Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Idea

  Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

I got a call from a friend of a friend the other night. It was a fellow with whom I’d talked 11 months ago about a project he and his partner were looking to start. We established then that I wasn’t the guy for him, that I was likely too expensive for their big-dreams, small-means budget. Fast forward to present day: their project is still not launched, it’s still not right. They’ve paid for something between 600-700 hours of development with a firm in India, an...

   Indian programmer,Outsourcing,Poor quality,Low cost     2011-12-05 13:00:13

  Small team? Fix your life with a non-virtual assistant

Like many others, I tried “outsourcing my life” using a digital assistant. A year and a thousand bucks later, I’ve received one department store recommendation and an admittedly adequate spreadsheet of competitive research.I have since cancelled. Why didn’t it work for me?I think I just didn’t trust it/them/him/her (that I even have this ambiguity is indicative of the issues).Most of my mindless time-sinks involve at least a credit card number and are often a con...

   Work,Assistant,Team,Small,Individual,Get an assistant     2011-10-28 10:26:36

  The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language

A few years ago I visited a friend who is a graduate student in linguistics. After some time he asked me if I was aware of the work by Chomsky on formal languages. I told him that yes, Chomsky work was a basis for much of the developments in theoretical computer science. More than that, I was glad to learn that there was something technical that I could share and discuss with other people in linguistics. At the time I found this was just a great coincidence. It was only recently, though, t...

   Programming language,Human language,Chomsky     2011-11-28 10:36:34

  Obviously Correct

What do automatic memory management, static types and purity have in common? They are methods which take advantage of the fact that we can make programs obviously correct (for some partial definition of correctness) upon visual inspection. Code using automatic memory management is obviously correct for a class of memory bugs. Code using static types is obviously correct for a class of type bugs. Code using purity (no mutable references or side effects) isobviously c...

   Memory management,Code,Static,Purity     2011-11-07 08:13:05

  5 Reasons Your Javascript Stinks

Javascript gets a bad rap on the Internet, but there are few languages that are so dynamic, so widespread, and so deeply rooted in our lives as Javascript is. The low barrier of entry leads some people to call it a script kiddie language, others scoff at the concept of a dynamic language while riding their statically typed high horse. You and Javascript just got off on the wrong foot, and now you've made it angry. Here's five reasons why your Javascript code sucks.1. You're not using a namespace...

   JavaScript,Good,Habit,Prototype,OOP     2011-04-13 12:25:37

  A Few Lessons I Learned After Having Failed

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.- Michael JordanIt was mid 2008 and Younique was doing reasonably well. However, I had an itch that I needed to scratch. I wanted to build a mobile advertising platform – think DoubleClickmeets AdMob. At the time the mobile adverti...

   Lesson,Career,Success,Failure,Mobile advertising     2011-10-17 11:21:55

  Why would a developer invest time in your startup’s platform?

The notion of developing a platform is highly addictive for technology founders. It ticks every “this is awesome” box and its drawbacks do not become evident until after you’ve already overcommitted.When you’re sunk deep in your idea, you start seeing the infinite number of directions it might go. It could be used for creativity or education or advertising or television or personal productivity or anything.Possibilities are exciting.You soon realise you can’...

   Platform,Invest,Attraction,Sell point,Developer     2011-10-31 10:49:37

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41

  Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces

It's an interesting time to be working on the frontend now. We have new technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, Canvas and WebGL; all of which greatly increase the possibilities for web application development. The world is our oyster!However, there's also another trend I've noticed. Web developers are still stuck in the request/response mindset. I call it the 'click and wait' approach - where every UI interaction results in a delay before another interaction can be performed. That's the process they'...

   AJAX,Asynchronous UI,AUI,User interface     2011-11-18 08:55:08

  10 Ways to Be a More Productive Web Developer

We could all be more productive. There are many things we can do — some big, some small — that will enhance the way we work and improve the outcomes of our activities.Although I can’t promise that I’ll be able to help you cure all your productivity ailments, I do hope that I can provide you with a few useful, solid tips on streamlining your web development workflow and making every part of the development cycle move quickly and smoothly.Follow each one of these tips a...

   Ways,Efficiency,Web development,API,Fram     2011-09-26 11:25:29

RECENT