Finding awesome developers in programming interviews

In a job interview, I once asked a very experienced embedded software developer to write a program that reverses a string and prints it on the screen. He struggled with this basic task. This man was awesome. Give him a bucket of spare parts, and he could build a robot and program it to navigate around the room. He had worked on satellites that are now in actual orbit. He could have coded circles around me. But the one thing that he had never, ever needed to do was: display something on the screen.

Why don't web browsers do this?

Why don't web pages start as fast as this computer from 1984?

Four ways of handling asynchronous operations in node.js

Javascript was not designed to do asynchronous operations easily. If it were, then writing asynchronous code would be as easy as writing blocking code. Instead, developers in node.js need to manage many levels of callbacks. Today, we will examine four different methods of performing the same task asynchronously, in node.js.

Keeping Abreast of Pornographic Research in Computer Science

Burgeoning numbers of Ph.D's and grad students are choosing to study pornography. Techniques for the analysis of "objectionable images" are gaining increased attention (and grant money) from governments and research institutions around the world, as well as Google. But what, exactly, does computer science have to do with porn? In the name of academic persuit, let's roll up our sleeves and plunge deeply into this often hidden area that lies between the covers of top-shelf research journals.

Exploiting perceptual colour difference for edge detection

Think colour isn't important in image processing algorithms? Let's try it both ways, and see for yourself.

Free, Raw Stock Data

Scraping financial information is easy with my friend, python.

The strange man reading a novel in the meeting room

Why is a visitor reading a novel all week in the meeting room?

Copy a cairo surface to the windows clipboard

I just spent several hours debugging clipboard copy of a DIB image. I could copy from my application, and paste into Paint. I could paste into Word. But if I pasted into WordPad, nothing showed up. If I pasted into GIMP, it crashed.

You don't need a project/solution to use the VC++ debugger

You learn a lot of things on the job as a programmer. Years ago, at my first coop position, I was a little confused when my boss went to Visual C++, and tried to open the .EXE file as a project. What a dolt! I thought. That's not going to work.

Tool for Creating UML Sequence Diagrams

If you have to draw something called "UML Sequence Diagrams" for work or school, you already know that it can take hours to get a diagram to look right. Here's a web site that will save you some time.