Lorna Mitchell04/23/13
3005 views
1 replies

The Economics of Developer Recruitment and Training

This isn't a rant about salaries, the skills of new graduates, or the trials of dealing with recruiters, although each of those is worth a post in itself. It's about the mathematics of providing your organization with the talent it needs at the time that it needs it.

Krishna Kumar04/22/13
7293 views
1 replies

The Work From Home Question

Everyone is talking about the Yahoo! memo ending work from home for employees. I am reminded of an article on Rands in Repose about telecommuting.

David Pollak04/22/13
4995 views
0 replies

Code of Conduct for Communities

I think that codes of conduct should be positive definitions of expected behavior rather than a series of prohibitions. Here's the code of conduct I'll use for my next conference.

Chris Travers04/22/13
3551 views
0 replies

A Distributist View on Software Freedom

It's worth noting off the bat that Distributism arose as a critique both of Capitalism and Communism and represents something with some of the ideals of both sides, but altogether different in character than either.

Esther Derby 04/20/13
3854 views
0 replies

How Much Self-management Is Right for a Team?

There are lots of teams in small companies and start-ups who are self-managing and self-directing. They manage themselves, they set product direction, and set company priorities. When I visit big, established companies, there’s almost always an assumption that teams need close supervision.

Eric Gregory04/19/13
4470 views
0 replies

Links You Don't Want To Miss (Apr. 19)

Today: Mozilla's pluggable collaboration tool, CISPA, homemade drones, a radical new CSS best practice, and Code Monkey Saves World.

Mitch Pronschinske04/17/13
2195 views
0 replies

Links You Don't Want To Miss (4/17)

Computer dinosaurs still walk the earth. This story, plus a cool Mac Terminal easter egg, a prominent game written in QBASIC, and a Python heart monitor that only needs a webcam.

Allen Coin04/17/13
3536 views
0 replies

Links You Don't Want to Miss: Apr. 17

Today: Everyone should learn to program, but not everyone should be a programmer; Is Stack Exchange hurting programming?; GitHub's new logo, and a "programming in a nutshell" comic.

Isaac Taylor04/17/13
4875 views
3 replies

Coding for the Changes You'll Have to Make Next Month

Anytime you find yourself looking at a class's implementation to figure out how to use the class, you're not programming to the interface, you're programming through the interface to the implementation. If you're programming through the interface, encapsulation is broken, and once encapsulation starts to break down, abstraction won't be too far behind.

Mainak Goswami04/17/13
4286 views
0 replies

Understanding Transport Layer Security / Secure Socket Layer

There are subtle differences between TLS and SSL. TLS is the successor to the SSL but TLS 1.2 cannot be interchangeable with SSL 3.0. TLS uses Hashing for Message Authentication Code (HMAC) algorithm over the SSL Message Authentication Code (MAC) algorithm.

René Pickhardt04/16/13
1373 views
0 replies

Teaching Web Science (Web Architecture and Web Ethics)

Overall we can say that the concept of the course worked really well. Especially putting such a high focus on the Web Architecture and actually letting students implement protocols helped to gain a deeper understanding.

Nick Johnson04/16/13
16010 views
0 replies

Algorithm of the Week: Fountain Codes (from "Damn Cool Algorithms")

Today's subject is Fountain Codes, otherwise known as "rateless codes". A fountain code is a way to take some data - a file, for example - and transform it into an effectively unlimited number of encoded chunks, such that you can reassemble the original file given any subset of those chunks...

John Sonmez04/16/13
4864 views
7 replies

So You Think You Can Polymorph?

In the true spirit of this blog I am going to take the complex idea of polymorphism and make it as simple as possible. Now you may already think you understand polymorphism—and perhaps you do—but I’ve found that most software developers don’t actually understand exactly what polymorphism is.

John Sonmez04/16/13
3901 views
1 replies

Everyone Should Learn To Program, But Not Everyone Should Be A Programmer

There seems to be a big backlash in development community against the idea that everyone should learn to program. Learning how to program and doing it professionally are two distinct things and they should not be lumped together.

Allan Kelly04/16/13
4184 views
2 replies

Requirements: Whose Job are They Anyway?

Companies believe that Developers will somehow comprehend what is needed from a simple statement. In the worst cases this is a condition I refer to as: “Requirements by Project Title”. Just because Developers understand the technology doesn’t mean they understand what is needed.