programming

How Many Hours Can a Programmer Program?

January 5, 2012

I am a little late to this party where Michael Arrington says that startups mean working hard and sleeping under your desk. But I will add a few words. I read a lot of commentary about how such death marches can be counter-productive and ultimately unsuccessful, and also the real dangers they pose to the […]

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Software Development While Having a Child

September 18, 2011

One thing that always seems to come up when discussing about programming outside of work is the question of what to do when you have a family? Don’t you have responsibilities towards your spouse and children? Don’t they deserve your time? Can you simply lock the door to your home office room and ignore everything […]

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Passionate Programming versus Caring Programming

September 13, 2011

Oren Eini (aka Ayende @ Rahien) replies to a job seeker who doesn’t have any source code outside of work: Put simply, we are looking for a .NET developer and one of the most important things that we look for is passion. In general, we have found that people that care and are interested in […]

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Becoming a Great Programmer

September 8, 2011

On the lines of Peter Norvig’s article about teaching yourself programming in 10 years, Mike Lewis (“Apoch”) writes a nice post about how to become a good programmer in just six “simple” steps: Get in it for the long haul. Write Lots of Code. Read Even More Code. Learn Many Languages. Master a Couple. Create a Language. Learn […]

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Questions to Resolve While Writing Data Synchronization Code

July 7, 2011

My home laptop fell a few days ago and the power button stopped working until I got new parts shipped and replaced. Everything went back to normal or so I thought until I opened Google Chrome on another system I was using, and found that the bookmarks I had added in the last few days […]

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Stops, Not Speed, Determine Programming Velocity

May 23, 2011

Have you had the experience where you estimated the travel time from A to B, in say, 30 minutes, traveled all but one mile in 25 minutes, felt pleased about it and then got stuck in multiple red lights in that last mile and reached your destination 10 minutes late? You might shave a few […]

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True, But Useless Information

May 1, 2011

From an old article by Paul Graham: In a recent talk I said […] that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project. […] I meant that Python programmers are smart. It’s a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And […]

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Improving Programming Productivity

April 30, 2011

Paul Homer has a post listing several ways in which you can waste your time while programming. Much of the waste comes from lack of thought about how to write code, primarily because people jump directly from specs into coding without thinking about how they can structure their code well. I sometimes read articles about […]

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Bottom-Up Design

April 29, 2011

The strangest thing I have read in the recent past (emphasis mine): In his classic “Clean Code” Robert C. Martin describes a great (and widely adopted) way to object oriented programming. He says code should read from top to bottom like prose. Start with the most high-level concepts and break them down into lower-level pieces. […]

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Commented Out Code

April 21, 2011

This post at Visual Studio Magazine by Peter Vogel has invited a lot of contempt (via Rob Conery): I never delete code — you never know when you might want it back. So I spend a lot of time commenting out code. I do this so often, and mousing up to the menu takes so […]

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