Programming | featured news

Looking for a career change, Ken Shimizu decided he wanted to be a software developer, but he didn't want to go back to college to study computer science. Instead, he quit his job and spent his savings to enroll at Dev Bootcamp, a new San Francisco school that teaches students how to write software in nine weeks. The $11,000 gamble paid off: A week after he finished the program last summer, he landed an engineering job that paid more than twice his previous salary.

Silicon Valley and several small companies and nonprofits are working to increase the number of women in the technology industry by teaching teenage girls how to write computer code.

Call it an amazing example of entrepreneurship or a daring play of deceit. After a U.S.-based "critical infrastructure" company discovered in 2012 its computer systems were being accessed from China, its security personnel caught the culprit ultimately responsible: Not a hacker from the Middle Kingdom but one of the company's own employees sitting right at his desk in the United States.

With hack days and e-petitions they're pushing for education to keep up with the digital economy. People of an older vintage tend to balk when they see seven-year-olds blithely reprogramming their TV sets, or changing the background on their smartphones. But a few among them believe kids have even more potential when it comes to software — they can actually create programs, if they’re only taught how.

Not long ago developers considered browser-rendering differences to be one of the most challenging problems. IE6 probably a nightmare to the online industry, is gone but there are still a lot of issues with browsers that make coding a tough job.

Contact form is deadly essential for any website, as it acts as a messenger which asses the opinion or enquiries of visitors to webmaster. There have been countless contact forms on the web but unfortunately most of them do not explain to you the inner working parts, so here comes a detailed tutorial to teach you to build an advanced contact form from scratch based on the pop technology, HTML5 and CSS3.

Mozilla is getting ready for the January semester of School of Webcraft, a 100% free developer training resource run in partnership with Peer 2 Peer University.

Great story from iPhone ad network provider AdWhirl. Apparently the developer of one of the most popular applications for the platform ever wasn't generating any ad revenue from it for several days, missing out on up to $2000 a day according to the company's co-founder Sam Yam.