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Ah source control, if there’s a more essential tool which indiscriminately spans programming languages without favour, I’m yet to see it. It’s an essential component of how so many of us work; the lifeblood of many development teams, if you like. So why do we often get it so wrong? Why are some of the really core, fundamentals of version control systems often so poorly understood?

I boil it down to 10 practices – or “commandments” if you like – which often break down or are not properly understand to begin with. These are all relevant to version control products of all types and programming languages of all flavours. I’ll pick some examples from Subversion and .NET but they’re broadly applicable to other technologies.

This is a place to find information about some of the more fundamental algorithms used in computer science. This information is widely available on the net, but hopefully the way it's presented and discussed here will resonate with you.

Most of these are things you wouldn't need to write yourself. Modern libraries and languages tend to have quality implementations for all of this. Nonetheless, I truly believe that understanding how things work is key to improving how we work.

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.

I've rarely been as excited about anything related to web development as when making the switch to Ruby a couple of years ago. But it was when my fellow student from ITP, Greg Borenstein introduced me to Sinatra that I first noticed how perfect an environment Ruby is for web dev beginners.

In this post I will try to illustrate why I think Ruby and Sinatra should be the preferred environment for students who have never programmed before - and why it beats PHP any time.

Many technologies we use as Cocoa/Cocoa Touch developers stand untouched by the faint of heart because often we simply don’t understand them and employing them can seem a daunting task. One of those technologies is found in Core Animation and is referred to as the CATiledLayer. It seems like a magical sort of technology because so much of its implementation is a bit of a black box and this fact contributes to it being misunderstood. CATiledLayer simply provides a way to draw very large images without incurring a severe memory hit. This is important no matter where you’re deploying, but it especially matters on iOS devices as memory is precious and when the OS tells you to free up memory, you better be able to do so or your app will be brought down. This blog post is intended to demonstrate that CATiledLayer works as advertised and implementing it is not as hard as it may have once seemed.

Jenkins monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

After a long time bouncing back and forth, I’ve come back to TextMate as my main editor. I realize that’s starting to sound almost old-school these days, but it still works the best for me.

What I’ve come to realize about TextMate versus, say, Vim, or RubyMine is that a) this is a genuinely personal decision and different people are just more comfortable with some tools than other and b) it comes down to what each tool makes easy and how useful that is.

For instance, RubyMine. RubyMine makes navigating a project super easy, which is great, since I do that all the time. It also makes refactoring easy, which is less useful because in practice I use the automated refactoring less. Vim makes manipulating text, if not easy, at least powerful, but again, I find myself doing that less. And the thing that Vim makes hard, having to keep track of modes, absolutely drives me crazy.

Anyway, TextMate. TextMate makes creating new snippets and triggers very easy, and doesn’t make anything particularly hard. That said, I have seen in some of my pairing around that a lot of Ruby developers don’t know about all the tools that give TextMate some of the features of RubyMine and Vim. So here are a dozen or so things that you can to to make TextMate work for you.

headache relief for programmers :: regular expression generator

Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

Map reduce is a powerful tool to process and aggregate batch data. While performance benefits are often cited as the main draw, clarity and simplicity are the real advantage it offers us normal programmers.

This is a tutorial for using REXML, a pure Ruby XML processor.

Read/write access to your Delicious bookmarks and tags via an HTTP-based interface

I'm trying to amass a list of programming books with opensource licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL, etc. The books can be about a particular programming language or about computers in general.

What are some freely available programming books on the internet?

Excuse me while I self-document something. I've been using Excel for years. I've done some crazy stuff with Excel. One of the more tame things that I've done is track my finances with it. I have a spreadsheet that I've entered all my bills and especially indicated all the ones that automatically withdraw from my bank account.

However, I want to know the next time they're going to come out. I can tell you the next time something will come out whether it's monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly. And I even have conditional formatting in place to colour code when things are more urgent.

Doesn’t the title say it all? There are a wide variety of tools and techniques which can drastically improve the speed at which we code. Particularly during time-sensitive settings, even a savings of a few seconds per iteration can add up substantially over the course of the month. I’ll show you ten of my favorite methods in this article.

There are some misconceptions that shell scripts are only for a CLI environment. You can easily use various tools to write GUI and/or network (socket) scripts under KDE or Gnome desktops. Shell scripts can make use of some of the GUI widget (menus, warning boxs, progress bars etc). You can always control the final output, cursor position on screen, various output effects, and so on. With the following tools you can build powerful, interactive, user friendly UNIX / Linux bash shell scripts.


Creating GUI application is not just expensive task but task that takes time and patience. Luckily, both UNIX and Linux ships with plenty of tools to write beautiful GUI scripts. The following tools are tested on FreeBSD and Linux operating systems but should work under other UNIX like operating systems.

If cars were built like software then...well, I don't know squat about building cars so who knows. It might be kinda cool. But probably not.

Are you a creative type that would like to get started with designing and prototyping with Processing?
In this excerpt from Visualizing Data Ben Fry introduces the Processing Environment and quickly gets you sketching
with Processing.

Free books on technology subjects.

Highest quality computer books all of which are available for free download