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Showing posts from December, 2005

10% time for productive fun

Someone was telling me a few days back about a certain software company that lets employees work on whatever they wish for 20% of their working week. Jim Shores has written an article on a very similar concept. In his article Jim explains the benefits of letting employees spend half a day every week researching any technology or area of their choice. Even if the research is not of immediate importance to the project they are working on, they will still benefit tremendously from the enhanced perspective. Jim mainly talks about spending the research time on technology and working up a small prototype to demonstrate a concept and to increase ones own understanding. The article is available on Jim's website Along with experimenting with code, other activities that may also yeild good results are reading articles or blogs written by senior software practioners, listening to podcasts, writing, and teaching. Many articles written by senior developers are very insightfull, because they wri

Benifits of blogging

A few days back I was discussing with a friend, how small companies can use blogging to their advantage. To survive in business each company has to maintain a certain brand image for itself. The brand image helps in attracted good customers as well as in attracting good talent to work for the company. Large organizations do the brand building in many ways, some of them being through advertisements, brochures, conferences, and their salesforce. Small companies however do not have the deep pockets that their larger counterparts enjoy, but many small companies do excellent work, and it's a pity that they are not as well known as they should be. The Internet and the concept of grassroots publishing gives smaller organizations, the tools to network and make themselves better known. Blogs and Podcasts are two of the more frequently used tools that can be used. In this weblog I talk about Blogs. I will to talk about Podcasts in another posting. Blogs as opposed to books capture small idea

Writing tip: usage of commas

An interesting writing tip from http://www.GrammerCheck.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- QUESTION: "Now that spring has arrived, the flowers are in bloom, and the trees are budding." This is a sentence my English teacher gave us in class, and I told her that it was wrong and she needed to drop the second comma. She disagreed and said it was right as is. GRAMMARCHECK: Your teacher is correct. The sentence in question has one dependent clause and two independent clauses: Dependent Clause: Now that spring has arrived Independent Clause #1: The flowers are in bloom. Independent Clause #2: The trees are budding. The first comma is necessary because a comma should be placed after an introductory [dependent] clause. The comma separating the two independent clauses is optional because both clauses are short and closely related; however, it's never incorrect to place a comma between two independent clauses that are joined

Free Books

1. Would you like to listen to free audio books? Check out LIBRIVOX . It contains audio recordings of many old copyright-free books, like Sherlock Holmes, P. G. Wodehouse, etc. 2. Here is a free e-book on the Java programming language. It uses Applets to illustrate certain concepts more clearly.