Who828

Even if it's done for marketing, I think it's a small price to pay if it can inspire even one visually challenged person to take up programming professionally.

Perhaps someone who loved computers might be wondering around the world if he/she can ever work as a programmer. He/She might not have explored how to go about it or he/she might not be confident enough to try.

So if this story can change one person's mind, I think it's a sin worth committing.

This reminded me of RubyConf India talk I attended back in 2013 titled “Turning blind eye to rails development by Siddhant Chothe”, that was also quite inspiring.

It made me realize, how rarely we think about accessibility when developing software.

Here is the link to the talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqL89VcYd6g

I am seriously going to miss Dr. Dobb's Jolt awards, it helped me find so many interesting books overtime (Release it!, Specification by example, Taming text, Team geek, Masterminds of Programming etc to name a few, here is the complete list if anyone else is interested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolt_Awards)

Can't believe there won't be any jolt awards next year :(

While I agree it's dated in lot of ways but it is still a great read. I am not a game dev but I love to write performant code, it's just a personal satisfaction when I know my code is making the best use of the hardware.

I think you should read the first chapter at least, on how he approaches code optimization, first by design and then by code.

This book teaches you to think like a performance programmer like no other. In the first chapter he challenges assumptions, for example how lib C code is not really optimally written (its written for portability and general purposes) and you can easily write more efficient algorithm to do the same.

The mindset of not being at mercy of the library is a powerful one, it inspires you to dig deeper and find out how things really work. Thus, you make the best choices for the problem in hand.

PDF, HTML(zipped) and the source code http://orangetide.com/graphics_programming_black_book/

“They didn’t understand me”, “I wish I had done this in the past”, “I wish I had someone to guide me towards my interest”, “I hope I become successful in the future”, “I hope become a millionaire”

Our ambition, our regrets have made us distant from the now and the present. We are not satisfied with it, how can we? We have our own expectations and dreams to achieve in life. So we run from the present, we live like we have a millennia more. We believe that our parents will always be there when we have time. So we don’t go meet them on holidays, we rarely talk to them over the phone. When we meet them we are obsessed with our future, never paying attention to their stories. Never really looking into their eyes. After all, Facebook and Twitter is way more interesting then old people’s talk.

And one day you will catch the train (success, fame, money or whatever it is) but you realise that there is no one on the other side, that you are all alone. It feels empty, it feels incomplete. That you have an entire life to go through now.

Don’t let that happen, go to their place. Talk to them over the phone (at least once a week). When you meet them, turn off your smartphone. Look at them in the eye and listen to their stories. You will find out that they need you as much as you needed them in the past.

Life is not all about fame and achievements, it’s about the people (Family, friends, etc). And whatever insignificant time we have on this planet, it’s better spent together in the present.

Thanks for taking time to write such an honest response. I realize my mistake that I haven't listed any projects explicitly.

I expected people to look at "Repositories contributed to" in my github profile for project experience. I guess it was my fault for assuming something like this.

Aside from projects listed there I also worked on the eval server for http://rubymonk.com/ and http://pythonmonk.com/.

I have been trying to use probability in real life occurrence like this whenever I can, so let's get started back of the envelop style

according to this site http://research.collegeboard.org/content/sat-data-tables

Roughly 1.53 million students take up SAT every year and of which 10k students get perfect SAT score in Math (let's just focus on math for now)

so that's 0.67% (rounded) people getting a perfect score out of the total.

According to this data set, http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analys...

It says there are roughly 31k active users on HN, considering that I have personally seen many google employee's responding to a query/commenting on HN, let's assume a higher number of 2.5k.

so, 2.5k * 0.0067 which is about 17 people, so there are 17 active google employees on HN which have perfect SAT score in Math.

So that was my attempt, can someone provide a better probabilistic model? (maybe I will learn something new and exciting)

Well, I used a similar approach when I was reading SICP. I decided that I would try to do two problems a day and I got really far (end of 3rd chapter) but at that time I felt I wasn't understanding things entirely. I also noticed that I had developed a tendency to search for a solution of the problem before even attempting to solve it (this was in case of hard problems). So, I stopped reading SICP because it such an amazing book and I didn't want to ruin the experience of it by ploughing through.

I have few suggestions on this matter,

1) If a book is interesting and its priced around 15$, I would purchase it no question asked.

2) I hope you can release a EPUB/Mobi version of the book in the future and make it available to people who bought the PDF.

3) This might be pushing it but if someone has purchased the ebook and wants to get the paperbound after certain period of time, it would be sweet if you can offer major discount on paperbound for those people (look at Oreilly for an example)

4) Similarly offer ebook version of the book with the paperbound copy, almost every publisher does it these days.

Second that, I would purchase it if there was an ebook version.

Hey pat, how do you understand the internal code so well ? I read your free chapter on Ruby's Hash table and I loved every bit of it. It would be great if you can share the process you go through when you read the source code, so maybe I can apply it in the future. By the way, congrats for the release !

The power of the coconuts moves you !!