The Insider News

John Papa[^]:

Stressing over your upcoming presentation where you have to type a bunch of code from memory or from a script? AutoHotKey can help you automate much of the “writing” of the code so you can write demos on the fly. AutoHotKey does so much more, but for a quick and simple way to write demos on the fly, it really is top-notch.

Learning by Shipping[^]:

“Slipping” or missing the intended completion or milestone date of software projects is as old as software itself. There’s a rich history of our industry tracking intended v. actual ship dates and speculating as to the length of the slip and the cause. Even with all this history, slipping is a complex and nuanced topic worth a bit of discussion about slipping as an engineering concept.

Ars Technica[^]:

In the semiconductor world, integration is omnipresent, driven by Moore’s Law. Integration reduces power and cost while increasing performance. The latest realization of this trend is the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) approach pervasive among PCs, tablets, and smartphones. And the latest SoC is Haswell. Haswell is the first new family of SoCs from Intel to target the 22nm FinFET process, which uses a non-planar transistor that wraps around the gate on three sides. While Ivy Bridge was the first family of 22nm products, it was not fully optimized for the 22nm process. The CPU was a shrink of the 32nm Sandy Bridge rather than a new design.

ReadWrite[^]:

If you want to know the most in-demand tech skills, that info is readily available. Want to learn the programming skills most coveted by employers? Done. But what are the skills and specialties that no one wants any more? What core competencies raise red flags instead of call backs?

Box Tech Blog[^]:

At Box, we’re very interested in the quality of our code, which is why we’re constantly evaluating our processes to figure out how we can do better. We even have a team of Code Reliability Engineers (CREs) that help others write better code and provide training both internally and externally. Recently, we’ve turned a critical eye towards code reviews and have been implementing a new process called code workshops.

[LWN.net][^]:

The 2013 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory Management Summit was held April 18 and 19 in San Francisco, California, immediately after the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit. This page will gather the coverage of this event, which was split into three separate tracks.

High Scalability[^]:

In NoSQL: Past, Present, Future Eric Brewer has a particularly fine section on explaining the often hard to understand ideas of BASE (Basically Available, Soft State, Eventually Consistent), ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability), CAP (Consistency Availability, Partition Tolerance), in terms of a pernicious long standing myth about the sanctity of consistency in banking. Myth: Money is important, so banks must use transactions to keep money safe and consistent, right?

Medium[^]:

Google Glass isn’t available yet. Even so, the technopanic it’s inspiring is rising to full swivet. But I say there’s no need to panic. We’ll figure it out, just as we have with many technologies — from camera to cameraphone — that came before.

Twisted Oak Studios[^]:

Computer science is an interesting discipline. Often, I find myself inadequately trying to communicate why I find it so fascinating. I think I get the closest when describing computer science things that ‘blow my mind’. This post is... basically just a list of computer science things I think are cool.

The Buffer Blog[^]:

Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says: “Blue is the richest color for me I can see all of blue.” Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions.

CodeProject[^]:

In this installment we talk to Oren Eini, perhaps best known for his work on RavenDB.

Codecall[^]:

You may think that making an OS kernel is easy if you've ever programmed before. Think again. You don't have an established API or library to program with; You have to start from scratch. In this tutorial, we are going to learn about bootloaders and linkers and the basics of programming a simple Operating System. If you have never programmed before, I suggest you read some tutorials and try a few smaller projects first.

infoq.com[^]:

Java performance has the reputation of being something of a Dark Art. Partly this is due to the sophistication of the platform, which makes it hard to reason about in many cases. However, there has historically also been a trend for Java performance techniques to consist of a body of folk wisdom rather than applied statistics and empirical reasoning. In this article, I hope to address some of the most egregious of these technical fairytales.