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

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Questions and answers

  Are older people better programmers?

Peter Knego states something interesting: “It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.”. He uses reputation and other metrics from StackOverflow to corroborate his point. His summary is: Number of coders drops significantly with age. Top developer numbers, at age 27, drop by half every 6-7 years.Developers in their 40s answer roughly twice as much and ask half the questions compared to colleagues in their 20s. It seems younger generation learns and older generatio...

   Programming,Age,Experience,Skill,Advanta     2011-07-28 09:02:23

  The Number One Trait of a Great Developer

Maybe the best programmers aren’t those who spectacularly solve crazy problems, but those who don’t create them, which is much more silent. – Lena HerrmannWhen I look around at other companies hiring Ruby on Rails developers, I see them focusing on three major traits: Super-smart; Large community following; Deep Ruby knowledge. They’re all wrong. While these are great aspects in moderation, they all miss the number one quality of a fantastic developer: Judge...

   Developer,Trait,Judgement,No. 1     2011-11-05 06:49:19

  Transparency in Cloud Services

37signals recently launched public “Uptime Reports” for their applications (announcement). The reaction on Hacker News was rather tepid, but I think it’s a positive development, and I applaud 37signals for stepping forward. Reliability of cloud applications is a real concern, and there’s not nearly enough hard data out there. Not all products are equally reliable; even within 37signals, the new reports show a 3:1 variation in downtime across apps. That said, ...

   Cloud,Transapency,37signals,Announcement     2012-01-10 07:24:02

  Enterprise Mobility Solution From A DreamFactory of Software to Accelerate Customer Experience

Today the conventional model that suppliers follow i.e. the make, sell and ship process is no longer enough to keep your customers happy and satisfied. The landscapes have evolved such that, manufacturers not only have to continue making the best quality products but also be in complete sync with the new age  customer requirements, encourage customer involvement and henceforth achieve the best products. This can be achieved by using the emerging mobile technology to deliver improved custom...

   enterprise mobility, enterprise management, enterprise mobility management     2014-12-10 00:36:56

  Why Objective-C is Hard

As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or J...

   Objective-C,difficult,hard,reason,analysis     2012-03-07 05:11:28

  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

  Introducing LocalDB, an improved SQL Express

Updated 2011-11-28: Added reference to the walkthrough of using LocalDB in Visual Studio 2010 and to the new LocalDB Installer. Updated 2011-11-02: Added reference to .NET Framework 4 support for LocalDB in the Q&A section. Introduction It gives me great pleasure to introduce a new version of SQL Express called SQL Express LocalDB. LocalDB is created specifically for developers. It is very easy to install and requires no management, yet it offers the same T-SQL language, programming surfac...

   LocalDB,Microsoft,SQL Express     2012-03-31 00:13:43

  Introduction to GoLang generics and advanced usage

Generics in Go allow you to write code that can work with multiple types of data, without having to write separate versions of the code for each type. This can make your code more flexible and easier to maintain, as you only need to write and test the code once, rather than maintaining multiple versions. To use generics in Go, you first need to define a type parameter, which is a placeholder for the type that the code will work with. For example, you might define a type parameter called "T" like...

   GOLANG,GENERICS     2022-12-17 05:12:21

  Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don’t vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much?Joel Spolsky gave a couple answers to this question in his most recent podcast. First, programmer productivity varies tremendously across the profession, but...

   Productivity,Salary,Efficiency,Programmer,Not match     2011-11-16 08:12:00

  Siri in Practice

Some quick comments on using Siri in practice—for things other than asking it to open the pod bay doors. Siri’s voice recognition is very impressive, and the scope of what it understands is very good given the difficulty of what it’s doing. But it has a lot of trouble with certain sorts of names—Irish names, for example, which often are not written as pronounced. For example there are a lot of people in Ireland named “Aoife”—it’s a very popul...

   Siri,Apple,Practice,Artificial Intelligence,AI     2011-10-15 15:01:13

RECENT