Alain de Botton gives us a refreshing perspective on success and failure on his witty presentation at TED
Watch the recording + comments at TED
Archive for the 'To ponder about' Category
A famous loose-cannon/American billionaire has a plan for unseating Google from its search-engine throne – and at a mere $1bn, his idea is significantly less expensive than the billions Microsoft is sinking into that Bing thing.
Broadcast.com co-founder and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s idea is simplicity itself: Just pay the top 1,000 websites a million bucks per to de-list themselves from Google.
Read the full article at The Register.
It dawned on me that many applications still use the old 3.5 floppy disk icon for the save button. While it is almost second nature to us, what kind of impression would it have on someone who has never seen or used one before?
An article by Esther Schindler discussing how it is often a good idea to start coding from scratch instead of trying to patch the big mess you created the last time when meeting a deadline.
Becoming a Great Programmer: Use Your Trash Can
I’ve come to believe that all great software is written three times. The first time you write it, it’s to see if your idea can work at all. It’s the digital equivalent of scratching something out on the back of the envelope, leaving out the fancy stuff and just concentrating on the basic feature or algorithm. Once you figure out that yes, this might be a good way to solve the problem, then you write the code a second time, to “make it work.” But it’s the third time you write the code, when you’ve had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes from the “try to make it work” phase, when your application will be the best it can be. (Well, almost. There’s often a 3.1, too. Even great software has a few bugs.)