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  I am a programmer

Admitting that may be career suicide, or possibly it will cost me dearly because 'software engineers' are raking in the big bucks these days, but the fact of the matter is that I'm a programmer. It's what I do best and it is the job title that I associate with most because it feels as though the biggest chunk of me will always be most likely to blurt that out when people ask me what my job is. That I like to program definitely helps.So instead of choosing some fancy title for what it is that I d...

   Programmer,Skill,Future,Requirements,Software engineer     2011-11-01 07:08:11

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41

  How Computers Boot Up

The previous post described motherboards and the memory map in Intel computers to set the scene for the initial phases of boot. Booting is an involved, hacky, multi-stage affair – fun stuff. Here’s an outline of the process: An outline of the boot sequence Things start rolling when you press the power button on the computer (no! do tell!). Once the motherboard is powered up it initializes its own firmware – the chipset and other tidbits – and tries to ...

   Computer,Boot-up,Rationale     2012-04-11 13:43:02

  Becoming a Better Developer, Part 1: Making Fans

If you're trying to grow your startup you've come to the right place. Get my 170-page ebook on how to grow a startup and join thousands of self-funded entrepreneurs by subscribing to my newsletter at right. This is the first of what I hope to become an ongoing series about non-technical ways to improve yourself as a developer. Becoming a better developer involves more than learning new technical skills; learning about your company and co-workers will dramatically improve the software y...

   Developer,Tips     2011-06-29 08:38:26

  We’re working our young people too hard

Yesterday, I shared an anecdote involving a school I once attended with a list. This anecdote eventually became the basis for a blog post. Traffic was fairly normal for the first few hours until it found its way onto hackernews.Then it exploded.The comments on both the original blog post and the post on hackernews filled almost immediately with opinionated hackers, teachers and students sharing similar experiences, discussing the problem and figuring out what should be done about it.Repeate...

   Education,Science,Teacher,Student,Exam     2011-11-17 08:38:01

  Launch Java process programmatically in Java

In some cases while working on some automation testcase, developers would like to launch Java process programmatically so that the tests can be ran without manual intervention. Java provides such methods to achieve this. ProcessBuilder can be used to build a Java process which can be launched when everything is ready. Basically it can take a list of parameters which are similar to the command line options/arguments.  For example, if you want to launch a Java process, you can do followi...

   JAVA,PROCESSBUILDER,COMMAND LINE     2016-04-27 04:03:30

  Not better, but different

The most important feature of Apple products is usability--Simple, aesthetic, easy to use.Their products may not necessarily the most powerful, but they usually are the easiest to use. Following picture show a Mac (left) and a PC(right), which one looks better?Many products are trying to mimic these features, but one problem comes out:It's hard to keep a product simple while providing so many new features.If you continuously add new features to your product,  your product will become more c...

   Market positioning,Product manager     2012-05-19 13:29:20

  Using C for a specialized data store

Pixenomics stores and transports 1.2 million pixels from the server to the client. During development we played with various methods to store and process this. Our ultimate goal was to send the entire board in under 1 second. During the stages of prototyping we used a MySQL database without thinking too much about performance. With a mere 2,000 pixels we quickly realised this wasn’t even usable as a demo. Changing the storage engine to memory was much better but still obviously unu...

   C,Data store,Efficiency,Performance     2012-03-07 05:09:38

  What to put on whiteboard during an interview

As a programmer, you may go through different kinds of programming tests while interviewing for jobs. The most famous and difficult one may be the whiteboard test for lots of people. Usually the interviewer will give the candidate an algorithm problem or case study and ask the candidate to implement the algorithm with his/her favorite programming language. The code to be written is not too much but it requires the candidate to thoroughly consider different edge cases. So wha...

   TIPS,INTERVIEW,WHITEBOARD TEST     2014-08-29 20:34:52

  Books for entry level C programmers

In computing, C is a general-purpose programming language initially developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs Its design provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language, most notably system software like the Unix computer operating system.To learn C, we need to read many C books and have many practices. Here we summarize a list of C books which may h...

   C,Book,Beginning     2012-07-26 14:00:51

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