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  Programming Achievements: How to Level Up as a Developer

How does a good developer become a great developer?Forget greatness for a moment: How does a decent developer become a good developer?There is no definitive path from Step 1 to Step n. Heck, it's not even clear what Step n is. And as logically-minded developer types, the lack of a well-defined route can make for a daunting journey from novice to master.I've spent a fair bit of time over the last few years bumping up against this conundrum. What's next? How do I go from being a goo...

   Good developer,Great developer,Comparison,Knowledge,Skill,Platform     2011-11-09 02:12:58

  C++ for the Real-Time Web

C++? Why on Earth? C++ seems like one of the least likely languages to write a web application in. C++ is associated with complexity, both with language design and the need to manually manage memory. Programming in C++ unleashes a whole class of bugs associated with memory corruption and memory allocation. This is a trade off for giving more power to the developer along generally being much faster than equivalent programs in languages such as Python or Ruby. Real-time Web as a Use Case Making...

   C++,Web development,Real time     2012-01-30 06:00:20

  var in JavaScript

Geoff published an article sometime ago--"How one missing var ruined our launch". This article described one case where MelonCard uses Node.js as their backend system, suddenly there was a small registration peak period--50-100 people registered concurrently, then the entire website stopped responding and many other strange problems showed up. When they were investigating the source of the problem, they found one missing var in the following code.app.all(‘/apps/:user_id/status’, fun...

   JavaScript,Scope,variable     2012-05-26 12:35:36

  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

  All Programming is Web Programming

Michael Braude decries the popularity of web programming:The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else. They don't understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven't got a clue why I'd use an interface or an abstract class. They don't understand: virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# struc...

   Programming,Web programming,Opposite,Views,Web app     2011-11-12 10:38:00

  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

  User experience : Exception handling

Exception handling is the process of handling emergencies or unpredictable operational errors. The specific time of the occurrence of unexpected events and the actual consequences of the specific situation are difficult to predict. How to handle this unexpected crisis is also related to the user experience of your users. Let's first look at how some famous products deal with unexpected exception encountered by users:1. Goodyear tires can automatically expand when leaking.Tire blast is one of the...

   User experience,Exception handling     2013-04-06 05:05:04

  Faster than C

Judging the performance of programming languages, usually C is called the leader, though Fortran is often faster. New programming languages commonly use C as their reference and they are really proud to be only so much slower than C. Few language designer try to beat C. What does it take for a language to be faster than C? Better Aliasing Information Aliasing describes the fact that two references might point to the same memory location. For example, consider the canonical memory copy: void...

   C,Performance,Speed,Fortran,Criteria     2012-03-25 09:12:23

  Why I Use Vim

I've been using MacVIM as my editor of choice for a couple of years now, yet in many ways I still feel like a beginner. Every day I am learning more and more about my editor, but it takes a conscious effort to become proficient with an editor like Vim. Here's why I make that effort. Editors are something that are very personal; they have to fit with your own work flow approach to programming. If you have ever stopped to think about it, the way each person goes about editing text is quite differe...

   Vim,Editor,Feature     2012-01-11 12:03:35

  How I Became a Programmer

I posted a very brief response to a post on HackerNews yesterday challenging the notion that 8 weeks of guided tutelage on Ruby on Rails is not going to produce someone who you might consider a "junior RoR developer." It did not garner many upvotes so I figured that like most conversation on the Internet it faded into the general ambient chatter. Imagine my surprise when I woke up to couple handfuls' worth of emails from around the world asking me what I did, how I did it, an...

   Programmer,Advice,Method,Study     2011-11-24 09:14:50

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