Archive for April 2010
Ideas are a dime a dozen
It’s common for the "business" people to have an idea and think that’s what they’re bringing to the table. I’ve had guys approach me to offer 5-25% equity in their imaginary company if I’ll just build the product for free.
My response is, generally, "How about I build this and hire you when I’m done to sell it?" They’ll protest "But this is my idea!" Who cares? Ideas are worth absolutely nothing. I have stacks of ideas that are gathering dust [...]
Coder’s Vocab #1 : Idempotent
In programming, the term idempotent describes a method that can be called multiple times without changing the result. Sometimes it can be a symptom of madness or incompetence – I’ve seen code where a save() method was called repeatedly "just in case."
Besides scratching the itch of the insane among us, idempotent routines are important. For a simple example, consider the "Checkout Button" on a typical ecommerce form. Often you will see strong language around the button asking the user to [...]