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  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

  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

  Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process. Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a ...

   Web design,Paradigm,Advice,User experience,Flow     2012-01-05 08:16:18

  What have been Facebook’s greatest technical accomplishments?

To maintain a large website which gets billions of requests er day and keeps very fast response speed is not an easy task. Many big companies are trying best to improve user experience by adopting different techniques. There is a question on Quora which asks "What have been Facebook’s greatest technical accomplishments?". There is a person who worked in Facebook before provided an answer which helps us understanding how Facebook handles huge amount of traffic each day. Here is the answer f...

   Facebook, Design, Efficiency     2013-01-15 07:32:07

  Ajax file upload tutorial

Step 1 - AJAX file uploadAJAX file upload tutorialFirst of all I have to say that to create a pure AJAX file upload system is not possible because of security limitations of JavaScript. All of the Ajax upload systems I know use some third party tool/package or only mimics the AJAX feeling. Even so it makes file upload process a bit nicer. In the next section I will present you a solution which imitates the AJAX process, but uses a normal upload process and iFrames.The concept: Create a simp...

   Ajax,File upload,PHP,Tutorial,IFRAME     2011-04-22 13:34:33

  Why I love everything you hate about Java

If you’re one of those hipster programmers who loves Clojure, Ruby, Scala, Erlang, or whatever, you probably deeply loathe Java and all of its giant configuration files and bloated APIs of AbstractFactoryFactoryInterfaces. I used to hate all that stuff too. But you know what? After working for all these months on these huge pieces of Twitter infrastructure I’ve started to love the AbstractFactoryFactories. Let me explain why. Consider this little Scala program. It uses â€...

   Java,Comparison,Modularity,API     2011-11-29 08:48:15

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