sunraa

Priceless: http://www-math.mit.edu/~djk/calculus_beginners/chapter00/se...

0.1 What You Should Know

To study calculus it is essential that you are able to breathe. Without that ability you will soon die, and be unable to continue.

Beyond that, you will need some familiarity with two notions: the notion of a number, and that of a function.

From Jan 26th: http://web.archive.org/web/20170126072506/https://open.white...

Bulk of them seem to be reports to Congress regarding staff with the odd climate change adaptation task force.

Forgive my ignorance ... What are the advantages of using icon systems such as Iconic & Fontawesome as opposed to using Unicode character codes. Maybe not all various icons are available in Unicode? And Unicode is geared towards language? thoughts?

Per the NYT: "But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start... (October 12)

And from today (Oct 21): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-nee...

In a previous life I worked on similar software development projects at the US State level. This project was several orders of magnitude larger in scope and in complexity than what I worked on. Assuming a generous start date for Spring - say March 1 - this boils down to ~7 months to design and develop to the Oct 1 hard deadline. Nearly impossible in my opinion.

I'm not discounting that there couldn't be issues else where in whole process. These would include: communication overhead between all the various agencies and contractors, integration nightmares, and not enough skilled folks at Medicare to manage all of this. But having the requirements delivered several months before roll-out seems to me a recipe for disaster.

Do you have an timeframe for adding the other services? And what might those be?

They have a fair amount of pretty good TV programming (subjective I admit). They also have a significant amount of kids TV programming which is not to be underestimated.

I just went through the process of changing passwords to sentences. You'd be surprised at how many sites do not allow sentences.

It seems it was only a matter of time until Ive took over as true heir apparent to SJ in this respect. Will be interesting to see how the relationship with Cook works and if it pans out in a similar fashion as it did with SJ+Cook.

Ahhh that keyboard! by far the best I've ever used on a laptop. I think I started with a 770 going back almost 15 years ago to a t61 and the keyboard was rock solid. Switched to a MBP and still long for that keyboard.

FB, Twitter, and YT were incredibly small teams of less than a handful who knew exactly what they wanted to build. Expectations were minimal or non-existent when they launched. They didn't have a corporate board, a CEO, or Wall Street looking over their shoulders for monetization.

Looking from the outside, they seem to have a dysfunctional culture around shipping software with all the additional layers of management. Hopefully this changes and they have a chance producing meaningful products but I'm not hopeful.

Good points. It's very easy to fall into the 'desktop first, mobile second' camp. Again it depends on the client and requirements.

The author raises a good point about page load times not really being minimized and lack of thought around good responsive design. However, I'm unconvinced about the rest of the arguments.

For example, he notes "The first rule in usability 101 is to give the end user what they expect." Maybe for the first year or two in the smartphone era it might have been acceptable to simply provide a shrunken zoomed out version of the site. The onus would have been on the user to navigate appropriately. Which... is a lot of work. My (swiftly getting older) eyes appreciate the larger fonts and readability that in theory a responsive design provides. I now expect to be able to read am article in portrait mode with a decent font size without having to zoom in and out. Maybe I'm alone but I would not be surprised if more users expect this now.

Why do I get the feeling that you're probably right about underpricing myself :)

More comment than question.. I'm trying to sign my first consulting client after a long stint in the enterprise world. I really had to struggle to not underbid. I went through the same thought process as you discussed and in the end I'm glad that I didn't underbid. Hopefully the client signs but if not, there'll be others.

Thanks for a very timely podcast (at least for me). Now to read the rest.

I'm slowly migrating to electronic form but sometimes habits are just plain hard to break. :)

Cannot emphasize the note taking process enough. I did this quite often early on. Don't forget to review them either. After a point it starts to sink in. I'm still a pen and paper person but would highly recommend either method

I'm not sure I find much to quibble with in the essay. In fact I find it almost prescient. Having worked with Java in an enterprise setting for over 12 years almost everything in that essay rings true. As we are acutely aware the enterprise beast moves to a very different beat - namely the vendors looking to make their numbers for the year. You're an IBM shop or a Microsoft shop. The decision's been made for you. And there's nothing wrong with that. As someone else pointed out, you're buying tooling, support and in the case of IBM - hardware. It is the almost the COBOL of this generation.

As much it pains me to admit it, Nikes' "Just Do It" applies here (and in life) as the author has learned. The procrastination and anxiety that comes with tackling something new can be overwhelming. The task oriented approach narrows focus and makes you think about what you need to learn. Fear is also a great motivator especially when your lead is breathing down your neck with a 'JGID - just get it done' attitude. :)

Lots of props to the blog author for going through the hoops that I suppose we should all be going through. I've always placed the CC books up there in the pantheon of great software engineering books. This is a chink in the armor and I hope Mr McConnell takes the time to provide a response although I'm not holding my breath. Another object lesson in not accepting things at face value.

James Duncan Davidson - noted photographer and software developer - has played with image delivery for Retina quite a bit. He details much of it on his blog: http://duncandavidson.com/blog/2012/08/retina_ready

Essentially he currently uses Picturefill (https://github.com/scottjehl/picturefill). From Davidsons' blog: "It’s a compact bit of JavaScript which supports a syntax that mimics the Picture Element Proposal. In a nutshell, it uses CSS media queries to sort out the most appropriate image to use out of a set."

Looks promising.

I'm about to do an multi-week after school "Intro to Programming" session at our local elementary/middle school in Scratch in Baltimore city. 8-10 weeks for 5th to 7th graders. It is an urban school with quite a range in the kids' abilities and not all kids have working computers at home. It'll be a challenge but I think the kids will surprise me.

Last school year I taught 2nd graders a little bit using Scratch and many of them got it and with a bit more exposure this year they could be creating programs on their own.

Some first person accounts from a SW engineering perspective from Peter Adler & Fred Martin - both from the MIT lab that developed the LM Guidance software.

http://www.history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.1201-pa.html http://www.history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.1201-fm.html

Having toyed with Vim in the past I was never convinced enough to switch. I guess I've never truly seen it 'in action'. I'll have to watch these videos. Thanks for the link.

Use of drones the U.S. is a done deal courtesy of the recently passed aviation bill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/house-approves-aviation...

Switched recently from Textmate to Sublime for almost everything but iOS related work. So far so good.

On a slightly less controversial tangent, the author did a nice job explaining getting up and running with her first program as well as explaining what programming does. The comments at the article thus far are mainly from programmers. It would be interesting to see how much non-technical folks take away from it.

His real constituents are the various companies that make up the banking sector - not the people in his district. Cynical? sure... but his sponsorship of this bill is very much in line with his almost republican-like business views. It's all about the benjamins.