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  Design Secrets for Engineers

If you are a designer like me, you must be asked on a regular basis to “make it look pretty.” The request can stroke your designer ego, making you feel like a design rockstar with super powers to make this world a more beautiful place. This is especially true at startups, where you are one of the few, maybe the only designer there. However, it can also be really annoying–almost degrading at times. Thoughts like “why the hell can’t engineers do this on their o...

   Design,UI,pretty,engineer,designer font     2011-10-24 11:18:25

  Don't. Waste. Time.

Stuff we startups do that doesn't delight users:Office spaceLaunch partiesHealth insurance plansSalary negotiationsFounder equity splitsSeries F stockOffice Food Team-building activitiesCRM systemsBookkeepingHead countWorking in SOMAConvertible debt capsValuationsTechCrunchKarma scoresISOsPowerpointBusiness CardsBanksLawyersDesks1099sBug TrackersAgile ProcessesAdvisory BoardsHiringCap TablesPayrollMeetupsMeetingsOf course, much of this stuff still needs to get done.  At some point.&nbs...

   Time management,Work,Startup,How to     2011-11-21 09:55:06

  C++ Versus Objective-C

What will programming in Objective-C mean to the C++ programmer Different Object Oriented Languages Almost all of us have heard the term object oriented programming, and most of us have used C++. How will Apple's purchase of NeXT, and NeXT's framework using Objective-C affect us as we develop software? If we know C++ already, how hard will it be to get up to speed on Objective-C? Many people will agree that once they understand the concepts of object oriented programming it doesn't matter...

   C++,Objective-C,OOP,Comparison,Methods,Philosohpy     2011-12-12 07:51:40

  Battlelog: Modern Web Applications are Here

It's the shooter season of the year and this fall was all about Modern Warfare 3 versus Battlefield 3. And being the kind of game they are they also try to keep their audience playing by introducing some additional level of engagement. Both Call of Duty and Battlefield introduced their own online community websites and statistic platforms. Call of Duty has Elite, Battlefield has Battelog.But just because these services are sitting in the same spot it does not mean they are in any way similar. An...

   Game,Call of duty,Elite,Battlelog,Web platform     2011-11-15 08:11:40

  Fear of Ignorance

This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten by a real programmer within 6 months.During the interview, we had the following exchange (due to an imperfect memory, I’ll ...

   Leader,Team,Technical,Leadership,Ignorence     2011-11-21 10:03:03

  Learning Server-Side JavaScript with Node.js

Node.js is all the buzz at the moment, and makes creating high performance, real-time web applications easy. It allows JavaScript to be used end to end, both on the server and on the client. This tutorial will walk you through the installation of Node and your first “Hello World” program, to building a scalable streaming Twitter server.What is Node.js?JavaScript has traditionally only run in the web browser, but recently there has been considerable interest in bringing it to the...

   JavaScript,Server side,Node.js.Implement     2011-09-20 13:33:15

  Notes on Programming in C

Introduction       Kernighan and Plauger's The Elements of Programming Style was an important and rightly influential book.  But sometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbook approach to good style instead of the succinct expression of a philosophy they were meant to be.  If the book claims that variable names should be chosen meaningfully, doesn't it then follow that variables whose names are small essays on their use are even better?  Isn't MaximumV...

   C,Notes,Tips     2011-12-09 07:55:47

  CSS3 Animation With jQuery Fallbacks

In today's post, we'll be taking a look at how you can use CSS3 transitions to power your application's animations with jQuery's .animate() method as a fallback where transitions aren't supported. The benefit of transitions is that unlike JavaScript based animations, they're hardware accelerated in certain browsers and mobile devices, resulting in a potentially smoother overall animation than you would normally experience. In a lot of cases your code will work seamlessly with the solut...

   CSS3,Animation,JavaScript,jQuery,Demo     2011-08-19 08:10:58

  Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good

Odds are, you don’t use a functional programming language every day. You probably aren’t getting paid to write code in Scala, Haskell, Erlang, F#, or a Lisp Dialect. The vast majority of people in the industry use OO languages like Python, Ruby, Java or C#–and they’re happy with them. Sure, they might occasionally use a “functional feature” like “blocks” now and then, but they aren’t writing functional code.And yet, for years we’v...

   Functional Programming,Hard,Difficult,Reason to learn,Good     2011-10-18 02:55:38

  Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces

It's an interesting time to be working on the frontend now. We have new technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, Canvas and WebGL; all of which greatly increase the possibilities for web application development. The world is our oyster!However, there's also another trend I've noticed. Web developers are still stuck in the request/response mindset. I call it the 'click and wait' approach - where every UI interaction results in a delay before another interaction can be performed. That's the process they'...

   AJAX,Asynchronous UI,AUI,User interface     2011-11-18 08:55:08

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