SE News

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.
The motivation for starting Project Euler, and its continuation, is to provide a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context.

http://projecteuler.net/

Dive Into HTML5 seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine standards. I shall publish drafts periodically, as time permits. The final manuscript will be published on paper by O’Reilly, under the Google Press imprint. Pre-order the printed work and be the first in your community to receive it. The work shall remain online under the CC-BY-3.0 license.

Mark Pilgrim

http://diveintohtml5.org/

The 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know project collects pearls of wisdom for programmers from leading practitioners. There is no overarching narrative: The collection is intended simply to contain multiple and varied perspectives on what it is that contributors to the project feel programmers should know. This can be anything from code-focused advice to culture, from algorithm usage to agile thinking, from implementation know-how to professionalism, from style to substance, etc.

Sometime around November, 97 contributions will be picked from the Edited Contributions and published in O’Reilly’s 97 Things series, which already includes 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know.

The 97 chosen for the book will be the ones considered not only to be the best individually, but also the ones that fit best together. Every contributor whose contribution goes into the book will be fully acknowledged in the book and will get a complementary copy of the book when it is published.

Kevlin Henney

http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

http://www.wolframalpha.com

With the debut of My developerWorks, two little characters (”My”) make a big difference: They take developerWorks from “just” the place where you find award-winning how-to content for developers and IT professionals to the place where you and your peers congregate to connect, share, and collaborate. Great content is just the beginning, and now it’s time for you to take the next step: Create your professional profile and your custom home page on My developerWorks. Then find and connect with like-minded peers, start tagging and bookmarking, and invite your peers into your My developerWorks network to share expertise and build groups for further interaction and collaboration.

Gretchen Moore
Ami Dewar

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/

It has long been common practice to use recurring solutions to solve common problems. Such solutions are called design patterns; standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer. This website seeks to better the situation for the UI designer, who struggles with the same problems as many other UI designers have struggled with before him.

This site will help you in two ways: You can read insightful design pattern articles or browse through our screenshot collection.

Finally, you can help your fellow peers by uploading your own screenshots of great user interfaces.

Anders Toxboe

http://ui-patterns.com/

Web hooks let you customize, extend and integrate the web applications you use with anything else you can access programmatically. To web developers, web hooks are a simple design pattern that only require the ability to make web requests and to store some extra data about users. To users, web hooks are a way to get events and data in realtime from their web applications. From this they can use the data however they like, empowering them with the ability to extend and integrate, and start seeing the true vision of the programmable web.

By letting the user specify a URL for various events, the application will POST data to those URLs when the events occur. […] How you use it is up to you and whatever you want to accomplish.

http://webhooks.pbwiki.com/

Professionalität = Bewusstheit + Prinzipien

Softwareentwicklung braucht Profis. Was aber sind Profis? Menschen die mit der Softwareentwicklung Geld verdienen? Nein, das CcdTeam meint, es gehört mehr und anderes dazu.

Professionalität in der Softwareentwicklung hat nichts mit Geld zu tun. Sie hat auch nur bedingt mit einem bestimmten Ausbildungsweg zu tun. Wir kennen professionelle Softwareentwickler, die wenig oder gar kein Geld mit ihrer Software verdienen; und wir kennen professionelle Softwareentwickler, die weder Diplom noch Doktortitel haben.

[…] Wir glauben, die Branche sollte nach Anerkenntnis des Problems einfach mal nur einen kleinen Schritt machen. Weder müssen die Curricula von Masters-Studiengängen neu definiert werden noch ist die Gründung eines Verbandes zwingend.

Viel einfacher glauben wir, dass “es” schon besser würde, wenn wir alle auch nur ein Buch gemeinsam gelesen hätten. Schon die vereinte Zustimmung zu den Aussagen in nur einem Buch würde einen Konsens herstellen, der viel bewirken könnte.

Wir meinen, mit Clean Code von Robert C. Martin solch ein Buch gefunden zu haben, das der gemeinsamen Lektüre würdig ist.

Es ist kein perfektes Buch und auch wir stimmen nicht allem darin vorbehaltlos zu - aber es ist ein Buch “im rechten Geist”: es ist ein Ausdruck profunder Reflektion und hat den Mut, ein fundamentales Wertesystem zu formulieren.

[…] Letztlich ist aber auch das nicht in Stein gemeißelt. Morgen erscheint vielleicht ein noch besseres Buch. Gut so! Aber an dem, was wir meinen, dass Professionalität ausmacht, ändert das nichts. Deshalb fangen wir einfach mal an. “Nicht lang schnacken, Kopf in Nacken” - so sagen die Hamburger, wenn sie einen Korn (norddeutscher Schnaps) in der Hand haben. Und so wollen wir es auch halten: Ganz im Sinne der Agilitätsbewegung nicht planen bis zur Bewusstlosigkeit, sondern etwas tun. Einen kleinen Schritt machen in Richtung mehr Professionalität.

Wer hat Lust mitzumachen?

Wer will CleanCodeDeveloper werden? Es ist ganz einfach!

http://www.clean-code-developer.de/

I’ve been a programmer for over 20 years now, and I’ve read a lot of programming related books in order to improve my skills and keep up with technology. I’ve always wanted to write an article about my favorites. I finally did , and the response was overwhelming. As with all Top x lists, many people disagreed with my choices. I also discovered a lot of books I had overlooked and now plan to read sometime in the future.

All of this led me to thinking about a way to allow everyone to pick their top 5 programming books they think every programmer should read, and aggregate the results and make some sort of master list of the best books. That’s how this site came to be. The goal of this site is to make it easy to find the best programming-related books, which in turn will make you a better programmer.

Shane Sherman

http://www.programmingbooks.org/

The money you spend, how much you exercise, the time you waste, and the personal information you enter are all data. In addition to the data that you yourself produce, it’s also generated by the environment, sports, government, entertainment, and plenty of other interesting fields.

We can use this data to understand more about ourselves and our surroundings as well as drive change. With this in mind, how can we help people realize the importance of the data around them? How can we use statistics to find meaning in our data? How can we provide and visualize this information to motivate action?

FlowingData explores these questions and highlights how statisticians, computer scientists, designers, and others are finding answers.

http://www.flowingdata.com

After a very short, five-week private beta, we’re opening Stack Overflow to the public today. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. This is a community project, so I’m being careful to avoid saying this is how it will work… that’s up to the community. But this is roughly what I have in mind.

Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question.

Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.

Already, it’s better than other Q&A sites, because you don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the right answer, if it’s in there somewhere.

Joel Spolsky

http://stackoverflow.com/

Perhaps you have wondered how predictable machines like computers can generate randomness. In reality, most random numbers used in computer programs are pseudo-random, which means they are a generated in a predictable fashion using a mathematical formula. This is fine for many purposes, but it may not be random in the way you expect if you’re used to dice rolls and lottery draws.

RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. People use RANDOM.ORG for holding draws, lotteries and sweepstakes, to drive games and gambling sites, for scientific applications and for art and music.

http://www.random.org/

Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data.

Sarah Perez

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_tools_for_visualization.php

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Manuel Lima

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc

The FOSSology project started out as an internal development effort at Hewlett Packard Company (HP). As part of HP’s own internal IT governance process, we needed a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open source project was licensed. Rather than simply collecting a project’s advertised license (as given at their website or in their documentation), this tool needed to analyze all of the source code for a given project and intelligently report all of the licenses being used, based on the license declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software licensing.

Thus was born FOSSology — “The study of FOSS.” As development progressed, we quickly realized that the analysis of open source licensing was only one application of what was quickly becoming a valuable general-purpose software data mining framework.

HP understands the broad value of these tools for helping IT organizations to confidently adopt open source software, as well as to uncover what open source software is being used within their environments. Furthermore, we believe this tool will be helpful for open source developers and distributors to build a thorough licensing picture of the projects and packages they produce. Thus it is being provided to the broader FOSS community with the intent of building a vibrant, open community of users and contributors who will help make the framework and the agents as valuable as possible.

http://fossology.org/