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  Programming language choices for an IT manager

A TechRepublic reader named Aaron emailed me and posed excellent questions; here’s an excerpt from his email:“I manage a small IT department and all my skills are self-taught. At times I struggle with complex business initiatives and I believe if I had some programming skills I would be more adept at handling the initiatives. Can you recommend a programming language? Is formal education the best path or have you found that programming can be self-taught?”I’m sure a lot ...

   IT Manager,Programming,Skills,Programming knowledge     2011-10-21 08:37:10

  Understand JavaScript prototype

For an front end programming language like JavaScript, if we want to understand its OOP feature, we need to understand its objects, prototype chain, execution context, closure and this keyword in deep. If you have a good understanding on these concepts, you should be confident that you can handle this language well. The inheritance in JavaScript is not class inheritance like Java, but it adopts another mechanism-- prototype inheritance. The key to prototype inheritance is the prototype chain mec...

   JavaScript, prototype, __proto__     2013-02-02 02:34:09

  JavaScript efficiency catch up

JavaScript is a very flexible language, we can write JavaScript code freely with various styles, different kinds of codes will have different execution efficiency. Here we summarize some tips we get from our development. Efficiency of JavaScript itself JavaScript has execution context chain, closures, prototype inheritance, eval etc. It brings us some magic features, but it also introduces the performance issue, if we don't use them properly, it will affect the codes execution efficiency. 1. Glo...

   JavaScript,efficiency,event delegation,eval     2013-04-02 04:08:46

  Erlang Style Concurrency

Introduction On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil, and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three1. Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential...

   Erlang,Concurrency,Lock,Message,Innovation     2012-01-03 10:44:44

  Python Patterns - An Optimization Anecdote

The other day, a friend asked me a seemingly simple question: what's the best way to convert a list of integers into a string, presuming that the integers are ASCII values. For instance, the list [97, 98, 99] should be converted to the string 'abc'. Let's assume we want to write a function to do this. The first version I came up with was totally straightforward: def f1(list): string = "" for item in list: string = string + chr(item) return string ...

   Python,Optimization,Anecdote,Loopup,ASCII     2011-12-18 10:52:49

   Python – parallelizing CPU-bound tasks with multiprocessing

In a previous post on Python threads, I briefly mentioned that threads are unsuitable for CPU-bound tasks, and multiprocessing should be used instead. Here I want to demonstrate this with benchmark numbers, also showing that creating multiple processes in Python is just as simple as creating multiple threads. First, let’s pick a simple computation to use for the benchmarking. I don’t want it to be completely artificial, so I’ll use a dumbed-down version of factorization...

   Python,Multitasking,Multiprocessing,CPU bound     2012-01-17 11:38:22

  Learn from Haskell - Functional, Reusable JavaScript

Learn You a Haskell: For Great Good? For the last couple months I have been learning Haskell. Because there are so many unfamiliar concepts, it feels like learning to program all over again. At i.TV, we write a lot of JavaScript (node.js and front end). While many functional/haskell paradigms don’t translate, there are a few techniques that JS can benefit from. There are Haskell library functions for everything. At first I thought this was just because it was mature, but then I notice...

   JavaScript,Haskell,Functional,Reusability,Feature     2012-02-21 05:30:51

  CSS3 & HTML5 Support in Browsers

Last week we launched FindMeByIP.com, a simple app which reveals your browsers' support for CSS3 and HTML5 features in an easy to read format using Modernizr.We've had a great response and we're going to be implementing some of your feedbackin the near future.UPDATE: Check out our Web Designers' HTML5 & CSS3 ChecklistFor now though I thought people mind find it useful to know the state of support in the current browser market.  I've taken all the A-Gra...

   CSS,HTML5,Web browser,Support     2011-05-14 11:26:45

  HTML Page Slide Without a Framework

The HTML5 Microzone is presented by DZone and Microsoft to bring you the most interesting and relevant content on emerging web standards.  Experience all that the HTML5 Microzone has to offer on our homepage and check out the cutting edge web development tutorials on Script Junkie, Build My Pinned Site, and the HTML5 DevCenter. I'm working on a little demo mobile application for an upcoming project, and I wanted to add sliding transitions between pag...

   HTML,Slide show,No framework,JavaScript     2012-04-17 06:51:40

  The business of software

Inspired by a talk I gave yesterday at the BOS conference. This is long, feel free to skip!My first real job was leading a team that created five massive computer games for the Commodore 64. The games were so big they needed four floppy disks each, and the project was so complex (and the hardware systems so sketchy) that on more than one occasion, smoke started coming out of the drives.Success was a product that didn't crash, start a fire or lead to a nervous breakdown.Writing software...

   Software,Design,Business,Software design     2011-10-29 07:22:09

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