Global Nerdy

What Makes a Great Developer? According to I Love Jack Daniels: pessimism, laziness, curiosity and being meticulous.

Why I Took the Job Title “Nerd Wrangler”: When I accepted the position of b5media’s technical project manager, Jeremy Wright said “come up with a less-formal sounding title”. I did a little Googling and figured that I could “own” the term “Nerd Wrangler”. It’s happened — I pretty much own the first page of results for the search term “nerd wrangler”, with and without quotes.

Python coding style guides. It’s hard to point to a Python “killer app” the way you can for Ruby (whose killer app is so “killer” that it’s often conflated with it). However, Python has something that Ruby doesn’t have: a “killer user”, namely Google, which has declared it one of the four accepted languages for their internal use (the others are C++, Java and JavaScript). Python’s a language worth learning, and its endorsement by Google means that you’re more likely to encounter it. Here are a couple of Python coding style guides that you might find handy, whether you’re learning Python or are a longtime Python coder: Python Enhancement Proposal 8: Style Guide for Python Code and Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python.

Joel Spolsky on StackOverflow.com: Now that we’ve heard from Jeff Atwood about StackOverflow.com, here’s what the other guy behind the project has to say.

If you’re a reader of Coding Horror — and if you’re a programmer or aspire to become one, you should be — you’re probably aware that its author Jeff Atwood recently left his job to work on his own projects. Today he announced what one of those projects is: StackOverflow.com, a joint effort with Joel “Joel on Software” Spolsky.

Here’s his description of StackOverflow.com:

So what is stackoverflow?

From day one, my blog has been about putting helpful information out into the world. I never had any particular aspirations for this blog to become what it is today; I’m humbled and gratified by its amazing success. It has quite literally changed my life. Blogs are fantastic resources, but as much as I might encourage my fellow programmers to blog, not everyone has the time or inclination to start a blog. There’s far too much great programming information trapped in forums, buried in online help, or hidden away in books that nobody buys any more. We’d like to unlock all that. Let’s create something that makes it easy to participate, and put it online in a form that is trivially easy to find.

Are you familiar with the movie pitch formula?

Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

Want to know more? They’ve recorded a podcast [MP3, 8.32MB, 46 minutes, 12 seconds] in which they describe their vision for StackOverflow.com.