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Left unchecked, certain developer personality types can sink your project -- or, worse, make themselves no fun to work with. In my long and storied career, I've personally encountered all 14 of these personality types. In fact, I have been several of these people to some degree or another; I've also knowingly hired them. You know who you are. Rock stars, Graybeards and Ninjas... oh my!
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I like to think I have an even balance of each maladaptive schema. 
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Nope, I'm none of those.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
Those who seek perfection will only find imperfection
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
me, in pictures
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i, j, ',', '{', '}', '[', ']', '"', "'", '#', '!', ';', '.', '~'
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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I see the value of writing clearly and concisely becoming an increasingly important skill for digital workers. Partly for the reasons outlined above, but also because we’re moving into a massive wave of distributed work and self selected customers. This means our voice, and the voice of our companies, are often going to be discovered and engaged with via the copy of our services, the content of our social media channels and the clarity of our emails. Your ability to discuss code is increasingly as important as writing it.
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Though it does serve a useful purpose in some compiled languages, I think switch is a clunky eyesore in most code. Its structure is prone to taking root and only growing larger and more cumbersome over time. If you’re coming to JavaScript from a background in procedural languages like C#, Java, or PHP, it’s natural to reach for the same tools, like switch, that you’re accustomed to using in those languages. However, JavaScript’s flexible object literal syntax and first-class functions offer alternatives to switch that I believe are cleaner, more extensible, and more maintainable. Embrace the functional side, Luke.
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So we have a lot of these "one input -> Success/Failure output" functions -- how do we connect them together? What we want to do is connect the Success output of one to the input of the next, but somehow bypass the second function in case of a Failure output.... There is a great analogy for doing this -- something you are probably already familiar with. Railways! Railways have switches ("points" in the UK) for directing trains onto a different track. We can think of these "Success/Failure" functions as railway switches. The little function that could.
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The debate about app design largely centers around screen size. What if designers worried about digit size instead? Luke Wroblewski, a respected designer... thinks it's time to reconsider mobile design principles. Instead of worrying about questions like whether to upsize smartphone apps for tablets, designers should start by asking how their users will physically interact with their devices when using an app. The technical term for this is input type—keyboard versus touchscreen, one-handed or two-handed interactions, and the like. This requires designers to think about how a device is held, which fingers are used, and how the app in question can optimize the experience for users' dexterity. Left-handed apps. You read it here first.
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Once every 17 years, a population of cicadas ranging from Connecticut to the Appalachian highlands of North Carolina emerges to annoy everyone within earshot. The last time east coasters saw this brood was in 1996, making 2013 yet another year of annoying insect pests. The only question is, when will we start to see this year’s cicada brood? Radiolab, the awesome podcast and public radio show, has put together an awesome project that asks listeners to track when the cicadas in their area will emerge. I am Magicicada of Brood II. Resistance is futile. You will be driven mad by the sound.
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Microprocessor architectures these days are largely limited, and thus defined, by power consumption.... Both AMD and Intel... have two independent microprocessor architectures that they leverage to build chips for the computing continuum. From Intel we have Atom for low power, and Core for high performance. In 2010 AMD gave us Bobcat for its low power roadmap, and Bulldozer for high performance.... Today AMD officially launches Kabini and Temash, APUs based on the first major architectural update to Bobcat: the Jaguar core. CPUs have come a long way from the old "how fast does it run?" days.
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Microsoft Excel isn't only for spreadsheets. It can also be used to create art. Don't believe me? Just ask 73 year-old Tatsuo Horiuchi. He'll tell ya. But why Excel? "Other specialized graphic software is expensive, and Excel came pre-installed in PCs," Horiuchi told Japanese website PC Online, adding that he found the program easy to use and more capable than actual paint. It's true. Excel can do anything.
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I think it was the '97 version that had an easter egg of a version of the Spy Hunter game in it. It was pretty awesome.
Yes, Excel can do anything.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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WOW!
Gryphons Are Awesome! Gryphons Are Awesome!
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Somebody please tell the old f**t about InkScape.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Microsoft has clarified that the next iteration of Kinect, the motion tracking peripheral unveiled alongside the Xbox One earlier this week, will be coming to Windows next year. We had previously known that the device would eventually be supported by Windows, but didn’t know when. Unfortunately, Microsoft is keeping quiet in regards to how developers will actually be able to take advantage of the new Kinect; the firm simply stated that it will share more details at its BUILD conference next month. The new Ctrl+Alt+Delete: Wave, Swipe, Raise the roof, Jump to the left, Stick it, Glide.
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In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing "Talk" platform with a new one called "Hangouts" that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users. Google's plan: send us back to IRC and Usenet?
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Quote: removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications
That was in any case a false feeling of security. The other person could still take screenshots or copy it off or if it wasn't the Talk app, but something else, keep an archive.
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The challenge is actually 5 Challenges, each two weeks long, that when combined will result in an a web application hosted on Azure that uses Azure data services, virtual machines and provides a great mobile experience. Everything a modern cloud based application needs. As to what the application does - that's up to you. Be creative. Weave a story. Write something interesting, all the while writing about it in an article. The third challenge: Use SQL on Azure in whatever way you wish.
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I love to write tools that simplify my life. Almost all the projects I have worked on and then published are tools that I originally wrote for myself before seeing a possible value for others. We talk to Daniel Godson, author of perhaps the most popular article on CodeProject: ToDoList.
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There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, but in 2001 the Norwegian government established a million-dollar Abel Prize, which is widely considered as an equivalent of the Nobel for mathematicians. This year’s prize was awarded to Pierre Deligne, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Today, he is honored at a ceremony held in Oslo. Deligne’s most spectacular results are on the interface of two areas of mathematics: number theory and geometry. Math describes the world around us at the deepest level. And it's all open source.
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A few months back I was satisfying my OCD by reading up on java object memory layout. Now Java, as we all know and love, is all about taking care of such pesky details as memory layout for you. You just leave it to the JVM son, and don't lose sleep over it. Sometimes though... sometimes you do care. And when you do, here's how to find out. Nice, clear rules. What could possibly go wrong?
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As people write, they learn to organize, refine, and reflect on their ideas. Clearly, there are powerful reasons for everyone to learn to write. I see coding (computer programming) as an extension of writing. The ability to code allows you to “write” new types of things – interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations. And, as with traditional writing, there are powerful reasons for everyone to learn to code. In the process of learning to code, people learn many other things.
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For years, the software industry has been trending away from so-called 'copyleft' licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) and toward permissive, Apache-style licensing. Given the rising importance of developers, this isn't surprising: developers just want to get work done without being bogged down by license requirements. It's perhaps not surprising, therefore, that permissive Apache licensing may simply be a way station on the road to no licensing at all. That's what GitHub seems to be telling us, anyway. A shift toward easy sharing and permissive licensing of code.
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When Dart was originally launched, many developers mistook it for some sort of Java clone. In truth, Dart is inspired by a range of languages such as Smalltalk, Strongtalk, Erlang, C#, and JavaScript. Get past the semicolons and curly braces, and you’ll see a terse language without ceremony. Dart has evolved into its own, and here are some of my favorite language features. 12 interesting features in Dart you ought to know.
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The new Kinect is kind of awesome. Just by the numbers, it's a huge upgrade. You can see (most of) the full walkthrough we saw just a bit ago here at Microsoft's Redmond campus in the video above. Parts are jaw-dropping. The demo is of a live action Kinect unit, which will be included with the new Xbox One. Right from the start, you can see the improved depth sensor. It's three times as sensitive, and can pick out bits as small as your t-shirt wrinkling or adjusting on your chest. Obvious next feature: you're not working hard enough - let's make the the game more difficult.
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The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. In the land of the Lotus eaters... or as we called it: business school.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: his early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer.
And the irony of that is that it was first brought to Commodore Business Machines with the proposal to have CBM market it for the PET. But they declined.
Marc
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It’s that time of decade again. Time for a new Xbox. It took four years for Microsoft to go from the original Xbox to the Xbox 360. The transition from Xbox 360 to the newly announced Xbox One will take right around 8 years, and the 360 won’t be going away anytime soon either. The console business demands long upgrade cycles in order to make early investments in hardware (often sold at a loss) worthwhile. This last round was much longer that it ever should have been, so the Xbox One arrives to a very welcoming crowd. [Cue din of nerds arguing over hardware specs.]
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Wilhite created the GIF when he was working at CompuServe (an early US ISP). According to The New York Times, the format was originally intended to help the company display things like color weather maps, although the first image he created was an animated paper airplane. More than 10 years after his retirement, he remains proud of his creation but there's one thing he's been wanting to clarify — the pronunciation of the word. Someone is WRONG on the internet.
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Jood jracious! All this time I have been usinj the wronj pronounciation. I sure am jlad this man has a better understandinj of jrammer than the rest of the jeeks in the world or we would all be speaking quite funny.
Now we can carry on producinj meaninjful content! Jod bless this man for it is his superior way of thinkinj that will brinj the world into a jathering of unified thinkinj and then finally there will be peace. For his jift to the world was not just a better way to send jraphics but also a better way to pronounce acronyms.
Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.
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Collin Jasnoch wrote: speaking [...] jathering
They're pronounced "speakinj" and "jatherinj". 
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Doh! I kept readinj it to see any jrammatical mistakes and was thinkinj I had jotten them all. Jood thinj you were lookinj as well 
Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.
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For many people Ethernet is merely the RJ45 jack on the back of a laptop, but its relative ubiquity and simplicity belie what Ethernet has done for the networking industry and in turn for consumers and enterprises. Ethernet has in the space of 40 years gone from a technology that many in the industry viewed as something not fit for high bandwidth, dependable communications to the default data link protocol. Few technologies in use today can lay claim to being 40 years old and still on the cutting edge.
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In other news, Leslie Nielsen died. One post earlier...
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yeah .. just like the electric bulb
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It’s not uncommon for an empirical CS researcher to get a review saying something like “Sure, these results look good, but we need to reject the paper since the authors never proved anything about the worst case.” Similarly, when I interviewed for faculty jobs ten years ago, a moderately famous professor spent a while grilling me about the worst-case performance of a static analysis tool that I had written. This was, to me, an extremely uninteresting topic but luckily there’s an easy answer for that particular class of tool. I recall noticing that he did not seem particularly interested in what the tool did, or if it was actually useful. Yet another consequence of the divide between the math and engineering sides of computer science.
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Today we’re announcing CoVim, a plugin that adds multi-user, real-time collaboration to your favorite (or least favorite) text editor. CoVim allows you to remotely code, write, edit, and collaborate, all within your custom Vim configuration. Originally started as a senior capstone project for Tufts University, we’re now open-sourcing it to give the world one of Vim’s most requested features. Solving the pair-programming problem with the world's most obtuse editor.
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Graph analysis is becoming increasingly important in software applications. Here a graph is a collection of nodes and edges, not a data visualization such as a bar chart. This article presents a demonstration of how to perform shortest-path analysis using a SQL CLR stored procedure. The techniques presented here can also be used for many other data-access programming tasks. “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” for data.
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Voice inversion is a method of scrambling radio conversations to render speech nearly unintelligible in ordinary radio receivers. As the name implies, it inverts the audio spectrum of a signal, making the lowest frequencies the highest and vice versa. It is not considered encryption; it's merely a sort of Pig Latin on analogue signals..., Voice inversion is cancelled by reapplying the inversion, i.e. inverting the audio spectrum again. Here I'll present some least-effort digital descrambling methods for the voice inversion scrambler that may be of interest to hobbyist listeners. I played it backward and only heard "Khaaaaaan!"
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Despite its popularity, PHP is considered by the programming elite, almost without exception, as one of the worst languages currently in use today. The term “good PHP programmer” is considered an oxymoron. Yet it’s the primary language we use here for development, and it’s the only language we use for everything touching the production MailChimp application. You can imagine the horror and surprise we see when we try to tell a good developer that we use PHP to solve cool and interesting problems. So here’s my best answer to that. The first step is admitting you have a problem.
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Javascript is a lot worse than PHP IMHO. At least in PHP it does not create a new function if you mis-spell the function name.
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VB6 at least let you turn that horrible behavior off. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: So here’s my best answer to that.
And his answer is: yet another framework
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This month, I’d like to evaluate where Microsoft is in its transition to a maker of devices and services. This is the biggest transition in the company’s history, one that will affect customers and users. Using Microsoft’s most recent earnings release, let’s rate the company’s progress and determine which strategic transitions might affect you. Devices and services are the future: where do your products fit?
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