Very impressive (and short) talk at TED that show that maps.bing.com is moving fast in the direction of Google maps.
Author Archives: greenido
2010 Mavericks in Half Moon bay
This is the competition we are going to watch tomorrow…
Amazing place with great surfers.
What can I say? Panama man! Panama is the place for surfers
Ahh…. thanks to Yaron – I’ve saw this clip and I’m planing my trip down to Panama.
What an amazing waves!
PHP is now faster then Java (almost)
It was great to read this blog post Facebook HipHop for PHP. I always like to see big companies like: Yahoo, Google, Facebook etc’ contributing back to the open source community. It seems ‘only’ fair to do it after you leverage open source product in order to build business that worth billions. After read it, I found one big mistake in the middle of the post:
“…This is compared to more traditional compiled languages like C++ and interpreted languages like Java.”
C’mon guys, I guess you wanted to write java script and not Java. Any way, it’s very good new approch that will help us (and lot of other) to improve their hardware usage.
As for Java – it’s still much faster then PHP and other languages. But like in other cases, if you take into consideration that TCO (Total cost of ownership) it’s much better to use languages like PHP, Python, Perl for web development due to the freedom they give you to make lots of changes quickly.
Thank you FB.
Web Design in 2010 is not what you think
Very good, short (less then 5min) video from SXSW 2009. Just as early filmmakers struggled to break free from the conventions of live theater, after 10+ years Web designers are still trapped in the structures of the past. Forget pages, linear text and other archaic vestiges of design’s print ancestry; the separation of content from presentation has already changed everything. I sign on every word…
Forget your MBA
It’s a great talk that David Heineimeier Hansson gave in Stanford last week. For those of you that are not developers (or geeks) – DHH, is the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37 Signals. This company build (with Ruby on Rails) some very useful/powerful/popular colaboration tools. All are using this ‘strange’ business model of getting money from users that like your product 🙂 The main thing he claim in this talk was that planning is guessing, and for a start-up, the focus must be on today and not on tomorrow. I would add, focus on monitization and not only the product/technology. In a new industry, don’t plan, work like Nike saying: ‘just do it’. It’s not 5 year plan that you need, but rather 2-4 weeks.
Another very important point, tune your skill for the real world and not the academic style.
He is a great speaker and worth an hour of your valuable time.
Here is a link to get the mp3 version so you could listen to it on your next run/car ride/commute etc’.
Enjoy.
Apple’s new Tablet or the big iPhone
Let’s be honest, the iPhone is an amazing device but you won’t say that its killer feature is the phone. I guess that apple, very inelegantly, understood that they now have everything in place to lunch the tablet and to make it a hit. Unlike microsoft that wanted to do it 6-7 years ago without any support to their vision, Apple now ‘have everything’ in terms of:
- Business model with framework to support it. The iTune and then App Store give apple huge advantage (or you can look at that as very high entry barrier to all the other players in the game like: Microsoft, Dell, HP) when it comes to how people will consume software (who said games? movies? songs?) on such a tool. It’s all in motion and in place. Everyone today (I mean, all the ones that have iPod), know that you can lunch the iTune and there you can get all your: movies, Tv shows, Songs and now even free applications (again who said games? Farm Vil…). It’s easy and it’s working plus, it looks great.
- The iPhone and it’s ‘know how’ will give apple very important knowladge on how to build this tablet to be useful. Keyboard usage… and other patents will play into their hands so this device won’t be like their 90′ Newton (Yes – I had one :).
I’m not an expert in hardware companies, but it seems that apple as a company (and as a stock) going to do very very well after this tablet will ‘get’ the high end market of ‘netbooks’. Just like Apple is doing with its laptop and their 90% share in the segment of expensive (=more then 1000$) laptop.
Kudos to Steve and his gang.
Good Developers And The Real World (part 1)
I’ve been programming since I was 6. It was the good old days of Commodor (64 and Vic) and then apple IIe and IIc.
*Sign* ahh… I was so young and passion about computers back then + life seems to be very good back then.
Everything was black or white. Simple 🙂
Here are my most memorable lessons I’ve remember in the past 22 years of coding:
- Always search before you build. There is no point in building the same wheel (anyone, said framework?) again and again and again.
- Don’t over design. Build first something that works and solve your problem and later come back and improve: code, performance etc’.
- Don’t fall into the student syndrome – In other words, don’t push your work and try to hack something in the last minute. You (=the student and the project) will fail.
- Use the right tool for the job – choose a language, framework, design pattern that solve you problem in the best way. Never the other way around. Moreover, don’t get in love with a language (e.g. Java) just because it is cool.
- Always backup your code – trivial… specially, after the first time your harddisk is ‘gone’ and you lost 4months (or years) of work.
- Learn and then learn and then keep Learning more – You must keep yourself updated with new stuff. In these days, every day/week there is something new you should be on top of. You must keep with the flow of info in order to be better coder.
- Change is constant – Your knowledge of technology/programming/life should be similar to how you treat stocks: Diversify.
Don’t get too comfortable with a particular technology. If there’s not enough support for that language or technology, you might as well start updating your resume now and start your training period. Who said “Java” and who said “Python”? - Open good communication between all the experts in the company or in other words, creative collaboration of domain experts and developer experts.
This is one of the critical and key success factor to any successful project. You must nature and advocate to open good communication. People should feel comfortable to speak their mind and to point that the king is naked as soon as they recognize it. We all know that the ‘answer’ is some where in the organization and the people that need it should be able to get to the right people on the right time. - How is your web application / software / feature is going to change and help the organization?
This is one of the most important question you need to ask yourself and push in a direction that will answer it in the best way.
I have a lot more, but I had enough time to write a short post. If you have some more urgent lessons, please feel free to add them here in the comments.
Ido Green 