Facebook IPO

Look out, Palo Alto – there are about to be dozens of new millionaires, multi-millionaires, and even a few billionaires added to your ranks. Yep – Facebook’s IPO is right around the corner, and the prices have been set.

As someone who’s been involved with the web since ’96 or so, it’s always cool to see the industry growing and creating positive headlines. Say what you want about nerds, but we sure do have some of the best and most anticipated IPO’s!

And Mark Zuckerberg – with his unique blend of youth, intelligence, cunning and utter lack of personality – is re-defining the “entrepreneurial CEO” role in the process. At the end of the first day of trading, he’ll be comically wealthy (many, many billions), and somehow he’ll maintain a majority stake in the company. Or, more accurately, Mark’s re-definition of “preferred options” will leave him with 50%+ voting power, so he’ll be able to behave as if he does. It’s just amazing to watch from the sidelines.

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The Ballad of Tim Toady

Open-Minded Project Management

Choices

There’s an old saying among Perl programmers that has weaved its way into the developer’s lexicon:

There’s more than one way to do it

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The Little Schemer

I recently finished reading a great book called The Little Schemer.

The book walks through a series of problems and solutions using recursion in the Scheme programming language (a dialect of Lisp).  No previous knowledge of Scheme or Lisp is required.

This book teaches patterns for applying recursion.  By the end you’ll think of recursion as a tool to be used in the same way we think of using “for”, “do”, and “while” loops in imperative languages.

I now find that I “think recursively”.  I get it.  No longer does recursion require a stretch of the mind.  It doesn’t matter what language you use day-to-day, the lessons learned in this book apply everywhere.

It’s a short book, and it’s a lot of fun to read!  Take a look and you’ll be glad you did.

Newsflash: Mom leaves tech job at 5p.m.

Hardly a newsworthy story, or at least so I thought before reading the following article about Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/16/tech/web/cashmore-facebook-sandberg/index.html

Personally, I’ve never been psyched about working a ton of hours, and I do what I can to avoid it.  Of course there’s times where deadlines dictate burning the midnight oil: a client proposal,  quarterly tax paperwork, or overdue blog entries, as examples.  But, there’s a subtly-sinister productivity-eroding quality to working too much.  You may not even notice it.  But it’s definitely there, a fatigue or mental malaise that pervades daily life to the extent no amount of coffee or Crunk can fix it.

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Flashback!

Something tells me that the fine folks in Cupertino will not be enjoying their Spring break.  Yep – Apple has a full-scale trojan virus/malware thingy on their hands, and it appears to be exploiting Macs either exclusively, or more likely, as a matter of sheer convenience.

The “Flashback Virus” takes advantage of an older Java flaw that Apple didn’t release a patch for right away.  Once on your system, it goes looking for info (passwords, etc) and then reports back to a central server.  The infection percentage is something like 98% Mac OS, 2% “other”.  For much more detail, go to:  http://www.macworld.com/article/1166254/what_you_need_to_know_about_the_flashback_trojan.html

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I <negative_emotion> Windows 8!

Note:  The opinions in this blog post are exclusively mine, unless of course they exactly match your opinions, in which case, neat!

Double Plus Ungood

So far, I really don’t like Windows 8.  At all.

What’s weird is, I don’t think I’ve ever written a truly opinionated blog post.  Sure, my opinion creeps in here and there, but for the most part, I’m focused on providing something useful, and hopefully a little entertaining.  But something about my early experience with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview has compelled me to tear it apart.

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Prefix vs. Postfix Increment and Decrement Operators in C++

Here is how most programmers new to C-based languages are taught to write for a loop:

for (int i = 0; i < someValue; i++) {
    // Do something
}

Unfortunately this starts programmers off on the wrong foot by teaching them the bad habit of using i++ (postfix increment) as the default way to increment a value.  Using ++i (prefix increment) would work just as well since the result of the increment expression is not used by the containing expression (the for loop).  Here is the equivalent code using ++i¹:

for (int i = 0; i < someValue; ++i) {
    // Do something
}

It’s preferable to use prefix increment when the result of the increment is not used by the containing expression.  To see why, let’s first take a look at what the compiler generates when it encounters i++ and ++i.
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Corporate videos: viral boon or epic fail?

We’ve all seen the Superbowl ads where corporate behemoths use extreme sports, rubberized Sasquatch suits and anthropomorphized babies to shill their wares.

It’s perhaps the most raw exposure any marketing campaign could hope for.   A captive audience of hundreds of millions of people.  Most Superbowl ads are identifiable in terms of what the ad is for, some are humorous, a few are pithy, cogent or genuinely funny, and fewer still leave the viewer with a sense of interest in the product.  All are stupefyingly expensive.  And short.  And therein lies the rub.

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Recruitin’ Time!

Spring is historically a busy time of the year for recruiting here at Fairway. While we certainly get requests for work throughout the year, Spring is when we often see budgets get reset and new projects launch. As a growing services company, this (more times than not) translates to demand outpacing our existing supply, and we find ourselves looking to add new folks to the team.

Having done this for a while now, we’re all pretty used to our recruiting process. Ads, job boards, resumes, phone screens, interviews, etc…

Lather, rinse and repeat until you find the right person(s).

But this year – we’re hearing about a whole new trend out there.

Some companies are asking job applicants for their Facebook and Twitter ID’s and passwords.

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Reference vs. pointer parameters in C++

Reference and Pointer Parameters

A question that often arises when working with C++ is whether it’s better to use references or pointers for function parameters.  Both types of parameters provide the ability for a function to indirectly access an object in the calling environment.  This indirect access provides several benefits:

1. The object referred/pointed to by the argument does not need to be copied in order for the function to have access to that object’s value
2. The function can directly modify the object referred/pointed to by the argument
3. The function can take parameters of types that do not allow copying

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