The Insider News

Dream.In.Code[^]:

In this tutorial I will guide you through the fundamentals of VB.NET. In fact, the following topics are fundamental to every programming language. You cannot make progress without an understanding of these topics.

apiaxle.com[^]:

Every developer sets out to make their API perfect when they start writing it, but, at least from this author's experience, it often veers as requirements pour in. The following is a small checklist of things that might indicate you're veering too far.

Karl Seguin[^]:

All modern languages and framework expose a set of buffer-backed data structures. Things like dynamic arrays (aka [Array]Lists) and StringBuilder. They are a useful convinience that comes with a steep price: poor memory characteristics. The way these work is simple: a fixed-length structure (typically an array) which copies itself into a larger fixed-length structure as needed.... The performance characterstics of such structures is the same as the underlying structure for read operations. While a write operation isn't guarnateed to be the same as the underlying structure, more often than not it is. The real problem with these structures is the impact it has on memory.

C#er : IMage[^]:

I recently took a vacation the same week as the 4th of July and had lots of time to reflect upon my career to date. It was a little shocking to realize I’ve been writing code for nearly 30 years now! I decided to take advantage of some of the extra time off to author this nostalgic post and explore all of the languages I’ve worked with for the past 30 years. So this is my tribute to 30 years of learning new languages starting with “Hello, World.”

Gamedevtuts+[^]:

The next generation of game consoles is here. This time around, nipping at the heels of the giants (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) are the microconsoles: less powerful, cheaper, and more welcoming to indie game developers. The superstar of this new family of game consoles is the Ouya. In this How to Learn guide, we’ll introduce you to the Ouya platform and its capabilities, share links to resources, and present a few suggestions to get you started developing games with it.

ITworld[^]:

I see a lot of headlines these days about "big data" and immediately identify. I think of all the big data problems that I've grappled with over the years and imagine what the key problems with managing big data will be as the data stores get larger and more diverse.... In a sense, I've been working with big data for decades -- cumbersome system logs, sometimes that went on for months, and crazy big logs from big web sites (e.g., the web logs from magazines like SunWorld and JavaWorld back in the late 90's). I might be analyzing tens or hundreds of gigabytes worth of data to answer important questions. The tools that I use won't be much different that those I use to work with files that are tens of kilobytes in size, but the techniques vary considerably.

Typographica[^]:

There was no shortage of long-distance diagnoses of the typography in Apple’s recently presented mobile interface, iOS 7. The live-streaming keynote address from the WWDC developer’s conference last Monday hadn’t even started before the first typophiles started sharing their concerns on Twitter. The day before the announcement, our friend Stephen Coles was already deeply worried about the light weight of Helvetica on the display banners hanging at the WWDC venue in San Francisco...

Bit Creature[^]:

In video games, territory often embodies a variety of aspects of meaningful play: storytelling through exploration or experimentation with the environment and the objects contained in it, the tactile or sensual experience of confronting level design, of solving for a goal, of feeling one’s way through to the next area. The territory contains loot, enemies, secrets, keys, NPCs, useless or superfluous junk. The territory is designed to look and feel a certain way, perhaps to elicit a certain emotional response or type of play. Sometimes territories are spatially linear, or nodal, or branching, or confusing and ethereal and broken up.working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email.

Gloria Mark[^]:

We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent
working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email.

Medium[^]:

I was asked recently by someone looking to possibly get into this field, “what does a normal day look like for you”? It’s a good question. I haven’t ever really thought about in before. I tell friends I sit on a computer all day and write code, but there’s a lot more to it that I just don’t think about usually. So, here’s an average day for me as front-end developer.