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  Why Every Professional Should Consider Blogging

I often argue that professionals should share their knowledge online via blogging. The catch is that virtually anything worthwhile in life takes time and effort, and blogging is not an exception to this statement. So before committing your energy to such an endeavor, you may rightfully stop and wonder what’s in it for you. Is blogging really worth it? In this article, I briefly illustrate some of the main benefits that directly derive from running a technical blog. 1. Blogging can impr...

   Developer,Blogging,Share knowledge     2012-01-29 04:30:07

  JavaScript is now a necessity

I've long looked at JavaScript as a second-class citizen in the programming world. Early on, it was the source of numerous security problems; it was a nice bit of glue to patch together HTML applications with a bit of styling, but nobody would use it for serious code; and so forth. Java, Ruby, Python, they were the languages for doing real work. But my attitude toward JavaScript has changed completely in the past few years. JavaScript has "grown up." I'm sure there are many JavaScript dev...

   JavaScript,HTML5,Necessary,Client langua     2011-06-24 00:50:14

  JavaScript Needs Blocks

While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby’s blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript’s “first class functions”. Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both JavaScript and Ruby have a mechanism to do so makes it natural to assume equivalence. In fact, when people talk about why Ruby’s blocks are different ...

   JavaScript,Block,Style,Format,Maintainebility     2012-01-11 11:59:35

  Preparing for the real costs of cloud computing

Computerworld - At a cloud computing conference in New York in June, a number of speakers pointed out that the cloud is moving past the hype stage and is beginning to deliver tangible benefits to organizations. These improvements include increased flexibility and agility. But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them. While these types of costs ...

   Cloud computing,Cost,Chanllenges,Platfor     2011-08-23 07:48:24

  What the Heck are Algebraic Data Types? ( for Programmers )

This post is meant to be a gentle introduction to Algebraic Data Types. Some of you may be asking why you should learn Algebraic Data Types and how will they change your world?  I am not going to answer that, but suffice it to say that Algebraic Data Types are the underpinning of the type systems to the ML derived languages, Haskell and OCaml included, and their construction and properties allow for the power (and inference) that accompanies these type systems.  They are cropping...

   Algebraic Data Type,Set,Operator,Programmer     2011-12-30 08:31:43

  Comparing Floating Point Numbers, 2012 Edition

We’ve finally reached the point in this series that I’ve been waiting for. In this post I am going to share the most crucial piece of floating-point math knowledge that I have. Here it is:[Floating-point] math is hard.You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly hard it is. I mean, you may think it’s difficult to calculate when trains from Chicago and Los Angeles will collide, but that’s just peanuts to floating-point math.Seriously. Each ti...

   Floating point number,Comparison,True value     2012-02-23 07:11:03

  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

  Dart is to JavaScript as C# is to C++

Given the background of Lars Bak, the Google engineer whose V8 JavaScript interpreter upended Firefox's claim on speed, it was reasonable to suspect Google's new Web development language might look a lot like Smalltalk. But that might have taken the Web in a strange and different direction. Today, on the day of a Web developers' conference in Denmark, Google and members of the Chromium open source development team raised the curtain on Dart, the company's bid for a new and somewhat more str...

   Dart,Google,JavaScript,Virtual Machine,Chromium     2011-10-21 08:40:09

  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

  C++11 multithreading tutorial

The code for this tutorial is on GitHub: https://github.com/sol-prog/threads. In my previous tutorials I’ve presented some of the newest C++11 additions to the language: regular expressions, raw strings and lambdas. Perhaps one of the biggest change to the language is the addition of multithreading support. Before C++11, it was possible to target multicore computers using OS facilities (pthreads on Unix like systems) or libraries like OpenMP and MPI. This tutorial is meant to get you st...

   C++,Multithreading,Standard 11,Demo     2011-12-18 00:50:35

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