projects I’ve worked on have been well-established by the time I arrived. In fact, offhand I can only think of one commercial greenfield Ruby project I’ve participated in. All the rest have been “legacy” from my perspective, in the ...

   Code style,Clean code,Code paradigm     2011-09-15 08:39:16

  Use DTrace to diagnose gdb issues

A few days ago, I installed the newest 64-bit gdb program (version 7.7.1) on Solaris 10 (X86_64 platform) to debug programs. After playing with the gdb a day, I found 2 issues about gdb:(1) The "set follow-fork-mode child" command doesn't take effect. By default, after the parent process forks the child process, the gdb will track the parent process, so this command can make gdb begin to follow the child process. But this command works OK on Linux.(2) The gdb can't parse the 32-bit application c...

   DTrace, debug, gdb, UNIX     2014-06-28 05:11:20

  What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie?

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at lea...

   C,Father,Dennis Ritchie,Death,Father of C,UNIX     2011-10-17 10:12:02

  PHP: a fractal of bad design

Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us have the slightest clue what we’re doing. Combine with Sturgeon’s Law, and I have a lifetime’s worth of stuff to gripe about. This is not the same. PHP is not merely awkward to use, or ill-suited for what I want, or suboptimal, or...

   PHP,Design,Analysis     2012-04-11 13:46:57

  Why I Hate Android

Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse. I should probably explain. Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. That is to say, I don’t hate the concept of Androi...

   Android,Hate,Feature     2012-01-10 07:19:27

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