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Your Version Control and Build Systems Don't Scale
Let's spend a minute and talk about the performance of a tool you use every day: your build system. For this purpose, they're all the same, so let's assume you use GNU Make. For a no-op build, what is Make's running time? You know, that O(N) stuff.
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Is Good Code Impossible?
I'm a Staff iOS Developer living in Denver, Colorado, who's been building mobile apps for 17 years!
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What Business is Wall Street In?
My last two posts were designed to stimulate discussion. But lets talk the real problem that regulators, public companies, investor/shareholders and traders face. The problem is that Wall Street doesn’t know what business it is in. Regulators don’t know what the business of Wall Street is. Investor/shareholders don’t…
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Engineer #2 at Mint.com on when to join a startup
Having been an engineer at a startup I empathize with people who are being recruited into startups especially if it's their first startup. The key
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Teach Like You're the Student
“I never have let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain Every time I see my graduate students try to teach for the first time, it’s usually so painful I bite my lip. Then I …
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Build your own Startup Death Clock
Here's a simple, powerful trick for focussing your mind on one of the most important things about your startup: The date that you run out of money.
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Who killed Prolog?
There are a thousand programming languages out there (Literally, it seems, according to people who actually count such things.) A classification of so many species is bound to be complex and subjec…
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Why C Is Not Assembly
In response to a previous article a poster in some forum called me an idiot and said "everybody knows that C is a portable assembly languag...
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Thoughts on Clojure
Programming Zen is a blog about programming and emerging technologies, authored by Antonio Cangiano, a Software Development Manager and AI Evangelist at IBM.
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The Building Blocks of Ruby
When showing off cool features of Ruby to the uninitiated (or to a language sparring partner [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1099305/why-is-ruby-more-suitable-for-rails-than-python/1099367] ), the excited Rubyist often shows off Ruby's "powerful block syntax". Unfortunately, the Rubyist uses "powerful block…
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In praise of git’s index
I still run into people lambasting Git for the concept of the index from time to time. It seems strange and superfluous to users of other VCS s – like a speed bump that serves no purpose. Why not just commit the changes in the working copy? This perception is understandable; when I first heard of Git, back as a…
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Programmer feel-good quote
From a bit to a few hundred megabytes, from a microsecond to a half an hour of computing confronts us with completely baffling ratio of 10 9...
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Changing Passwords
How often should you change your password? I get asked that question a lot, usually by people annoyed at their employer’s or bank’s password expiration policy: people who finally memorized their current password and are realizing they’ll have to write down their new password. How could that possibly be more secure…
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Pure CSS Twitter Fail Whale
This domain name has been registered with Gandi.net. It is currently parked by the owner.
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The Importance of Abandoning Crap
Curating the intersection of modern lifestyle and technical obsession. We are currently architecting our systems for the upcoming launch.
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Yacc is dead: An update
The draft of " Yacc is Dead " that David Darais and I posted on arXiv received some attention, so we'd like to share updates and feedback.