I realized that my article about "How to interview a programmer" is pretty popular, so I decided to extend this topic and share my thoughts about recognizing a good programmer.

Nowadays, it is known that IT guys can make relatively good money in software or web development industry. This makes a lot of people to start learning basics of programming from the school, or sometimes even change their current careers to become programmers. Unfortunately, having a desire is not enough to become a good programmer. Even a number of certificates or diploma from university is not a sufficient sign of a good programmer.

If you are looking for a really good professional you must pay your attention to a certain important indicators.

A very interesting news recently came out from Google:

Google is developing an anonymous identifier for advertising, or AdID, that would replace third-party cookies as the way advertisers track people's Internet browsing activity for marketing purposes.

Source: USA Today

I like funny Easter eggs in software and applications. How about Easter eggs in Google? I found a nice list of Easter eggs in Google Search.

http://searchengineland.com/the-big-list-of-google-easter-eggs-153768

PS: Like this one. :-)

​

NASA 

Today is the 256th day of the year, which is officially recognized as "The Programmers' Day" in Russia and observed in many countries.

So, happy Programmers Day, colleagues!

News feeds today reported a funny fact. There is a daily flight number 666 from Copenhagen (CPH) to Helsinki (HEL). Therefore, unsurprisingly that media reporters payed their attention to this flight since today is Friday 13th!

There is no passengers who cancelled their trip on this flight reported.

And you? Would you board Flight 666 to HEL on Friday the 13th? :-)

Recently, I have written about comparisons of numbers with floating point. Here is another important lesson that explains why loose comparison may break the business logic in your PHP application.

Look at the following PHP code. It seems pretty clear and straightforward.

Wow! Such an interesting thing I just found.

There is another way of tracking users without using cookies / javascript that only few people know of. Check this link to get more details.

http://lucb1e.com/rp/cookielesscookies

Shortly after acquiring Skype Microsoft is buying Nokia ...

Nokia was once the leader in their field. And it's so sad that Nokia has now lost almost all business assets. Can't say that Skype got better. I doubt that Nokia will get better.

In PHP you should be careful working with floating point number comparisons because sometimes the result that you get can be unexpected and unpredictable even if it looks pretty obvious. Here is an example. Can you guess what will be the result?

<?php
$a = 0.7;
$b = 0.1;
$c = $a + $b;
if ($c == 0.8) {
   echo '$c == 0.8';
} else {
   echo '$c!=0.8';
}