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You’re close to shipping and you receive a shopping list of bugs and changes. Some are tiny and un-eventful, some are show stoppers, some let the bad guys in, and some are simply scope creep trying to sneak through the door. It’s hard to know where to start without reclassifying them because the majority of them are all labelled Critical. It’s time to sit down with whoever documented your bugs and do some talking… Prioritize your work: read this first!
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I use a number of text editors. The three I have pinned to my taskbar are Visual Studio, Sublime Text 2, and Notepad 2. I have three because I like features from one and wish those features were in another. Sublime Text (and a few other editors) has a great feature called Simultaneous Editing. It's the very definition of an advanced - but core - editor feature. Enter the MultiEdit extension for Visual Studio. Holding down ALT while mouse-clicking in the editor will add multiple selection points, so when you type, text will be added to all the selected positions. Should this be a built-in feature of VS?
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Most developers stagnate both intellectually and productively after 4-5 years in industry; they adopt some tools, pick up some patterns, learn a language or two, and maybe they’re even able to work at a successful company and contribute to some important products. Great! But what happens when you hand a developer a blank sheet of paper and the opportunity for them to own a product? Most of the time: chaos and failure. If you want to be a better developer, it starts with changing the way you look at your code and how you program.
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He makes good points but perhaps misses the deaper reason for the 'lack of confidence' he often sites as being behind failures. All too often this is due to developers who can use the tools but don't really have a deep understanding of how they work. They panic when given a blank sheet of paper because they've never been asked or asked themselves the question. "What if I really had to start from scratch?" and then gone away and worked out the answers. This is not about taking the customer point of view or understanding that it's business problems that we're solving it's quite the reverse it's about caring about code for the sake of code. First wanting to do it right and to have full insight into what's happening from the registers upwards so that you can make sure it's done right, own it completely and understand it completely. If developers never get to do this why is it a surprise that they lack confidence and rely on habituated ways of doing things. Most have spent their entire carrers being told not to look under the hood, just fix the surface problem and get it shipped, because people who don't understand software will never grasp that that is not where the long term interest of the business lies.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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How do you store sensitive configuration options (such as usernames, passwords, etc.) in source control? Typically what I’ve done is to just punt on the problem entirely. I create a dummy configuration file, such as conf/sample-settings.json which has the basic structure but none of the details filled out.... The technique I picked up from Craig was to, instead, keep an encrypted version of the configuration file in source control and then provide a means through which the user can encrypt and decrypt that data. Check out the comments for some potential concerns and additional tips.
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Kent Beck and Erich Gamma changed software development forever when they created JUnit. Programmers embraced JUnit and the philosophy behind it. There are now xUnit-style frameworks in just about any language a programmer might need to use today. The simple but powerful conventions introduced by JUnit are now accepted standards for how test frameworks work. In this interview, Kent Beck tells the creation story for JUnit. So, let me tell you how I got involved in testing...
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One of my favorite parts about Go is its unwavering focus on utility. Sometimes we place so much emphasis on language design that we forget all the other things programming involves.... I want to focus on one that's not generally well known: Go can seamlessly use functions written in Assembly. An interesting MOV, but let's not all JMP on the Assembly bandwagon.
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It's very easy to make assembly hard to read and write: use AT&T syntax.
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Agreed. It's just painful to look at.
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Want to get developers fired up? Kick off a debate about development methodologies – waterfall, agile, lean, extreme, spiral, unified, etc. At any given time it seems one method is the right one to use and the other methods, regardless of previous experience, are wrong. Some talk about having a toolbox of methods to draw on. Others say everyone must adapt to a new state of the art at each generation. Is there a practical way to build good software without first having this debate? Real coders ship... by any means necessary.
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Content that was once primarily accessed by consumers on their PCs, is shifting to mobile devices.... The top two activities that consumers are shifting from their PCs to their tablets and smartphones are web browsing and Facebook. Among tablet owners, 27 percent say they are using their PC less frequently for accessing the Internet and 20 percent say they are using their PC less frequently for accessing Facebook. Books and games tie for third place.
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This decision supposedly came right from the top of the company, with Bill Gates himself even chipping in. Despite initial reservations, Kempin claims that Gates always had qualms that the living room computer would, at some stage, metamorphosise into an alternative PC that could threaten Microsoft's dominance of the traditional market. As a result, it was eventually felt the company had to try and tackle Sony head-on. While with hindsight we can see this worked out for the best, a huge amount of teething issues were encountered along the way. Looking for a Halo product while fighting a Bastion of consumer products.
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LEGO sets are not cheap toys. They are made to the highest standards and have the price to go along with it. However, in the past couple decades it seems that the price of LEGO sets has become outrageous. New sets can sell for up to $500 retail and old sets can sell for twice that in a secondary market. This is a children’s toy, right? There is no way LEGO sets have always been this expensive; it is just molded plastic. Let’s take a look at the history of LEGO pricing and try to figure out what is going on. LEGO is not a cheap toy and has never been.
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Luckily, I get to play with LEGOs for three hours a week without buying them..and they call it a "lab"  (for my Intro to Robotics class...I almost said I get to play with them for free but then I remembered tuition...)
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The Lego Robotics curriculum resources are fantastic. We've been working on it with my daughter and it's fun. They do a great job introducing both mechanical and programming elements. Well worth the investment.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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I LOVE Legos! I have approx. 30 lbs of them in a large bin, and about another 20 lbs in other storage containers. Yes, I have around 50 lbs of Legos.
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
 2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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Quote: Many who received their first LEGO set in the early 1990’s are now adults looking forward to buying a LEGO set for their first child or for themselves. When we are younger, we do not fully understand how money works. We do not realize that a large LEGO set can require hours of work to earn. We only know what we want. I would wager that it isn’t until our first jobs that we can fully appreciate the value of money. We all wanted the large sets as kids and we didn’t realize how hard our parents had to work for them.
Most of the big lego sets I got between ~8 and 12 years old I paid for myself from a 'job' that paid maybe 50c/hour on a good day (for the few years after that I spent most of my pocket money on shareware cds and used pc games). At the time my dad was an auto mechanic and hauled all the worn/broken parts for scrap. Most of it was just iron and went strait from the garage to the recycling center; but anything with copper/aluminum was set aside because the pure metals sold for ~10x the price for mixed. Anything I was able to tear apart was mine to sell at the higher rate.
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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A good mentor relationship lasts long after your job at a single company. The relationship will change and grow over time. Your first job at a successful company will launch your career. A great mentor will help you stay on the fast track.
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130206181727-56725-the-importance-of-mentors-to-build-a-successful-career[^]
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream. Discover.
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Surface Pro is so good that it could drive Windows 8 adoption with enough force to make people reconsider Microsoft’s odd new OS. Microsoft bet the farm on a new paradigm and it needs a champion. Surface Pro is the right hardware for the job.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/05/microsoft-surface-pro-review/[^]
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream. Discover.
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It's not groundbreaking; one could always set up a SIP server over OpenVPN (wouldn't even cost anything with an OpenWRT or DD-WRT compatible router), and install an OpenVPN cliet and a SIP softphone app, or roll a softphone app using [insert kickass encryption library here] and SIP/SDP/SRTP compatible library like PJSIP[^]
Silent Circle just makes this technology available to mass consumption in a more convenient way, so I don't see any reason to ban it.
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Looking back on my life, three programming languages prepared me well for JavaScript (which has some challenging aspects)... What tools are you using to learn (or simplify) JavaScript programming?
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In HTML, there isn't just a single animation implementation (hey, that rhymes!) that you can use. You actually have three flavors of animation to choose from, and each one is specialized for certain kinds of tasks. Let's take a quick look at all three of them and see how they relate to the animation definition you saw in the previous section. Lights! Camera! DOM!
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