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  The Hungry Programmer

Programming is a lot like eating. Tonight I was hungry. I wasn't at home. I couldn't go to the kitchen for a snack. I looked around and saw only McDonald's across the street. Then I was struck with the same dilemma that I face whenever I leave the comfort of my own home for any decent spread of time: Do I eat crappy food now and satisfy that hunger? Or do I stay hungry for a little longer and eat a healthy meal back at home? As I pondered this dilemma I couldn't help but notice how much i...

   Programmer,Hungry,Coder,Coding     2012-01-19 11:04:30

  We trade a lot more than just time to practice our craft

I was recently having one of those “life, the universe and everything” conversations with a close industry (web) friend. Mid-conversation I dropped that I’d identified three kinds of stress that we face as creators – it felt somewhat poetic at the time, so I thought I’d take some time to describe it. Physical, the kind of stress you’re under when you’ve been eating poorly, drinking too much, exercising too little, or working too long. Weâ€...

   Stress,Programmer,Creator,Emotional stress     2011-12-09 07:45:48

  Use Java ThreadLocal with caution

According to Oracle documentation, ThreadLocal is a class provides thread-local variables. These variables differ from their normal counterparts in that each thread that accesses one (via its get or set method) has its own, independently initialized copy of the variable. ThreadLocal instances are typically private static fields in classes that wish to associate state with a thread. In short, ThreadLocal variables are variables belong to a thread, not a class or an instance of a class. One common...

   JAVA,MEMORY LEAK, THREADLOCAL     2015-11-03 07:31:57

  Do you really understand C? 21st International Obfuscated C Code Contest winning entries

The 21st International Obfuscated C Code Contest(IOCCC) officially launched the winning source code. IOCCC requires contestants to write the most creative and the most obfuscated C codes with the size limited to 4kb and less Work of each participant is impressive. The winners, including one French, one Korean, five Americans, one Belgian, one Israeli, one British, four Japanese and one Chinese. Here we list some codes: Best short program Seonghoon Kang  from Korea- Decodes spelled out ...

   C,Obsfucation contest     2012-10-25 12:26:55

  Are older people better programmers?

Peter Knego states something interesting: “It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.”. He uses reputation and other metrics from StackOverflow to corroborate his point. His summary is: Number of coders drops significantly with age. Top developer numbers, at age 27, drop by half every 6-7 years.Developers in their 40s answer roughly twice as much and ask half the questions compared to colleagues in their 20s. It seems younger generation learns and older generatio...

   Programming,Age,Experience,Skill,Advanta     2011-07-28 09:02:23

  3 preconditions for Facebook to enter China

It's well known that Mark Zuckerberg has a big interest in the Chinese market. Recently, the founder of Facebook visited China to attend a development forum held by the Chinese government. Along with the trip, he also paid a trip to some famous places in Beijing such as The Great Wall. He even did a morning run in front of the Tian'an men Square, the symbol of China.  In past few years, Zuckerberg also learned Chinese and read Chinese books, showed his love to the Chinese culture....

   FACEBOOK,CHINA,MARK ZUCKERBERG     2016-03-25 01:32:51

  XML Abuse

It’s everywhere. XML Abuse. From Domain Specific Languages to Data Serialization, XML is the most commonly abused data format I’ve ever encountered. XML is perfectly fine for (because it was designed for this): First of all: XML was designed to be written by humans and read by humans. Nearly all generated XML I’ve seen sucks badly. I think this is because XML cannot efficiently represent common data structures found in programming languages.XML is good...

   XML,Abuse,Alternative,Serialization,Data storage     2011-12-14 07:12:10

  Advice From An Old Programmer

You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming. Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You'll need some advice to make sure you continue on the right path, and get the most enjoyment out of your newly chosen activity. I've been programming for a very long time. So long that it's incredibly boring to me. At the time that I wrote this book, I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how w...

   Advice,Programming,Python,Old programmer     2012-03-08 13:51:11

  Simplicity Oriented Programming

After few years on Warsztat (a Polish gamedev site) I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon. Every now and then there are Compos (programming competitions) organized in two different flavours. Some compos are single-run events that last only few hours, others are long-term (several days/weeks). And as an extra catch, the former are usually restricted to basic APIs (SDL, OpenGL etc) while the latter are free-for-all (all sorts of engines, UDK/Unity allowed). Now, results are somewhat shocki...

   Programming,Research,Advice,Time efficie     2011-08-04 01:55:40

  Severe SSL 3.0 vulnerability to be released

According to The Register, another severe security vulnerability has been found in the widely used SSL v3 protocol. Until now, it's still in patch phase and the details of this vulnerability is expected to be released today. There are a few widely impacted security vulnerabilities revealed this year and they bring people's attention to the long existing security concerns. Previously, we have seen the HeartBleed issue and also the recently ShellShock issue. Both of them occur in popular libraries...

   SSL,Security vulnerability, The Register     2014-10-14 22:22:39