The Insider News

Minifesto.org[^]:

Fight for Pareto's law, look for the 20% of effort that will give you the 80% of results....

AllThingsD[^]:

The first rule of building on top of another company’s platform: Make sure you play by the rules.
The latest case in point: Ribbon, a Twitter-based payments startup, launched a new product on Wednesday morning, and it looked pretty cool. The main draw was the ability to buy stuff from inside a tweet, simply by clicking on a button and entering your credit card info and shipping deets... long story short, Twitter shut off support to Ribbon’s new feature within a few hours after launch.

GeekWire[^]:

Duane Campbell is retiring from Microsoft today, after 28 years as a software developer with the company. Chances are you’ve never heard of him, even if you follow the company closely, and that’s one of the best parts of his story. Rather than following the traditional management and executive path that put some of his former peers into the spotlight, Campbell understood what he loved to do, and he had the courage to stick with it. He loves to code — and he does it extremely well.

Kent Beck[^]:

My intuition and experience is that long test names are good and short function names are good, all else being equal. But why? ... One constraint common to test naming and function naming is that the names should be chosen to optimize readability and comprehension. Your team will invest far more reading names than writing them. This doesn't mean that long names are necessarily good, but that the focus should be on the reader's experience, not the writer's.

CITEworld[^]:

Yesterday Microsoft reported flat Windows revenue from the year before, despite an unprecedented drop in PC sales.... There are several factors that made this possible. As investor relations chief Chris Suh put it on the earnings call, "Non-OEM revenue grew 40% this quarter, driven by sales of Surface and continued double digit growth in volume licensing." So how much did Surface help Microsoft's Windows revenue this quarter? Let's do a rough back-of-the-envelope estimate.

The Official Lookout Blog[^]:

Lookout has discovered BadNews, a new malware family, in 32 apps across four different developer accounts in Google Play. According to Google Play statistics, the combined affected applications have been downloaded between 2,000,000 – 9,000,000 times. We notified Google and they promptly removed all apps and suspended the associated developer accounts pending further investigation. All Lookout users are protected against this threat. BadNews masquerades as an innocent, if somewhat aggressive advertising network. This is one of the first times that we’ve seen a malicious distribution network clearly posing as an ad network.

Marco.org[^]:

No matter what you make or how much you charge, some people will find things to complain about. If you drop your app’s price all the way down to free, people will still complain — just not about the price. They’ll move on to the features, the implementation, the design, the updates, the way you look, or what kind of dog you have. They’ll complain about every facet of your app, and then they’ll complain about unrelated topics just to pile on.

Betabeat[^]:

Is booze for programmers like spinach for Popeye? The Ballmer Peak, a reference to Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, holds that imbibing alcohol improves cognitive ability, up to a point–a variation of the Yerkes-Dodson law, which shows a correlation between arousal and performance. Anecdotal evidence suggests that optimal programming occurs about two beers in. But what sayeth science?

marcusoft.net[^]:

What am I optimizing for when I write my code today? Change will always come. I know that from the outset. "I will change something in that spec during the 25 years the system will live". How do I try to handle that? Do I precieve change as a risk or an enabler? Being able to change fast is a business advantage and a way to manage risk. How do I make my code being easy to change? What kind of documentation do I need in a system that I'm going to change a lot?

Smashing Coding[^]:

Static typing is great because it keeps you out of trouble. Dynamic typing is great because it gets out of your way and lets you get your work done faster. The debate between strongly and dynamically typed languages rages on, but understanding the issue starts with weak typing and languages such as C.