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  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

  Engineer mindset in internet companies

This post tries to list down how we keep engineer mindset while doing development work. We engineers are the ones deliver the actual product by writing each and every line of the code, in order to deliver high quality and less buggy code, we should keep reminding ourselves what needs to be paid attention to during our daily development work.  So what is engineer mindset? Engineer mindset is that we should keep in mind that each and every line of code we write should serve the purpose well a...

   ENGINEER MINDSET,INTERNET COMPANY     2021-10-07 04:09:08

  HeartBleed: Should C be blamed for the HeartBleed bug?

There is a discussion about the security of applications written in C on Hacker News recently after the report of HeartBleed bug in OpenSSL. In this discussion, some people are saying that the applications written in C are unsafe. It seems all or most of the faults should be laid on C. I think this is biased. The language itself should not be blamed.Safety is a relative term for programming languages. No language is absolutely safe. We claim some languages like Java and C# are safer than C/C++ b...

   C,HeartBleed,Analysis,Code review     2014-04-14 03:52:55

  Removing duplicates in sql

In modern web development, it’s standard practice to make use of a database abstraction layer, typically an Object-Relational Mapper based on either the Active Record pattern or the Data Mapper pattern. There are several pros and cons to this which are fairly well established, so I’ll spare us all from enumerating them all right now. One established pro worth mentioning is that these systems typically provide a high level interface for fetching data, often removing the need to ...

   SQL,Duplicate,Remove,Web design     2012-01-05 08:20:13

  PHP's Output Buffering

While profiling our application I came across a a rather strange memory usage by the ob_start() function. We do use ob_start() quite a bit to defer output of data, which is a common thing in many applications. What was unusual is that 16 calls to ob_start() up chewing through almost 700kb of memory, given that the data being buffered rarely exceeds 1-2kb, this was quite unusual. I started looking at the C code of the ob_start() function and found this interesting bit of code inside php_sta...

   PHP,Memory,ob_start(),source,40kB     2011-12-08 10:20:32

  C Preprocessor Hell

Lisp programmers should stop reading right now because they'll likely suffer severe injury of the jaw muscles as they laugh themselves silly at how hard it is to do some things in C. The C language has a pre-processor (typically called cpp) that is both infuriating and powerful. How powerful is usually best described as 'just too little' and it has happened more than once that I found myself almost - but not quite - able to do what I wanted to do. The frustration can run very deep at ti...

   C,Preprocessor,Lisp,Hell     2012-01-19 10:22:31

  try { return } finally {}

Do you know what value will be printed when following program is ran? class Test { public int aaa() { int x = 1; try { return ++x; } catch (Exception e) { } finally { ++x; } return x; } public static void main(String[] args) { Test t = new Test(); int y = t.aaa(); System.out.println(y); } } And before answering the above question, do you have answers to following questions? If ther...

   JAVA,JAVA INTERVIEW QUESTION     2016-09-26 08:06:28

  Something you may not know about Shell

Shell is also called command line interface, it is the interface between *nix users and computer. Shell is a program which provides service to access OS kernel services. This article is to introduce some not so well known but useful and interesting knowledge about shell. Wiki shell was born almost at the same time as Unix. The first UNIX shell was written by Ken Thompson in 1971 and its name is Thompson sh. It's older than Linux kernel. The default Shell in most *nix and MacOS is bash, bash was...

   Linux, Unix,Shell,Command     2012-11-24 07:19:47

  What's Wrong with the For Loop

Closures in Java are a hot topic of late. A few really smart people are drafting a proposal to add closures to a future version of the language. However, the proposed syntax and the linguistic addition are getting a lot of push back from many Java programmers. Today, Elliotte Rusty Harold posted his doubts about the merits of closures in Java. Specifically, he asks "Why Hate the for Loop?": I don’t know what it is some people have against for loops that they’re so eager to...

   For loop,Basic,Problem,Efficiency,Java     2012-02-24 05:06:15

  Code Refurbishment

Within our industry we use a huge range of terminology.  Unfortunately we don’t all agree on what individual terms actually mean.  I so often hear people misuse the term “Refactoring” which has come to make the business in many organisations recoil in fear.  The reason for this fear I’ve observed is because of what people often mean when misusing this term.I feel we are holding back our industry by not being disciplined in our use of terminology.  If...

   Code Refurbishment,Code design,terminolo     2011-09-05 08:17:14

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