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Big update this week! First, I updated the logo. I rotated the cubes 45 degrees to try and convey a better sense of speed and movement. What do you think? Next, I added support for 4K screenshots. Now I can hit Alt-S and my renderer resizes all of its buffers to 4096x2304 (biggest 16:9 resolution supported by XNA), renders the scene, saves it to a PNG, then resizes everything back to normal.
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A curated collection of personal reminders, quotes, and principles on leadership, technology, and living well
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A curated collection of personal reminders, quotes, and principles on leadership, technology, and living well
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Like Josh, I prefer to navigate with swipes rather than taps. However, unlike him, I prefer tidy swiping — that is, I prefer my apps not to register my gestures unless I begin them in certain areas, such as the extreme left side of the screen: whenever I want to go back in an app’s visual hierarchy, for example, I put my finger up against my case’s left bumper and swipe across; it would be confusing and annoying if I made an accidental righ..
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Lost in the shiny new features (see: namespaces and closures ) PHP 5.3 also added the __invoke method. While not plainly apparent, it is secretly an amazingly useful 'magic method' . If you're not taking advantage of __invoke, you should be . Why? It provides a uniform execution points for objects that have a doPrimaryAction() style method. What do I mean by this? Many simple, single responsibility objects have a usage that goes ....
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Lost in the shiny new features (see: namespaces and closures ) PHP 5.3 also added the __invoke method. While not plainly apparent, it is secretly an amazingly useful 'magic method' . If you're not taking advantage of __invoke, you should be . Why? It provides a uniform execution points for objects that have a doPrimaryAction() style method. What do I mean by this? Many simple, single responsibility objects have a usage that goes ....
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pAt theScore, we have a big JSON API with hundreds of end-points that expose sports data. Since sports data is very rich, the JSON representation of most of the resources on our API tend to be complex. As a result, a lot of time is spent on generating JSON in our Rails application./p pAt the time we wrote the API, a href=https://github.com/nesquena/rablRABL/a was a great choice. When a href=https://github.com/rails-api/active_model_serializ....
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Over a year of presenting agile fundamentals to teams has taught me that the topic of estimation seems to strike fear and horror into people. The process of estimating seems to go something like this:
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Lean product design is a software development process for creating innovative new products. It enables businesses to get their product to market fast, validate it frequently with users, and continuously respond to feedback. The process involves interweaving lightweight design and user research throughout an agile development process, rather than relying on most of the product design and research to be done up front.
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Connection pooling is quickly becoming one of the more frequent questions I hear. So here’s a primer on it. If there’s enough demand I’ll follow up a bit further with some detail on specific Postgres connection poolers and setting them up. The basics For those unfamiliar, a connection pool is a group of database connections sitting around that are waiting to be handed out and used. This means when a request comes in a connection is ....
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Connection pooling is quickly becoming one of the more frequent questions I hear. So here’s a primer on it. If there’s enough demand I’ll follow up a bit further with some detail on specific Postgres connection poolers and setting them up. The basics For those unfamiliar, a connection pool is a group of database connections sitting around that are waiting to be handed out and used. This means when a request comes in a connection is ....
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Corporate Graffiti - Being Disruptive With Visual Thinking
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www.thoughtworks.com
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12 years ago
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eng
Disruptive thinking, done visually. It’s about making your thought process visible to others to affect change. It’s about corporate graffiti as an influencing technique.
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More than two years ago, a company called Nosh got quite a bit of attention for their inventive approach to the generally unremarkable 404 error page: rather than the usual, bland description or even a poor attempt at humor, the folks over at Nosh made a video, and a fantastic one at that. I won’t spoil it for you here, but I will say this: this video stands the test of time in a way that few other things from even two years ago do; it’s ju..
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Junior programmers will often ask, “Which language should I use?”, “Which programming language is the best?”, and when they discover this new hip programming language that’s meant to solve all of their scaling problems, they get in your face and mock you for not using it for every single task. They will write blog posts titled “X language for Y programmers” in hopes of converting the masses to their newfound toy. Smug senior programmers ....
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Junior programmers will often ask, “Which language should I use?”, “Which programming language is the best?”, and when they discover this new hip programming language that’s meant to solve all of their scaling problems, they get in your face and mock you for not using it for every single task. They will write blog posts titled “X language for Y programmers” in hopes of converting the masses to their newfound toy. Smug senior programmers ....
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Going Beyond Technology: Lalit Pant's Journey with Scala
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www.thoughtworks.com
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12 years ago
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eng
Lalit Pant is a prominent Scala contributor based out of Dehradun. He is the creator of a learning software platform called Kojo. We invited him to give the keynote at the First Annual Pune Scala Symposium where he demoed the power and simplicity of Kojo.
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For better or worse — better in my opinion, but clearly worse if you looked at my bank statement — money has always been nothing more than the means to an end for me, and not a goal in and of itself. I want to have a good job where I can work hard and receive appropriate compensation after a job well done, but outside of a safety net should said job fall through, a costly, once in a lifetime opportunity arise, or an unexpected bill arrive i....
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Our universe is comprised of a seemingly infinite number of rules ranging from little tidbits like magnetism and inertia, to the unchangable truths of buyer's remorse and Steam downtime occurring on a weekend. Still, there is another rule that seems to be more faithful than gravity itself: given ‘n’ public facing IP addresses, you will receive ‘n+1’ requests for their allocation. Six IPs? I'll see your six IPs and raise you seven servers.
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That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” - William Shakespeare Or would it? Despite what Juliet argues in Romeo and Juliet, names do matter. Moving to a new office space in Chicago in 2006 created an opportunity to rebrand the Thoughtworks space and honor progressive innovators and leaders at the same time. Here’s how we did it.
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Over the past week especially, there has been a fair bit of discussion devoted to podcasting’s so-called “Blogger moment”. In particular, John Gruber and Mike Monteiro discussed this on the latest episode of The Talk Show , and Myke Hurley and Casey Liss spent some time talking about it on CMD+SPACE 96: Not Many Original Thoughts, with Casey Liss as well. In a nutshell, the idea is that just as Blogger brought blogging to the masses in t..
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Graphs are among the most interesting and useful objects in mathematics. Any situation or idea that can be described by objects with connections is a graph, and one of the most prominent examples of a real-world graph that one can come up with is a social network. Recall, if you aren’t already familiar with this blog’s gentle introduction to graphs, that a graph $ G$ is defined by a set of vertices $ V$, and a set of edges $ E$, each of whi..
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Graphs are among the most interesting and useful objects in mathematics. Any situation or idea that can be described by objects with connections is a graph, and one of the most prominent examples of a real-world graph that one can come up with is a social network. Recall, if you aren’t already familiar with this blog’s gentle introduction to graphs, that a graph $ G$ is defined by a set of vertices $ V$, and a set of edges $ E$, each of whi..
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Graphs are among the most interesting and useful objects in mathematics. Any situation or idea that can be described by objects with connections is a graph, and one of the most prominent examples of a real-world graph that one can come up with is a social network. Recall, if you aren’t already familiar with this blog’s gentle introduction to graphs, that a graph $ G$ is defined by a set of vertices $ V$, and a set of edges $ E$, each of whi..
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At the intersection of science and fun-filled Friday nights you find neat tricks rooted in the former and potentially immensely helpful in the latter, such as this one. I still have a couple of years until I have to worry about this, but I might as well get ready now. Permalink.
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Moving VIM .swp Files Vim has this annoying habit of creating .swp files in your current working directory when you're editing a file. I found a better way (inspired by this stackoverflow thread). To change this, create three new folders to house all your .swp files... mkdir -p ~/.vim/{backup_files,swap_files,undo_files} Then add the following lines to your .vimrc file… set backupdir=~/.vim/backup_files// set directory=~/.vim/swap_files// s..
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In Part 5 of our interview series with testers who are upping the testing ante, we chat with Justin Rohrman (@JustinRohrman). Justin is a long time tester and an instructor for the Black Box Software Testing classes run by the Association for Software Testing (AST). He is also a Miagi-do black belt, and was part of the review committee for the Testing & Quality Assurance Track at Agile 2013 and 2014. In particular, his interests lie at the..
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Incredible video by Gary Turk teaching the value of living life outside of the narrow world within our smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Take a few minutes to watch this; I do not feel out of place saying that it just might change your life. Truly remarkable work. Permalink.
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Relative to last week’s , and compared to the week prior’s , another relatively short list this time around, unfortunately. But, as I have said before, volume and quality are rarely linked: I will never pad these out with shows of dubious value just to reach an arbitrary length. This is a curated list of the best podcasts I discovered within the last week, and so it will forever remain. Permalink.
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Combining Bloom Filter Offloading and Storage Indexes on Exadata
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tanelpoder.com
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12 years ago
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eng
Here’s a little known feature of Exadata – you can use a Bloom filter computed from a join column of a table to skip disk I/Os against another table it is joined to. This not the same as the Bloom filtering of the datablock contents in Exadata storage cells, but rather avoiding reading in some storage regions from the disks completely. So, you can use storage indexes to skip I/Os against your large fact table, based on a bloom fil....
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Combining Bloom Filter Offloading and Storage Indexes on Exadata
-
tanelpoder.com
-
12 years ago
-
eng
Here’s a little known feature of Exadata – you can use a Bloom filter computed from a join column of a table to skip disk I/Os against another table it is joined to. This not the same as the Bloom filtering of the datablock contents in Exadata storage cells, but rather avoiding reading in some storage regions from the disks completely. So, you can use storage indexes to skip I/Os against your large fact table, based on a bloom fil....
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Although I don’t watch television, I’ve been watching the episodes of The Goldbergs online because it’s absolutely hilarious and I relate to a lot of the stuff in it from my own childhood experiences. The final episode of season 1 was this week, and it starts off by talking about how the father never bragged about past events (no matter how cool), and would occasionally say something that totally made you think you knew nothing about him ;..
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Although I don’t watch television, I’ve been watching the episodes of The Goldbergs online because it’s absolutely hilarious and I relate to a lot of the stuff in it from my own childhood experiences. The final episode of season 1 was this week, and it starts off by talking about how the father never bragged about past events (no matter how cool), and would occasionally say something that totally made you think you knew nothing about him ;..
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We just updated the build servers with the latest version of the Codename One iOS VM. This is still a work in progress and there is no guarantee your application will work. However, you can start playing with this right now and you might enjoy some of the benefits including proper stack traces, faster builds, smaller code size & faster performance. To try this just define the build argument ios.newVM=true
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There are many subtle joys associated with working almost exclusively in the command line all day: tab completion, a simple interface, and unix pipes . Like general command-line mastery, learning how to wrest unix pipes to your best advantage can translate into a wide variety of benefits. Don't get me wrong, when you need a scripting language, use a fully fledged scripting language – bash isn't going to juggle diverse data types and c....
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