The Real Reason Italy Sucks at the Startup Game

For a long time now Italy has been experiencing political and economical turmoil that would require several drastic changes in order to reboot it. Italy needs a new class of politicians who truly care about the real problems that the country and its people are facing everyday. It desperately needs to reform the educational, tax, and labour systems, as well as a substantial reduction of bureaucracy at every level. In...

An Update On My Technical Blogging Book

Today I wanted to let those of you who don’t follow my adventures on twitter know that I have a few updates in regards to my upcoming technical blogging book, which I announced a while ago. The most important update is that the book is not going to be self-published. Instead, after receiving offers from a couple of major publishers earlier this year, I decided to publish the book with The Pragmatic Bookshelf....

The need for good vocational schools for programmers

A rigorous computer science education is certainly beneficial to programmers. It provides you with the ability to see the bigger picture, and a more in-depth understanding of many topics that will ultimately make you a better developer. I would argue however that it is far from actually being necessity. For many programming jobs, a computer science education is akin to having a mechanical engineering degree when...

IBM is Looking for a University Student with PHP skills in Toronto

My team is looking for a student for a paid internship, which will last for up to 18 months. The candidate should be legally permitted to work in Canada, as the location for this internship will be the IBM Toronto Software Lab in Markham, Ontario. PHP is a required skill for this position. If you have experience with cloud computing (Amazon EC2), relational databases, open source contribution, and/or Moodle, that...

Interview with the Compilr.com team

1. For those who don’t know, what is an online compiler and how did you come up with the idea? An online compiler, or online IDE is a full software development environment on the web. This allows us programmers to develop from a wider range of machines without any software installations, and to always have our code handy whenever we may need it. There are a wide range of online compiler’s out there...

Google I/O developer event in Waterloo, Canada

I just received an email from one of my contacts at Google in regards to an upcoming Google I/O conference in Waterloo, Ontario. I’m posting their announcement here in case you are in the area on May 10, 2011 and are interested in this free event: Google I/O 2011 is bringing together thousands of developers to share, learn and create; we want you to be part of of this free developer event! On Tuesday May 10th,...

Results of the Technical Blogging survey

A couple of weeks ago I published a survey in which I asked you a few questions about a book on technical blogging I intended to write. The response has been very positive, so today I’m officially announcing that I’ve started writing this book. I also created a pre-launch landing page where you can signup to receive occasional updates about the progress of the project, and learn of when the book becomes...

I’m thinking of writing an ebook and would love your feedback

Over the past few months I’ve been toying with the idea of self-publishing an ebook about technical marketing and blogging. These are topics that I feel are very important for a technical audience (one that is often less keen on marketing and self-promotion). However, before committing to investing a large amount of my time and energy in such a project, I thought it would be best to gauge the interest level in...

FAQ: What programming language should I learn first?

There are hundreds of different programming languages out there. As a newcomer you can ignore the fact that most of them exist. However, even if we narrow the list to just a dozen mainstream languages, deciding on what programming language to learn first can be a daunting task. You might find yourself asking, should I learn C, C++, Java, C#, or PHP first? If you ask ten programmers this question, you’ll...

Programming is a Super Power

In a society where technology and the Internet have become incredibly prominent elements of our daily lives, being able to program is akin to having a super power. In fact, a programmer is able to not only easily interact with cutting edge technology, but also to take advantage of said technology to transform pure thoughts into something as tangible and useful as software. I would argue that there has never been a...

Getting Stuff Done With the Pomodoro Technique

The problem with many productivity techniques is that they introduce undue bureaucracy into one’s workflow. I do not need to be coerced into getting my tasks done, and appreciate simple aids that don’t get in the way of actually accomplishing the goals I’ve set (in other words, tools that grant me the ability to get and stay more organized, on track, and focused). This is why I use a simple technique for...

Jenga Driven Development

Over the years I’ve coined a few new programming related terms that are meaningless to other people, but which make sense to me (as they concisely describe certain programming concepts). Sometimes these homemade words have taken off among my colleagues as well, however others remain for the most part just tokens of my own nomenclature. One of my personal favorites is the term Jenga Driven Development (JDD). I...

Give your programmers professional tools

Professionals tend to have expensive tools that enable them to do their job as efficiently as possible. Even when cheaper, more commonly used tools exist, professionals often opt for higher-end ones that are faster, stronger, more durable, or more advanced. This is why the Canon Rebel — which is a great camera — isn’t the model in the hands of most professional photographers, who are more apt to go with a...

Things I’ve learned from hiring interns for IBM

A few months ago I blogged about the fact that IBM was looking for two interns to fill a longterm (paid) internship. The good news is that after an extensive selection process and a hearty dose of governmental bureaucracy (which is not unusual when relocating countries), two students have finally been able to join our DB2 team at the lab. In case you are curious about who the students are, they’re Marius Butuc...

Get weekly emails about new Programming books

Today I’m announcing a pet project of mine that I think may interest some of my readers. Any new books? is a free notification service which enables you to subscribe to a series of subjects that interest you and receive weekly emails about new book releases in those categories. These books are hand-selected, to filter out obvious duds, and include only books that appear to be promising/interesting. Naturally I...

The pursuit of excellence in programming

As I write a series of thoughts on the pursuit of excellence in programming, I must preface my essay by asking you to ignore that I wrote these words. I invite you to evaluate the opinions and ideas presented here not ad hominem, but rather on the basis of their own merits. It would be easy to otherwise mistakenly dismiss them with the infamous question posed by Steve Jobs to a blogger: “What have you done...

A new domain name for Zen and the Art of Programming

For years Zen and the Art of Programming has been hosted on my domain antoniocangiano.com. However, I’ve decided to switch it over to a new one, programmingzen.com. This move was done for two main reasons: first, it is sometimes hard for native English speakers to communicate and remember my name. Second, my blog isn’t so much about me and my life, as it is about the world of programming. As I look...

Follow up to my Gmail third-party access post

My previous post about a possible intrusion by non-authorized parties on my Gmail account has received a lot of attention on Hacker News, and was even linked to from LifeHacker. There were a lot of questions, concerns, and critics that quickly surfaced, and in this post I’ll address most of them. Given the volume of heterogeneous points at hand, I will present this post in an informal FAQ manner. Image ©...

Who is accessing your Gmail account?

The Gmail team recently introduced a new feature (in the footer) that enables account holders to verify the latest login activities on their account. I routinely check mine and the results are usually boring, reminding me I check my email way too often (and I do so mostly via browser, through my Canadian IP). An unwelcome surprise If you don’t check yours regularly, you should (my version of Google Apps...

The world according to Android

Apple is receiving copious amounts of bad press due to their somewhat arbitrary and restrictive App Store policies. This isn’t going to change a thing at Apple, but the complaints are warranted. Android on the other hand is touted as being “the open platform”, and developers are invited to develop and sell their apps on the Android Market, rather than investing in a proprietary platform like the...