Category: English

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Is Writing Code a Career Limiting Move?

From time to time I think about my future in the computer industry. What I do best, without a doubt, is computer programming. I’m not sure I’m management material, but I really have no idea. I’m considered pretty good at what I do, which is directly related to the following traits:

  • I take interest in the computer science world in general and programming in particular.
  • I care about the code that I write.

However, I never see myself advancing up the company ladder, because writing code seems to be a career limiting move, especially if you’re good at it. For example, if you care about what you’re doing you might get into arguments with management over some design decision that you think is wrong. In turn, it would make you look like you’re not a team player. It might even just look to everyone else that you’re not such a nice guy. I’m not the only one thinking about it… Tom Ball of Sun Microsystems talks a little about why writing code could be a career limiting move. (via Artima)

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Telemarketers counter script

Telemarketers are awful. Usually I just hang up on them a few seconds after the call begins, whether we said our goodbyes or not. It is well known that telemarketers follow a script to get what they want and also handle resistance by the callee. Now there’s a counter-script, which you can use to question the telemarketer and even handle those telemarketers who do not cooperate. (via Lifehacker)

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I’m curious about Second Life

Second Life is a virtual world I recently heard about. I’m very curious about it, as it seems people are really getting into it as a place to hang out, despite it being entirely on their computer screens. Now it appears that there are ways to make profit in this virtual world, as this CNET article suggests. Additionally, according to the showcase part of the Second Life website, “Suzanne Vega will become the first major recording artist to perform live in Second Life avatar form”. That’s cool. Extremely geeky, yet cool.

On a side note – looks like Alpha World, the virtual world I played around with about 10 years ago, still exists.

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Book Recommendation: Freakonomics

I’m nearing the end of a book I got not too long ago, called Freakonomics. The book’s writers present data related to real-life issues and examine it objectively in a way that puts the reader’s intuition to the test (proving common beliefs and exprets’ opinions wrong). The book is an extremely interesting and a fascinating read.

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Wikimapia – cool use of Google Maps

I’ve always liked Google Maps, but the really cool thing is the fact that it is open, which means people on the web can use it to do very cool things. Like Wikimapia, for example, which is a place where people can put squares around places in the sattelite map and describe what the place is. Now, Wikimapia announced their 1,000,000th place on the map, which is a good reason to go check it out. Here is, for example, a close up on Tel-Aviv in Wikimapia.

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Coding Horror

Coding Horror is a relatively new blog on my RSS feed list, but I like it very much already. Jeff Atwood, the writer, talks mostly about programming and software related issues and subjects in a thought-provoking way.

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Following AOL’s mess: The seven ways people search the Web

For those of you who are not connected to online technology news, here is some background: recently, AOL published a gigantic list of search terms (what people are searching for) of their users that they have collected for about 3 months. Here’s just one article of many about this issue. It was a stupid act, and AOL quickly withdrew the file. However, as things usually happen with the Internet, once you have something interesting online it won’t go away for a long time (ask the poor Star Wars Kid). So people started poking into the data AOL published and soon enough, even though the data was anonymous (users were referenced by IDs, e.g. “user no. 312431”), real users were identified (the first one was this nice 62 year-old widow (NY Times article, free registration required)).

Now, Paul Boutin published an article following an analysis of the data, which outlines the seven ways people search the web, or the seven “types” of users according to their searches. So… are you a Pornhound? ;-) (via Slashdot)