Looking for the article on appreciating software developers [closed] - project-management

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I've read a long time ago an article about why managers should appreciate the devs., and there was analogy drawn to the 7 samurais movie: that a company can't really offer much to an engineer, and that the engineer chooses to help the company -- like the samurais helped the villagers.
I thought that was on joelonsoftware.com, or codinghorror.com; but the search did not bring any result. Does it ring a bell to anyone? Anyone?

It's from Joel's book "Smart and Gets Things Done". Section is entitled "Treat Them Like Samurai".
A quote:
The village is your team. The samurai are the programmers who, you hope, will come solve your problems, bringing their talent and expertise in exchange for, maybe, a bowl of rice. You may be poor and hopeless, but you sure as heck know how to show some respect for the samurai who is going to save your behind.

Nothing about Samurai, but another 3 articles from Joel that relate to management/developer relations.
Field Guide to Developers
Development Abstraction Layer
Two Stories

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How to prepare for Olympiad in Informatics [closed]

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I am a high school student who live out side of the USA.
So... please excuse any mistake.
I am planning to study for Olympiad in Informatics(I have never participated in this contest) and I am going to try on next year since it begin in April in our country I think I still have a time to prepare for it. And actually, I am kind of interested in data structure and algorithms . Although I cant get a good result from the contest, it would be worth experience to me.
However, there are no one who have ever participated in this contest in our school. So, I have no idea how to prepare.
I sure know how to code with python ,C ,C++ (but I am not good at it..)
So... If you guys know about it, please just give me some information. like books and way to prepare.
First research what the contest is about.
Learn your stuff. If it's algorithms, then I suggest something like Skiena, The Algorithm Design Manual. I think there's also a competitive programming book by Skiena.
Then practice. It looks like it might be similar to "classical" programming contest, so it would make sense to try:
- https://uva.onlinejudge.org/
- http://www.spoj.com/
- Any of the numerous online judge systems.

What statups are expecting while asking to solve a programming challenge before hand? [closed]

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I have applied to couple of startups and most of them are asking to solve programming challenge before they start on the interviewing candidate.
I have submitted couple of the solution and all the time getting rejected in the initial screening.
Now what i think is, they will see my coding style, algorithm and OOD concepts that i have used to solve the problem. Can you guys input more on it as what other details are taken into consideration and how can i improve my coding for getting selected.
By the way, i did all my coding in either Java/Perl.
Nice question, I am a new grad too... One thing I notice: When you do the exercise home, they expect you to use the best algorithm out there. In my opinion code modularity, even on a small function is key. Put lot effort into the code because they are not just judging you, but comparing you against other candidate. The one which seems to have put the more effort wins.
ps: Ask this question on programmers.stackexchange, you will obtain some good inputs there.

Where did 42 come from in the programming world? [closed]

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I see 42 used A LOT in the programming world as examples. In screencasts, tutorials, etc.
Where did the popularity of this number come from?
It is from the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Wikipedia has more detail:
In [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy], a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. The Ultimate Question itself is unknown.
You forgot to read The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
It's a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
It's the answer.
Douglas Adams came up with it and as mentioned it's a reference to THGTTG. Back in the day, programmers were more "geeky" than they are now. Generally they were math geeks. Being extremely geeky would put you in line with Douglas Adams' books. If you look for it, you'll find it everywhere. Where did I put my towel?

Where does "Your Kitten of Death awaits" come from? [closed]

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If you run SBCL (at least on Windows, I use CLISP at home), you get the message, "Your Kitten of Death awaits." I suspect that this has something to do with some form of inside joke (like Super Cow Powers). I've tried Googling and I have found nothing particularly useful (I suppose that it is mentioned elsewhere on the 'net is of some, if not much, use).
If this seems more of a SuperUser or ServerFault question, please let me know and I will ask on their forums instead.
UPDATE:
It seems that the origin of this quote is from a commit by Christopher Rhodes to version 1.54 of the original source (thanks to Daniel A. White for finding the fild name). I'm not sure if that will prove useful, but it is an additional avenue to approach this query.
Here is an interesting discussion on this very topic:
http://www.bitchx.com/log/lisp-f/lisp-f-02-Feb-2010/lisp-f-02-Feb-2010-00.php
They seem to suggest it comes from one of the following:
The nursing home cat that could detect when someone was going to die (Recent book written about the "Grim Reapurr")
The long comic series by Sluggy Freelance about satanic kittens (starts here, ends here)
Or is inspired by Death's kitten(s) in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett (Image here)
Here is a diff that has it, but its been removed in this patch.
http://www.peerweb.nl/sbcl/sbcl-1.0.14.10-windows.patch

What do these mysterious "Business Intelligence" software do anyway? [closed]

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What do these mysterious "Business Intelligence" software do anyway ?
They're not really mysterious. BI or Business Intelligence software is just a term that groups software with a particular goal like OLAP and report generators. SSRS and Crystal Reports are some examples, among many others.
And the requisite wiki article...
In a nutshell, the goal of BI is: aggregating and presenting data to help executive decision making.
In a business, the role of a CEO is to stay on top of pretty much everything that is happening in a company. Some data you can get off of standardized reports, but sometimes you have an intuition, and need to actually dig through the data in arbitrary ways, while not really being able to learn SQL. BI is there to fill that role. It is there to do a better job then the CEO actually exporting a bunch of reports into excel, then massaging the data there.

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