Recently I took on the enormous task of learning Objective-C from the bottom up and I was struck by something I couldn’t shake: this is too hard. An experienced developer might scoff at me for saying that, but it’s true. I’ll be honest about my education, Calculus II was the most math I ever took, I have an advanced degree from Berkeley in Journalism. I am a proficient HTML/CSS developer and can glue enough javascript together to solve almost any problem that has presented itself. My first encounter with C was at a community college when I was 13, and found the syntax so r...

Takeaway: Everyone seems to agree that IT is a tough field. But what does it take to overcome the adversities and become a successful IT pro? These qualities may be the key. I recently wrote a string of articles discussing various reasons to leave IT — and various alternative careers for dissatisfied IT workers. I received an amazing amount of feedback from readers who have always wanted to express similar sentiments. But that leaves out a huge swath of people: those who desperately want a career in IT, as well as those who are caught somewhere in Limbo, trying to...

PHP's meaning of overloading is different than Java's. In PHP, overloading means that you are able to add object members at runtime, by implementing some of the __magic methods, like __get, __set, __call, __callStatic. You load objects with new members. Overloading in PHP provides means to dynamically "create" properties and methods. These dynamic entities are processed via magic methods one can establish in a class for various action types.Some example:class Foo{    public function __call($method, $args)    {        echo "Called method $method";&n...

现在主流的网站开发语言无外乎asp、php、asp.net、jsp等。网页从开始简单的hmtl到复杂的服务语言，走过了10多个年头，各种技术层出不穷，单个的主流技术也在不断翻新的版本，现在分析下各种语言的区别、优势、劣势、...

Over the last few months, we have been recruiting developers, and we’ve started to get a sense for the type of developer who is a good fit for our team.  These attributes probably apply for developers at most web startups, so I wanted to share them with you.Before I get into it, the most important thing to know is that technical skill is a threshold requirement.  The assumption is that any person who is a fit for our team will have the relevant technical experience to do the job.Beyond that, here’s what we look for in someone as a good fit…PassionOne of our g...

Software development is a rapidly evolving field that got off to a very rocky start. Conventional wisdom for many years was that software engineering should be like other types of engineering: design carefully, specify precisely, and then just build it – exactly to spec. Just like building a bridge, right? The problem with this approach is that software is just that. Soft. It’s endlessly malleable. You can change software pretty much any time you want, and people do. Also, since software can be used to model just about anything, the possibilities for what you can ask softw...

We've always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we're performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There's plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people will use it.[Google found that] the page with 10 results took 0.4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took 0.9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.In A/B tests, [Amazon] tried delaying the page in increments of 100 mill...

With the release of the iPad, HTML5 technology has recently come into the spotlight.  The format that will likely kill Adobe’s Flash is a lot of fun to use, but we’ve  not seen much of it yet.The good news is that you don’t have to wait until the iPad is in your hands to see what HTML5 can do.  If you have a compatible browser, there are already a wealth of sites that show off the capabilities.First, make sure that you have a browser that is capable of rendering HTML5 content. At the moment, Google’s Chrome is king in this department.  So for the...