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

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Open source

  Feature: The History Of Mobile Gaming

Mobile phones have come a long way since the unsightly bricks of the 1980s. The sleek handsets of today are a fraction the size of their ancestors, yet exponentially more powerful. While the implications for communication have been profound, there have been many other applications for this technology. Modern devices are capable of supporting increasingly complex software, innovative interfaces and networking capabilities, and the gaming sector has been one of the biggest benefactors of this.Much...

   Game,Mobile,History,Feature, Game on mobile device     2011-10-12 11:44:30

  Don't write on the whiteboard

I recently interviewed at a major technology company. I won't mention the name because, honestly, I can't remember whether I signed an NDA, much less how strong it was.I did well. Mostly because of luck. I normally step over myself when I interview. I guess I've improved over the years. Here are a few tips to ace your own interview.1. Don't write on the whiteboardWhen I interviewed at Palantir around 5 years ago, I had a lot of trouble with this. Yes, I knew next to nothing about compu...

   Interview,Preparation,Whiteboard,Note,Python     2012-01-11 11:31:32

  10 Secrets of Successful Leaders

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader, a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves.” But, becoming a great leader isn’t easy. Successfully maneuvering a team through the ups and downs of starting a new business can be one of the greatest challenges a small-business owner faces.Leadership is one of the areas that many entrepreneurs tend to overlook, according leadership coach John C. Maxwell, whose books...

   Leader,Skill,Calm,Trust,Involvement     2011-11-03 03:36:56

  Prototypes in JavaScript

Following on from his previous article, David Chisnall explores JavaScript as an example of prototype-based object orientation. In this article, he shows how it's possible to implement more complex object models on top of this simple abstraction.My previous article, Prototypes and Object Orientation, considered the differences between class-based and prototype-based object orientation. In this article, we'll look in a bit more detail at the workings of the JavaScript object model, since it'...

   JavaScript,Prototype,Object oriented,Obj     2011-09-02 11:44:12

  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

  Secret Symphony: The Ultimate Guide to Readable Web Typography

Right now, there’s a mathematical symphony happening on your website.Every single one of your readers is subconsciously aware of this symphony, and more important, they are all pre-programmed to respond to it in a particular way.The question is this:Is your site’s symphony pleasing and inviting to your readers, or does it turn them off and make it harder to communicate with them? The Mathematical Symphony of TypographyAs it turns out, this symphony is not unique to websites. You...

   Web design,Typography,Math,Golden rule     2011-12-23 07:48:10

  Good to Great Python reads

A col­lec­tion of python “must reads”:The Python yield key­word explainedPython’s super() con­sid­ered super!Under­stand­ing Python DecoratorsWhat is a meta­class in Python?Meta­classes DemystifiedTry/Catch for val­i­da­tion or speed?Python (and Python C API): __new__ ver­sus __init__Python “self” keywordPython and the Prin­ci­ple of Least AstonishmentA Curi­ous Course on Corou­tines and Concurr...

   Python,Reference,eBook,Reading Material     2011-11-15 11:46:12

  Windows 8 Possible Features: Ribbon, Metro, Apps, Cloud Integration

Microsoft may still be plugging away at selling Windows 7 to consumers and the enterprise, but rumors have already started about the next version of the popular operating system—dubbed "Windows 8" by many in the media. Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott, two bloggers with a track record of delving into Microsoft's proprietary code base, recently sparked a fresh round of chatter with a dissection of a supposed Windows 8 early build, adding their voices to a discussion that extends back to 201...

   Windows 8,New features,Touch,Metro     2011-04-11 02:10:12

  Deep inside ARM's new Intel killer

ARM has swung a one-two punch at Intel's plans to muscle in on the smartphone and tablet space that's currently dominated by the plucky chip designers from Cambridge.At press soirées in London and San Francisco on Wednesday, ARM announced both a design for a tiny new chip, the Cortex-A7 MPCore, and a system-on-chip scheme that will marry the new A7 with the much more robust Cortex-A15 MPCore, which was announcedlast September and which should see the light of day next...

   ARM,Killer,Intel,Chipzilla,Performance     2011-10-22 12:55:23

RECENT