Book: Founders at Work

Posted on May 25, 2014 by alexkhomenko

Here is a small opinion about ‘Founders at work’ book (homepage).

In this book you can find 32 interviews of famous IT-person: Wozniak, Spolsky, Levchin, Hannson and many others. You can read how many issues this guys solve and how much effort put in work to achieve goal. But every story is individual, so, you cannot find here any keys to success (instead of work-work-work of course).

So, resume about book: read if you don’t have any other things to do.

C# future

Posted on January 12, 2014 by alexkhomenko

Interesting thing about presentation about C# planning features. They plan to add primary constructors

public class pointX(int x, int y)
{
    private int x, int y;
}

and property and method extensions

public double Square => x * x;

Looks like not only me looks in Scala 🙂

Long tail book

Posted on December 19, 2013 by alexkhomenko

Finished “Long tail” book by Chris Anderson. Main idea about that selling mass things changes by new technologies – and how it impact on business.

I remember that a lot of discussion was about internet, and how people in internet like steal copyrighted property, and how many billions owners loose. I understood that’s bullshit, but I didn’t think about any arguments about that.

First thing – that people like not to pay for another work. That’s not correct, because usually people don’t like to pay for shit, which some sales try to sell them. Usually, if somebody try to sell you something that you really don’t need, and with some psychological tricks success – you will be not satisfied after, because you understand that you was cheated. That’s why people don’t want to pay for things which they hold in hands or download on computer, if this things don’t add value for them.

Another things about choice – if you can pick from a high variety of goodness, you have a more chance to buy something that fit right you. And not to buy “common” thing. And of course in this situation sold of common things goes down – but for summary sold of all things goes up. So, if you are a manufacturer – don’t sit and wait, create new product and ideas. Like Coca-Cola sell usually drinks like Cola or Sprite, but also you can buy some brands like sport Aquarius or another style drinks – but manufacturer the same.

Conclusion: good to read.

Scala on Coursera

Posted on November 9, 2013 by alexkhomenko

Just finished course “Functional Programming Principles in Scala” by Martin Odersky on coursera. Scala looks very good, and Martin makes a good lectures about foundation and strategy of scala. Things such higher order function and pattern matching are very interesting. For me a minus that this course has a bit academic, and hasn’t connections to real problems and solutions, but it will be covered in next courses from Martin, which already announced.

For us, C# developers, many functional features already arrived in language, but some things in scala, like introducing fields from constructor or short form of returning looks like elegant and natural. Scala is not pure functional and build on top of Java, and this decision helps to fast grow language even in background there is no support from big corporations.

IDE based on eclipse and also useful, practical and fast enough. But documentation by feelings not so good as msdn, anyway, community is big – a lot of posts, examples and stack overflow answers.

As a resume, scala is a good choice to try new language and can be useful in production.