It’s the eternal conundrum of a hiring manager – you have to hire for every single position in the company without any first-hand experience. How to do it? If you can have a trusted programmer sit in on the interview, that’s ideal, of course. But what if you’re hiring your first programmer? Or what if you’re hiring a freelancer? Or what if company policy dictates that you’re the only person allowed to do the interviewing? Well, in that case, you need some helpful advice and your innate bullshit detector. We questioned programmers and hiring managers and compiled a list of dos and don’ts. Here are some things to ask when interviewing programmers:

Past Experience

Ask the programmer about the biggest disaster of his career so far, and how he handled it. Did he come in at midnight to fix the code? Was he unaware of the problem until someone brought it up? Did someone else handle it?  According to our programmer sources, “Anyone worth their salt has caused a major meltdown. If they say they haven’t, they’re lying. Or very, very green.” Pushing a code with bugs in it isn’t necessarily bad. Not handling it well is bad.

As usual, your biggest asset is not knowing the field, it is knowing people. Asking about career disasters can be uncomfortable, but if the interviewee is experienced and honest then she won’t have a problem telling you about it, and you will get an idea of how she handles mishaps. Even if you don’t understand what the disaster was or how it was fixed, you should be able to tell how honest she’s being and how she handles being put on the spot.

In May 2012 Google Chrome hit a milestone. It kicked Microsoft's Internet Explorer into excess phone oh that oh that second place as the most used browser on planet Earth.
With Microsoft being in second place, it makes a dark hole for Firefox coming in at number three. Google likes to trumpet three key reasons: security, simplicity and speed.
Available for free on Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows. It gets its speed from the open source JavaScript engine written in C++ known as V8.
In my daily use I use Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 10, Apple's Safari (on OS X) and chrome on both Windows 8 and OS X.

Admittedly people do not know anything about Internet Explorer version 10 since you can only get it on Windows 8/RT.

I do not need a crystal ball to know that the Mother of All Browser Battles is set to begin in the fall of 2012 and beyond.

I have said this before and I'm going to say it again.

It is rather unfortunate that in the ever changing and rapidly improving world of technology, we hardly remember the geniuses who through their inventions laid the foundation for many of the conveniences and features we now enjoy in our favorite communication devices.

This article is a tribute to the ten people who made these discoveries and an attempt to bring their achievements into the limelight.

1.      Marty Cooper

Did you know that Cooper was the first to file the patent in 1973, when he was already working for Motorola for the “radio telephone system”. The Cooper’s Law is his brainchild and to think that he himself was inspired to come out with the patent was Star Trek and its Captain Kirk is indeed revealing.

2. Mike Lazardidis
 

Facebook has recently released a collection of C++ software modules that it uses to run the popular website.  With Facebook releasing Folly (the name it designated for the collection), more of the internal programs could become open source since they need different parts of the collection.

Jordan DeLong, a Facebook software engineer, said one concerning holdup to releasing additional work is that any open source project had to cut away from the dependencies on non-released internal collection code.