… and a Great Person in general. Empathy is your most important skill. Practice it with everyone you interact with, and everyone who interacts with your work. Humility goes hand in hand with empathy. Be open to the possibility (likelihood, even) that you are wrong. Know that you will always be learning and improving. accept and own up to mistakes immediately. The less you fear being wrong, the more confident you can be. You are wrong about many things. You know very little about most things. Everyone else is exactly the same way. Embrace it. Always learn, always question, always adapt and grow. ...

This is seriously good collection of resources for web designers and the likes, don’t miss it. I’ll let you in on a little secret: beautiful websites aren’t made, they’re found. Smart designers know where to find that perfect photo, subtle pattern or that unique icon. Here’s where the best designers go to find photos, graphics, icons, and more. via Where the best designers go to find photos and graphics | Blog. ...

A few days ago I tweeted: Now the project is out in the wild and I’m very excited about it. It’s all italian yes, but do know that CoderDojo is a global movement, and starting a kids coding club in your own town would probably be great idea. Come meet me next week. I will be giving a short talk about CoderDojo Ravenna and, most importantly, we’ll have a good pizza afterwards. Oh, and we’re looking for mentors to join us. ...

Would it be possible (and advisable) for a person to deal with everyday matters as if he/she was a stateless machine? Imagine if you as a person dealt with millions of requests a day from a thousand or so clients: if you had to keep track all those clients and the multiple requests they were making, it would drive you crazy. The burden of remembering would crush you. ...

Dennis M. Ritchie ‘The Development of the C Language’ is one of those things any programmer should read soon or later, if nothing else for historic reasons. C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first widely available description of the language appeared: The C Programming Language, often called the `white book’ or `K&R’ [Kernighan 78]. ...

What we may not have realized is that once the browsers don’t suck, being an HTML and CSS “guru” isn’t really a very marketable skillset. 80% of what made us useful was the way we knew all the quirks and intracries of the browsers. Guess what? Those are all gone. And if they’re not, they will be in the very near future. Then what? A lot of folks who came up from that time and headspace have diversified their skillsets since. Many are now programmers, or project managers, or creative directors, or business owners. But a lot of others are still making a go of it as an HTML and CSS guru, often in a comfortable job they’ve had for years. What happens when that gig comes to an end? ...

We shouldn’t really trust this kind of statistics, I know, but when my favorite language comes out as a clear winner, I can’t resist and take them for good. Python is the “language of the year” according to the PYPL index : it had the biggest increase in popularity share in 2013. PHP had the biggest decline. Meanwhile, Java continues to have the highest popularity share among the programming languages. ...

You’re so damn smart — I’ve told you how awesome I think you and the solutions you’ve built…they’re amazing. You have so many awesome things on your hard drive you built that it would blow the world away if only they knew. You created Facebook before there was Facebook and PayPal before there was PayPal. But recently I’ve heard you ask, “how can this junk software out there be so popular?”…why are all these idiots more successful than me? ...

Maybe instead of Coder Dojos for kids, we should run them for their teachers. We must build a team of dedicated teachers to support school coding programs. We do not rely on our students to absorb math from textbooks, online videos or math clubs; similarly, we cannot depend on every student to learn to code on their own, by using online tutorials and afterschool clubs. If coding becomes as fundamental as reading and writing, we need to create a system where everyone has an opportunity to learn, not just the few who probably would have learned it on their own anyway. ...

A very interesting read if you’re into Python. Eve has been Python 3 compatible for a while and honestl, I would be surprised to find that somebody is running it in production under Python 3. Why aren’t people using Python 3? First, I think it’s because of a lack of urgency. Many years ago, before I knew how to program, the decision to have Python 3 releases live in parallel to Python 2 releases was made. In retrospect this was a mistake, it resulted in a complete lack of urgency for the community to move, and the lack of urgency has given way to lethargy. ...