Code Newsletter - O'Reilly Media

Greetings Developers,

When software developers start out, the opportunities look endless. But eventually a ceiling is reached. Then what?

Sure, you can start working your way up to CTO. But suppose your true love is coding? Is there a glass ceiling for folks who want to stay purely technical?

Send word of all your code monkey career path suggestions to us at code-newsletter@oreilly.com. We're glad to gift respondents an O'Reilly ebook of choice. (A free O'Reilly account is needed.)

Cheers,
The Code team on behalf of
Edd Dumbill and Sarah Novotny
Chairs, OSCON

Open Dialog

What the Open Source Community Is Talking About

Penguins are So Sensitive
If your salary is important, Linux is a good job skill to have in your pocket. At least that's how this article from Linux.com sees it. (They may have a slight bias, name-wise.)

Twitters Clutch of Open Source Eggs
OK, only one egg, but Clutch.io is a doozy, designed to let developers create native or HTML5 apps for mobile devices, notably iOS ones. It's now available under the Apache license.

Samsung Flashes Linux
Flash devices have very different requirements than magnetic disks, at least if you want to squeeze the best performance out of them. Samsung wants to help, and has submitted F2FS (Flash Friendly File System) to the Linux kernel crew.

Pop! The Weekly Quiz

One Horn to Rule Them All

The unicorn thing damnably continues but this time, it's a software unicorn that can win you our prize. To wit: What unicorn-named company started out making text editors for early home computers?

Think you've got it? Write code-newsletter@oreilly.com with your answer. The first correct respondent is welcome to a free ebook from the O'Reilly catalog.

LAST WEEK's quiz suffered from no lack of correct answers as you are all obviously cheerfully geeky fans of obscure animation. Uni the Unicorn of course was one of the adventures found in the cartoon version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Sean M. Hibbler made a critical hit with a natural 20, and found a free O'Reilly ebook of his choice in the treasure chest.

Q'S A'D

The Interactive Bit

Ditching the Dev Drudge
Last week, we mentioned the developers troika of time, money, and features (or quality)—wondering if you had a magical dev drudge elixir that could free one from the trinity's tyranny.

Phil Cochlin uses the Desert Island Test in his reasoning. "Ask yourself," Phil writes, "whether or not you'd be able to accomplish practically any task were you to find yourself on that proverbial desert island with just a computer, maybe two or three languages, a good editor or two, and lots of organized thinking that came from experience."

Ted takes us all the way back to 2001 before moving forward. "In the recent old days you had to worry about your memory usage, pointer math, and if strings were properly terminated, leading to Joel's discussion of strings that both stored their length and had null termination," he says.

"I hope the market becomes somewhat fragmented," Ted concludes. "This is where strong service architecture models become helpful. If you aren't writing in a monolithic stack, it's easier to expose your API. Sorry C# and Java."

Phil sees the Zen koan of today's dev: "We've replaced the older forms of drudgery with ever-expanding project size," he writes, "which introduces new drudgeries of its own."

"Hell, yes!" enthuses Larry G. "Things like client-server frameworks, object-oriented languages, and databases definitely eliminate lots of development drudgery! If you want to prove it, just write an application that enables lots of users to simultaneously select and order from, say, a million items in a catalog.

"But use only languages and tools that were available before 1985."

Shudder. Have more nightmarish scenarios? Don't hesitate to share.

tail -f /dev/newsletter

All Good Things Must End

Goooaaaal!
For many Americans, futbol has all of hockey's ho-hum drama with none of its entertaining violence. But for the rest of the world, it's a passion—one that even robot designers can get caught up in.

Now, thanks to a new open source hardware platform intended to help aspiring robotics students participate in RoboCup, anyone can design their own soccer-playing robots.

Pint-sized players compete against each other in tournaments. Organizers predict that mechanical competitors will handily defeat the best humans by 2050.