I had an internship right out of high school and the team I was working on had five employees. I, a high schooler with no formal CS education, was replacing them. I was rewriting all of their legacy code and making huge improvements on it. Furthermore, the legacy program was written in ASP, a language [...]
Andrew Morton, the 2.6 kernel (specifically the mm tree patchset) maintainer and a huge player in the Linux world recently gave a Google Tech talk. The talk really is “the current state of the Linux kernel,” even though he takes a while to get into the meat of the content. He’s also been a Google [...]
There aren’t many theories about how to effectively teach new computer scientists how to program. Dan’s done some analysis of this problem but was unable to come up with the perfect programming language for teaching the breadth he expected. What he did come up with was a pretty good list of languages that covered a [...]
I get many questions about how the open source development model works. How do the developers get payed? Who hires them? How do I get involved? Well, there are many different programs that use an open source development model, from Pidgin to the Linux kernel, and they all use their own modification of the model. [...]
My grandparents comment regularly that they don’t understand how young people can keep track of all this new technology. “How can you concentrate on school work with all these computers and cell phones?” What my grandparents don’t understand is that computers aren’t a distraction or a novelty that we force into our lives, it’s necessary [...]