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  Why developer-friendliness is central to API design

Today, APIs play a bigger role in software development than ever before. The evolution of computing has been dominated by ever-increasing levels of abstraction; the use of higher-level languages, of course, but also the development of platforms, libraries, and frameworks. Professor Douglass C. Smith claims the progression of this second category far outpaced the development of programming languages.  Developers are also noticing that difficulty has shifted from designing algorithms a...

   API,User friendly,Significance, Improve quality     2011-12-21 02:29:54

  Ten things I want Siri to be able to do for me

Now that I've had my iPhone 4S for a couple of days, I'm amazed with what Siri can do. I've asked a number of questions -- real ones, not questions like "What is the meaning of life?" -- and have been totally impressed with how my interaction with the iPhone has changed. But there are more things I'd love to be able to do with Siri, which is the reason for this post.Everyone should understand that Siri is currently a beta product from Apple. A lot of the things I'm talking about here should happ...

   Siri,iPhone 4S,AI,Tweet,Four square,Intelligent agent     2011-10-17 11:24:37

  How To Make The Most of Your Least Productive Time

Everybody talks about mastering the art of staying productive. Not many people willingly accept that such efforts are futile. It’s impossible to stay productive 100% of the time, and this will never change. Something that I believe to be just as important, if not more so, is what we make of our least productive time. We all have the capacity to be extremely productive for some part of the day. Even the world’s grandest underachievers. But I believe that to be successful runni...

   Productive time,Limit time,Effort     2012-02-06 07:49:47

  What I learned from Google - You Get Fifteen Years

four years ago I was in Mountain View, California, interviewing for a position with Google. It was an odd sort of interview.  Lots of puzzles, math-like challenges, and code.  Lots, and lots, and lots of code. What struck me at Google wasn’t the challenges.  Nor was it the office environment, the cafeteria, or the mini-swimming pool, all of which were impressive. No, what struck me were the people. All of the people I met — and I mean all of them — had this ...

   Career,Technology,Programmer,Transform,Lifetime     2011-12-06 02:27:04

  How big company CEOs spend their time in work

As a company's steer holder, the CEO or founder takes plenty of pressure ordinary people even cannot imagine. They usually need to deal with different aspects of daily operation of a company including technology, business, marketing, public relationship etc. Lots of meetings, negotiations and presentations are waiting for them every day. Hence time is a precious resource for them. Let's take a look at how these CEOs spend their time in their work. 1. Apple CEO Tim Cook Gets up at 3:45 am ...

   CEO,STEVE JOBS,TIM COOK,ELON MUSK,JACK MA,MARK ZUCKERBERG,PONY MA     2016-08-13 13:29:00

  Notes on Programming in C

Introduction       Kernighan and Plauger's The Elements of Programming Style was an important and rightly influential book.  But sometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbook approach to good style instead of the succinct expression of a philosophy they were meant to be.  If the book claims that variable names should be chosen meaningfully, doesn't it then follow that variables whose names are small essays on their use are even better?  Isn't MaximumV...

   C,Notes,Tips     2011-12-09 07:55:47

  Test-Driven Development? Give me a break...

Update: At the bottom of this post, I've linked to two large and quite different discussions of this post, both of which are worth reading... Update 2: If the contents of this post make you angry, okay. It was written somewhat brashly. But, if the title alone makes you angry, and you decide this is an article about "Why Testing Code Sucks" without having read it, you've missed the point. Or I explained it badly :-)Some things programmers say can be massive red flags. When I h...

   Test driven,Application design,tool     2011-10-17 10:19:16

  Readability in Programming Languages

I saw a side by side comparison of a bunch of scripting languages online recently. Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby My first, and second reaction was yuck! Now I have my biases – biases which may  not be shared by others of course. But I like readable code and for me anytime I see a special character (anything not an alphanumeric) it slows me down. This got me thinking about where we are going in design of programming languages? Are we moving forward (what ever ...

   Programming,Style,Coding style,Readabili     2011-09-22 09:20:03

  Peter Thiel thinks tech innovation has 'stalled'

Peter Thiel says the United States no longer cares much about science or technology(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET)ASPEN, Colo.--One of the Internet's most influential investors and entrepreneurs is offering a dire prediction: the pace of technological change is stagnating.Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook, warned that--despite spectacular advances in computer-related fields over the last few decades--technological progress overall is actually "stalled out.""There...

   Peter Thiel,PayPal,Technology,Stack,Inno     2011-08-24 08:42:42

  Linus Torvalds’s Lessons on Software Development Management

If anyone knows the joys and sorrows of managing software development projects, it would be Linus Torvalds, creator of the world's most popular open-source software program: the Linux operating system. For more than 20 years, Torvalds has been directing thousands of developers to improve the open source OS. He and I sat down to talk about effective techniques in running large-scale distributed programming teams – and the things that don’t work, too.Torvalds says there are...

   Linux,Software development,Linus Tonalds     2011-09-28 09:16:02