chriszf

5 ms·

1.
by chriszf 14y ago
It's like the movie Ratatouille: Not everyone can be a good coder, but a good coder can come from anywhere. While they may receive an impossibly large number of candidates, in the end, they will boil it down to roughly 15 students. That mea
2.
Hacker Academies are popping up like weeds, and now it's just getting silly.(chriszf.posterous.com)
2 points by chriszf 14y ago|1 comments
3.
by chriszf 14y ago
"We're having computer problems onsite."
4.
by chriszf 14y ago
Is that a problem, underpricing the competition if the market bears it? Dev Bootcamp's cost has risen meteorically since they first opened their doors in February of this year. It is now roughly the same cost as a year's tuition at a UC. Ap
5.
by chriszf 14y ago
In 2005, I worked support for a company with a mobile offering. At the time, app purchases were handled exclusively by the carrier and were completely opaque. A little while prior, we had partnered with a shady marketing company, netting us
6.
Getting bdb Python bindings working on Lion(chriszf.posterous.com)
1 points by chriszf 14y ago|0 comments
7.
by chriszf 14y ago
San Francisco: Fulltime Do you like talking about code as much as you like writing code? Hackbright Academy is looking for instructors for our ten week code school. We teach a blend of practical engineering skills and computer science theor
8.
by chriszf 14y ago
They had a guest list and all my students were on it. This particular student was also on it, along with a note to exclude her specifically from entering the office.
9.
by chriszf 14y ago
The story was abbreviated: I talked to several people to figure out what was going on before they insisted we were blocking the entrance. By then she had decided it was not worth the trouble and wanted to leave.
10.
by chriszf 14y ago
I had another 9 students inside, and the talk was worthwhile for them. Furthermore, the problem was not with the organizers (who were generous and accommodating) or the speakers (who were similarly generous), but with the venue. Nothing wou
11.
by chriszf 14y ago
It had everything to do with her name: she was turned away by the person with the guest list, but not by the security guy checking for fake IDs. That was the only piece of information they had. And no, she's got a down-home 'good old Americ
12.
Apparently Yelp has a no-fly list(chriszf.posterous.com)
269 points by chriszf 14y ago|114 comments
13.
by chriszf 14y ago
It's wrong to offer up the idea that women somehow are biologically averse to tech. You need only look outside the US to verify this: Malaysia's tech sector is almost evenly split between men and women. It's a cultural thing, which we're lo
14.
by chriszf 14y ago
Repeat after me: programming is not computer science. Got it? Good. Now, for actual advice. Contrary to the prevailing sentiment, there actually is a career path in engineering that starts at the bottom and takes you to the top, all classic
15.
by chriszf 14y ago
Actually, nuclear power plants are designed to withstand failure. Typically there are multiple backup plans to safeguard against failure of any one system. One comment I sometimes hear is, "They had to pump seawater in to cool things down?
16.
by chriszf 14y ago
Twilio's twice-monthly hackathons were explained to me thusly: how much money would you pay annually for someone to scrounge up 300 good use cases and 100 really excellent use cases for your API product? It turns out $24k is cheap for this
17.
Of course you should learn to code if you want to(chriszf.posterous.com)
2 points by chriszf 14y ago|0 comments
18.
by chriszf 14y ago
Two things. You can build a product but until you manage to sell your product to someone, it's not a company. 'Salesmen' are not the only way to get people to buy your product. I think it's important to start making a distinction between sa
19.
by chriszf 14y ago
Mostly I agree, except for his introduction of %r very early on in python the hard way. What %r does in the context of the lesson is clear, but many students ask why and what it's for, and the complete answer is much more difficult. Frequen
20.
by chriszf 14y ago
When you're teaching something completely new to someone, at first you won't even have a common vocabulary. This is true no matter what you're teaching, and you have to dedicate some time to establishing the language (English, not computer)
21.
by chriszf 14y ago
Freeswitch and Asterisk are both written largely in C, although it's unclear if that's representative of industry practice.
22.
by chriszf 14y ago
It seems to me that you're talking about modularization for managing complexity, which FP does just fine. OOP doesn't have a monopoly on that. It takes discipline, but you can write well-structured code in any paradigm. To say that function
23.
by chriszf 14y ago
I did some work programming a sequence for a Siemens magnet, and while I can't comment on the quality of the code driving the hardware, the OOP API they exposed for sequence creation was as bad as it gets. There was no sense of abstraction
24.
by chriszf 14y ago
If you read the Google paper, you'll notice that they actually refer to this and other work by Liu et al. The overall technique is the same, estimate the original camera path, calculate an optimal camera path, retarget the input frames to a
25.
by chriszf 14y ago
You can't be perfect but you can at least try to reduce complexity. Saying "just paint over it with pretty colors when you're done" invites unchecked complication. That attitude is what drove all the monkey/ninja patching that we saw with
26.
by chriszf 14y ago
Fair enough, but it's interesting to note that a person with little-to-no CS background can be made to resemble, in all respects, a junior-to-mid level engineer in such a short time. It suggests that the industry notion that a CS degree is
27.
by chriszf 14y ago
I disagree. A computer science degree means you've spent 4 years learning computer science, it doesn't mean you know anything about software development. In fact, at a university with a good CS program, it almost certainly guarantees you kn
28.
by chriszf 14y ago
I don't think having a school for women necessarily gives an unfair advantage. I'm not even sure it's an 'advantage' at all in a male-dominated discipline, especially given the degree to which engineering is male-dominated. You're right tha
29.
Learn Rails the Hard Way(chriszf.posterous.com)
1 points by chriszf 14y ago|0 comments
30.
by chriszf 14y ago
I spent about an hour looking at noir (the clojure web framework) and here are some terribly shallow and scattered thoughts on the matter. I learned scheme some 12 years ago and have always liked it, but somehow have never felt comfortable

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