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  Inside Google's recruiting machine

FORTUNE -- In the hot war for talent being fought in Silicon Valley, no company has an arsenal quite like Google's. Named Fortune's Best Company to Work For in 2012, the search giant made a record 8,067 hires last year -- boosting total headcount by a third. The thirteen-year-old firm's recruiting has an almost mythical quality about it, particularly for the two million candidates applying to work there each year. In terms of elite American institutions, getting a job at Google ranks with b...

   Google,Recruiter,Contract,Recruit machine     2012-02-25 04:50:01

  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

  How I Learned to Program Computers

I’ve been asked this question a lot lately, especially after I built YouTube Instant. So, here’s the answer, once and for all, for those who are interested.In short:I learned how to program by building lots of websites.The full story:I learned how to program by working on lots of different website projects starting from a pretty young age. What follows is a full account of all the major websites I’ve built, back to the very first site I made when I was 11 years old. Wha...

   Programming,Computer,Tips,Feross Aboukhadijeh     2011-10-17 10:25:32

  Why learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse programmer

I've found, contrary to what you sometimes read, that learning Python and Haskell has not improved my programming using other languages. Haskell in particular, being so different from imperative languages, is supposed to give new insights into programming that will help you even when you are not using the language. My current experience doesn't exactly tally with this, and here is why:Demotivation.I find I think in Python, and even in Haskell to some extent, even though I have used Has...

   Python,Programmer,Bad,Bad programmer,Haskell     2011-10-29 07:13:44

  In College, Working Hard to Learn High School Material

In June, Desiree Smith was graduated from Murry Bergtraum High. Her grades were in the 90s, she said, and she had passed the four state Regents exams. Since enrolling last month at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, Ms. Smith, 19, has come to realize that graduating from a New York City public high school is not the same as learning. She failed all three placement tests for LaGuardia and is now taking remediation in reading, writing and math. So are Nikita Thomas, ofBedford Stuyves...

   Education,College,High school,Material,Knowledge transfer     2011-10-24 11:51:39

  The trap of the performance sweet spot

This post is about JavaScript performance but I would like to start it by telling a story that might seem unrelated to JS. Please bear with me if you don’t like C.A story of a C programmer writing JavaScriptMr. C. is a C programmer as you can probably guess from his name. Today he was asked by his boss to write a very simple function: given an array of numbered 2d points calculate vector sum of all even numbered points... He opens his favorite text editor and quickly types somet...

   C,JavaScript,Sweet spot,Memory,Low level,Trap     2011-11-06 14:45:01

  Coding tricks of game developers

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So w...

   Tricks,Advice,Gamedesign,Plan     2012-02-12 04:50:30

  How big are PHP arrays (and values) really? (Hint: BIG!)

Upfront I want to thank Johannes and Tyrael for their help in finding some of the more hidden memory usage. In this post I want to investigate the memory usage of PHP arrays (and values in general) using the following script as an example, which creates 100000 unique integer array elements and measures the resulting memory usage: <?php $startMemory = memory_get_usage(); $array = range(1, 100000); echo memory_get_usage() - $startMemory, ' bytes'; How much would you expect it to ...

   PHP,Array,Memory occupation,Garbage collection     2011-12-16 10:06:04

  FUCK PASSWORDS

I'm so tired of passwords. So, so, so tired. Most people don't understand this. Most people use the same password everywhere. Most people can just mechanically type out password3 in every password box, smirking to themselves at how clever they are, because who would ever guess 3 instead of 1? I don't do that. Let me tell you what i do. I generate a different password for every service, based on a convoluted master password and the name of the thing. I do this because it's what you're...

   Security,Password,Random generation,Hard to remember     2011-12-05 11:32:45

  How One Missing `var` Ruined our Launch

Well, that was a veritable shitstorm (sorry for the language).  Long story short, MelonCard was featured today on TechCrunch (along with other500Startups companies, also on VentureBeat, Forbes, …) and everything broke all at once.  Every. little. thing.  We had rolled out a huge change to MelonCard over the last few days to make our site a seamless “everything just updates” look-good / feel-good product using NodeJS lo...

   JavaScript,NodeJs,jQuery,Variable,Scope,Global     2011-11-02 13:01:22

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