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  Google engineer: What I learned in the war

Veteran's Day is an ideal time to hear from one of those rare folks who combine corporate and military careers. Dan Cross, a software engineer at Google (GOOG) and a 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, took a leave to serve active duty in Afghanistan, came home a year ago, and brought back lessons that he couldn't have learned in business. While he had never seen himself as the military type until a personal tragedy made him reroute his career, he's a better man for it. Cross, 34, is now an...

   Military,Marine,Google,Engineer,Lessons,Teamwork     2011-11-12 10:36:03

  HTTP Streaming and Internet Explorer

In early 2006, Alex Russell posted about a neat hack that the Google Talk team in Gmail use to support Comet in Internet Explorer, a trick which works as far back as IE 5.01. What great news! A reliable way to stream Comet messages to Microsoft’s browsers. If only it were that easy. I have not been alone in the following findings: after connecting the htmlfile ActiveX object as a streaming Comet transport to my Comet server, everything works perfectly for a few messages, but then abruptly...

   IE,Streaming,JavaScript,htmlfile,ActiveX     2011-09-05 04:05:23

  Hackers vs. Coders

Photo Credit: Pranav MistryBeing a good hacker is an invaluable skill. But is being a coder the same as being a hacker? Is it possible that coders are at a creative disadvantage to hackers who don’t know how to code?Here’s a story that helped me see the difference.I was recently invited to mentor at Startup Weekend. On Friday night, we gathered to eat pizza, pitch ideas, create teams and discuss launch plans. At the end of the day, everyone was feeling great about what theyâ...

   Hacker,Coder,Comparison,Innovation     2011-05-11 02:11:09

  Your Code is My Hell

It occurred to me recently that my experience as a Rails developer may be somewhat unique.I often get brought in to help preexisting Ruby/Rails projects evolve and mature in a sustainable way. As a result, the vast majority of Ruby projects I’ve worked on have been well-established by the time I arrived. In fact, offhand I can only think of one commercial greenfield Ruby project I’ve participated in. All the rest have been “legacy” from my perspective, in the ...

   Code style,Clean code,Code paradigm     2011-09-15 08:39:16

  Automate Everything

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human. But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any j...

   Automate,Email,Repeative     2012-02-07 06:21:19

  Learning Is More Important Than Knowing

Although DuckDuckGo's success is based more on ideology than technology, you'd have to be a pretty arrogant technologist to not appreciate and be impressed with what this small team (for a long time, 1 person) has accomplished. And while DuckDuckGo teaches us a number of valuable lessons (about business, and privacy), to me, the most important, is that good programmers should be measured by what they can learn, not what they already know. Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo's creator, has been wo...

   Learning,Knowing,Google,DuckDuckGo     2012-04-18 07:17:53

  Browse OpenJDK Java source code in Eclipse

Java 8 was recently released, many developers are now trying to extract the source code of Java 8 to find out how the new added features such as Lambda expressions, default method in interfaces, new Time API are implemented. How do you manage to download and browse the source code? Today we are going to show how to extract OpenJDK Java source code to Eclipse. Since OpenJDK is adopting Mercurial as its distributed version control system, you need to install Mercurial on your computer first before...

   OpenJDK,Java 8,Source code,Eclipse     2014-06-16 00:53:34

  Use of Erlang in WhatsApp

After many years, people are still discussing whether Erlang is a small language. People have all sorts of doubt about it, but with the appearance of WhatsApp, we may change our mind. What is WhatsApp, from its official website: WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. The more funny thing is the main developer of WhatsApp Rick Reed worked in Yahoo and SGI before he joined WhatsApp and he didn't have any know...

   Erlang,WhatsApp,Architecture     2013-06-16 03:03:46

  Twitter service down incidents summary

This Thursday, Twitter encountered a global service down incident. This is the second service down incident since last month. Later Twitter updated its website and stated that users might not be able to access Twitter temporarily.Twitter admitted the service down incident and explained that this time's service down was caused by problems of their both data centers.Ok, now lets summarize the service down incidents encountered by Twitter in past few years.in May 2008, Twitter's new engineer team w...

   Twitter,Service down,History     2012-07-28 12:36:39

  Webinar Best Practices For A Webinar Experience Your Audience Will Love

The web conferencing technology has been getting a lot of attention lately, and for good reason. With global lockdowns and social distancing norms in effect, video conferencing has emerged as an economical way of staying in touch with office colleagues, friends, and family members. However, if that’s all you are using this technology for, you may not fully understand what is web conferencing and its immense potential. For instance, lately, web conferencing technology is being used to deliv...

   WEB CONFERENCE,WEBINAR     2020-11-07 04:19:52