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  7 big mistakes that make your layout a disaster

Even though the web design field has become a real industry, building a website is part art, part science. The design of a website may attract people but it may also make them run away, it depends on the work of the web designer. The experience, the talent and the capacity of endeavor are the greatest tools of a web designer, a good layout is based on all of these and, besides that, it is a very time consuming activity.Making a good layout is difficult and judging its value is subjective, a desi...

   Web design,Mistakes,Content,White space     2011-11-24 03:36:23

  Why Windows?

Since the latest episodes of both Bent and Throw it Against the Wall have seen me mention Windows Phone 7, I think it’s about time I talk about why I like it. I know there’s a lot of scepticism surrounding it. And why not? Most people I know who were considering jumping the Microsoft ship did so in the dark days of Vista, so that’s their last experience with Windows. Anyone who saw their parents working on a Treo back in the nascent days of the Blackberry know the slop...

   Windows,Features,Advantage     2012-02-10 06:22:13

  How To Find Link Prospects Without Using Google

I’m obsessed with Google. (I mean, you kind of have to be if you’re in this industry.) But sometimes, you need a break from the hand that feeds. There’s no denying the power of advanced search queries, but you’d be surprised how many other and different prospects you can find without using the search engine at all. Curated Lists OK, I lied. You do have to use Google for this, but not nearly in the capacity you would with normal searches. With lists, you have less ...

   Search engine,Web site prospect,SEO     2012-02-25 12:02:50

  A Month With Scala

Although I’ve played around with Scala for the few months, these efforts largely involved simple scripts and casual reading. It wasn’t until last month that the opportunity to use Scala in a large scale project finally arose and I dove right in. The project was a typical REST based web service built on top of Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, SimpleDB, S3 and Redis*. First off let’s talk about why I chose Scala in the first place. After spending a good deal of my las...

   Scala,Functional,OOP,Java,Iteration     2011-12-10 06:03:23

  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

  Writing great JavaScript

I probably could have named this post something like “Writing clean, validating and portable JavaScript”, but that would be no where near as catchy. The problem with “great” is it means different things to different people. I am going to show you my idea of great which may differ from many developers views, but I hope it helps someone improve their code. So what’s the point in this, why can’t you just carry on writing JavaScript as you have been for a...

   JavaScript,Great,Clean,Tips     2012-03-24 05:18:12

  Guest Post from a CodeBoy: The Five Stages of Debugging

Being confronted with a serious and difficult-to-diagnose bug can be one of the most traumatic and stressful experiences of a professional programmer's career. Those who have been through such an ordeal rate the stress as on a par with that accompanying serious injury, divorce, or the death of a family member. Researchers who have studied the psychology of computer programming have lately constructed a framework to understand the stages through which the programmer's mind progresses as she...

   Debug,Steps,Stages     2012-05-01 06:39:38

  Why developers need a Mac

I am by no means an Apple fan. For one thing, I find Windows (and Linux) stable and fast, so you are not going to hear me argue that my computing life was transformed once I made that Switch (with a capital letter). Admittedly that is partly because I am familiar with how to fix and tune Windows and remove foistware, but it is not that hard. For another, I am not an admirer of Apple’s secretive approach, or the fact that most requests for comment from journalists are responded to wi...

   Apple,Mac,Development,iOS,Windows     2011-12-07 03:12:17

  Program Or Be Programmed

On Thursday night I gave a talk at NYU Poly and in the Q&A a young man asked me for advice for "those who aren't technical". I said he should try to get technical. The next morning I met with a bunch of Sloan Business School students doing a trek through NYC. A young woman asked me the same question. I gave her the same answer.I don't mean that everyone should become a software engineer. I do mean that everyone should understand software engineering (or whatever technical...

   Program,Technical,Basic knowledge     2011-11-10 10:31:02

  Thoughts on Python 3

I spent the last couple of days thinking about Python 3's current state a lot. While it might not appear to be the case, I do love Python as a language and especially the direction it's heading in. Python has been not only part of my life for the last couple of five years, it has been the largest part by far. Let there be a warning upfront: this is a very personal post. I counted a hundred instances of a certain capital letter in this text. That's because I am very grateful for all the opport...

   Python,Python 3,Feature,Drawback,Embrace     2011-12-07 08:46:47

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