I’ve been looking into better ways to host my repositories for clients, manage task lists, documents, etc. I like github. It’s a good interface. It works. I could use a few more features in the Issues module, but it’s nice that they keep it simple. I’ve tried BitBucket and Assembla, and looked at several others. I’ve managed my own servers. In every test, github wins.
Except for price. github is often the most expensive. Especially if you need what I need, which is several small repositories, each with a small number of collaborators (often just one or two). But just a few of those can push you into the Medium plan, or even into the Bronze plan. Read more…
Thanks to @codinghorror, I recently read a blog post from Steve McConnell called 10x Productivity Myths: Where’s the 10x Difference in Compensation? Steve quotes a question from Pete McBreen:
“One point in his article that McConnell did not address–programmer compensation does not vary accordingly. This is a telling point–if the difference is productivity can be 10X, why is it that salaries rarely fall outside the 2X range for experienced developers?” [emphasis in original]
He then provides some fairly satisfying answers. “The other guy is actually overpaid.” “You’re confusing coding with actual business value.” “Companies pay the least they can get away with.” etc. All his answers make good, intuitive sense. Unfortunately, despite being a longtime fan of Steve McConnell’s work, I believe most are irrelevant or incorrect.
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Last night’s CocoaHeads was a blast. Alondo, you have to come give an intermediate/advanced talk on Storyboards. Thanks a lot to @scottpenrose for his lightning and thunder, and @flightblog for his inspiration (METAR gave me a lot of headaches, too). And of course, thanks especially to Josh for organizing everything. And a new place for NSCoder? You rock.
For those who didn’t scribble notes fast enough, my Core Foundation presentation is attached (including the fix for my memory leak; was it Jay who found that?) I’ll make sure to fix the code in the book for the next edition.
Building a Core Foundation.pdf
When last we looked at Bézier curve calculations, we were able to calculate five million points in about 0.6s (~8.3Mp/s or megapoints-per-second). That’s 1000 points per curve, 100 curves, at 50fps. That was 5x faster than the original -Os optimized function. But we’re just getting warmed up. We haven’t yet gotten half of the performance available.
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