I stumbled upon this really interesting site. It implements a new kind of site navigation that is really cool. It’s actually a research project that tried to create a user interface which requires no clicking.
For me it was a mind-tumbling experience, but I quickly got a hang of it. I even liked it to some [...]
A post on Jeff Atwood’s excellent blog inspired me to write up the fourth element of my Tools of The Effective Developer series. This time I’ll handle the habit of taking the customer’s view.
Jeff states that the primary responsibility of a software developer is not to write code, it’s to solve the customer’s problem. (Otherwise, [...]
This is the third post in my Tools of The Effective Developer series. The other two discussed the habit of keeping personal logs, and the habit of daily planning. Now the time has come to the habit of programming by intention.
Please note that I’m not speaking of intentional programming, which by the way introduces some [...]
One of my favorite quotes comes from Ron Jeffries on his blog Hot Needle of Inquiry:
“the river is moving, and if we don’t keep rowing, we are going to drift back downstream”
The quote reminds me of the importance of self-improvement. If we stop learning we are nothing but dead material in the stream of life. [...]
I just finished reading The Google Story, by David A. Vise. I can’t say it’s a great book. Some parts are terribly boring, stuffed with uninteresting facts and examples. But there were chapters that made me long for my next visit to the toilet. Here is the list of things that caught my attention:
Larry and [...]
I have a confession to make: I used to be addicted to debugging. Yes, it’s true. When I got hooked - damn you Delphi - I wasn’t able to see the dark side, the demonic side of the debugger. It lured me into thinking only quick fixes, and I lost track of the big picture. [...]
According to this slide show, the team behind D is thinking of incorporating an interesting addition to the language: The interchangability of a.foo(b) and foo(a, b).
This makes some interesting uses available. For instance, one could do something that looks a bit like monkey patching, adding functionality to library classes.
real round_to(real n, uint d) {
[...]
It has been a vivid debate following my D doesn’t have real closures post. For most parts it has been a constructive discussion, but what I wanted to see was real examples that would convince me that real closures (those that carry the environment with them) were actually useful for a language that provides other [...]
Today, for the first time since I let FeedBurner collect my visitor stats, I examined the numbers more closely. I was quite surprised to find that Firefox so totally dominated the web browser statistics. Almost 7 out of 10 visitors were using Firefox 2.0.
The reason I got so surprised was that the figure was something [...]
Delegates are something that gives me mixed feelings. While I used to embrace them in Delphi and Object Pascal, I now find them difficult to get used to in C#. I guess that is because they introduce a little of the functional programming paradigm into an otherwise object oriented environment.
Don’t get me wrong, I do [...]
