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Three qualities every good programmer shares... and even many not-so-great programmers. Which do you put to the most use?
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Laziness -- it's the basis of code re-use and a cornerstone of OOP.
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I have to second laziness as well. I agree on the code reuse, why reinvent the same thing?
From the link: "makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it"
Yes, I write labor saving programs, but it is generally for me to do my job better. Document what I wrote? Hell no!
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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Scope creep is the kind of thing that accumulates so slowly and subtly that you don't realize it's happening until it's too late, like when you've already promised it or, worse, when you're already building it. The only way for that to happen is if we-not our clients-let it happen. That is the kind of scope creep I want to talk about. The kind that-though we may want to blame our clients-is really our responsibility. Why scope creep is your fault (and what you can do to prevent it)
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: <layer>Why scope creep is your fault (and what you can do to prevent it)
Never is my fault, as I will only implement what the client is asking for in their code. I do keep an eye out for scope creep when the client asks for new features and warn them up front if there's going to be any issue. Saves me headache and time, and the client money.
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
"Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham
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UTF-8 encoding should be the default choice of encoding for storing text strings in memory or on disk, for communication and all other uses. We believe that all other encodings of Unicode (or text, in general) belong to rare edge-cases of optimization and should be avoided by mainstream users. I U+2665 Unicode.
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The internets are buzzing with new IDE ideas. On the one hand, it is great to wake people out of their stupor and and show them what might be possible. But on the other hand I am bothered with the unspoken implication that such things are possible with current programming languages. Just slap a magical new IDE on top of Java or JavaScript and the world will be a better place. Unfortunately I don’t believe that is possible, and I fear it will lead only to disappointment and further fatalism. Until we change our language assumptions, we'll continue to code in tarted-up text editors.
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A recent (and short) IEEE Computing Conversations interview with Douglas Crockford about the development of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) offers some profound, and sometimes counter-intuitive, insights into standards development on the Web. Douglas Crockford discusses the origins of JSON.
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Worried that under a new owner BeOS would die a slow, unsupported death, Michael Phipps did the only logical thing he could think of: He decided to re-create BeOS completely from scratch, but as open-source code. An open-source system, he reasoned, isn’t owned by any one company or person, and so it can’t disappear just because a business goes belly-up or key developers leave. How a volunteer crew brought a crack operating system back.
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Responsive web design is arguably the hottest topic in web design today, but how do you monetise responsive sites? Matthew Snyder and Etai Koren, co-founders of ResponsiveAds, present the biggest issues and come up with some solutions. Ads for browsers and devices of all shapes and sizes.
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Do you ever get a craving to do a little BASIC programming, but find yourself without a good old DOS box at hand? Never fear. Cory Smith wrote a Silverlight-based GW-BASIC interpreter that runs in your browser... even on your Windows Phone! GOTO CODE ANYWHERE.
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The concept of Big Data—the practice of acquiring, analyzing and interpreting ridiculously huge data sets—is something much of the technology and business world is extremely excited about. But excited is about as far as it goes because, currently, there just aren't enough practitioners to make it work. Data, data everywhere... and not enough expertise to use it.
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Here are two tools I've been using lately to better understand the functionality of my game designs. The first is the loop, a structure that should be very familiar to those who have looked into skill atoms. The second is the arc. Loop back over this and you'll get the arc of the idea.
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Someone tell me why i dont enjoy games today as i did when I was a child or a teenager. Tell us why today's computer games or better - or worse - than those of yesteryear.
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I disagree with people who say games aren't as good. Back in day I think they were more "amazing" because they were new and ground breaking. Now, there are a set number of genres and 50 games being released in each of those genres a month. A good game to me is now determined by the story and overall polish of the game. Graphics mean nothing, which I guess is just a thing from growing up in the 90's where the most amazing graphics I ever saw was Dues Ex :P (was that even the 90's ???)
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ROGUE ! ! ! !
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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My room mate and I have this discussion every time we stop by the local Gamestop. Personally, I think its a combination of:
0. There is a much larger number of games coming out. With that kind of quantity, there's more to compare to and the really great games stand out (and make the majority of games look bad)
1. Some publishers/studios go for quantity over quality, and as long as its profitable they have no reason to change
2. We're not children anymore, and as a result we're much harder to impress. Even if the quality stayed the same we'd probably feel that it decreased as we become more critical and able to distinguish good from bad
3. Nostaligia
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There's a very interesting discussion about what are good games and the concept of a "gamer" in the current context on episode 64 of the Hypercritical podcast with John Siracusa[^].
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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You’ve invested in building an API and now you want developers to use it. Very few companies can get away with creating a successful API ecosystem on technical merit alone. You’ll need documentation, SDKs, sample apps, debugging tools and everything else that goes into a great “developer experience”. Based on my experience of working with an array of different APIs, here is what I believe to be the baseline level of support structure anyone who is serious about their API program should implement. If you build it (well), they will come.
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As I do some app development for Windows 8 I wanted to share my thoughts around localization and what it really means to me to provide a ‘world-ready’ application. The three areas of focus are 1) how the platforms support a localized app, 2) what technical tools you have to automate localization 3) getting culture-correct localization and 4) testing your localized app. Parlez vous good user experience?
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I visit a lot of customers and look at a lot of code. I also worked with a number of large production code bases in my previous jobs and I see a lot of ifs, fors and switches. I see loops inside of loops with ifs inside them, all doing various transformations of data from one form to another. I see strings getting parsed to pull bits of data out in ways that are easy to say in English but take 100 lines to say in code. Should they? There are a million things available to the programmer beyond the first three keywords we learn.
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And they are all implemented by shift, add, and complement.
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When I used to teach programming (C), the first project I gave them was to create a little editor. All it had to do was echo the letters to the keyboard when you typed them and allow you to delete the end letter. Most were quite surprised how many steps that took (and this in console screen). Adding the ability to delete from the center of a line and/or insert a character and they had new respect for all the little things.
So the concept of many lines of code required to do a simple spoken concept. Why the surprise?
Or, to put it another way: if you want a copy of that page, build a xerox machine, push the button, and you're done.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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JSIL is a compiler that transforms .NET applications and libraries from their native executable format - CIL bytecode - into standards-compliant, cross-browser JavaScript. You can take this JavaScript and run it in a web browser or any other modern JavaScript runtime. From C# or Visual Basic to the web in one easy step.
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