One of the advantages of operating in an environment like AWS or Azure is the ability to template and programmatically deploy both infrastructure and application platforms. This advantage is sometimes overlooked in place of a more adhoc deployment model where resources are created as needed. Today’s post provides brief commentary on some of the advantages of handling deployments in a more structured manner. ...

I just wrapped up working on a month long project planning phase with a new customer. We gathered user stories, made technology selections, built proofs of concept, and generally got to know the customer’s business. What was interesting about this planning phase was that we started with a detailed product specification and worked backwards to define user stories and acceptance criteria for the project. While at first this may seem like a waste of time, it was actually extremely valuable to all parties involved. ...

The Re­portView­er control that Microsoft provides to display SQLServer Reporting Services reports in ASP.NET web ap­pli­ca­tions does not support custom cultures. There doesn’t appear to be any good, or easy work around for the lack of custom culture support. Fur­ther­more, it appears that the Reporting Services team is intent on continuing to use locale IDs to identify .NET cultures instead of culture names regardless of the preferred method of iden­ti­fy­ing cultures in .NET being by name. ...

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a useful framework for building asyn­chro­nous web ap­pli­ca­tions. Among other features, GWT handles the Javascript (hereafter JS) engine dif­fer­ences between various versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox, can handle UI layout, and comes with a number of pre-built in­ter­ac­tive components. ...

I recently starting using Kivy, a cross platform Python based native UI framework for a personal project. While searching forums, documentation, and Stackoverflow I have noticed several posts with code that takes the hard road to updating an on screen graphic. This post presents an example of using Kivy’s Kv language in combination with Python to draw an object that rotates in response to user input. ...

Just a quick fun post on a wonder of Sun and Oracle marketing: The product named ‘Java’. There is no one thing that the product name Java refers to and depending on the context it may be a cloud service or a programming language. Here is the list to get it out the way quickly: Java the programming language Java the virtual machine (which Java the language runs on) Java the set of standard libraries leveraged by Java the language (and a whole host of other languages) Java the browser plugin that comes bundled with Java the virtual machine (this is the one always in the news due to security flaws) Java the cloud service offered by Oracle (also with recently discovered security flaws) In more detail:...

After reviewing higher level JPA 2.0 ab­strac­tions like Ec­pliseLink and TopLink for tieing a service ap­pli­ca­tion to a database I chose to use jOOQ because of its flex­i­bil­i­ty and ability to provide tight control over the SQL being executed in the ap­pli­ca­tion’s data layer. ...

So you have a lot of data from something. What’s happens next? Where does the data go after point of capture? The data in question could be analytics gathered from application performance, click logs from a website, search data from a search engine, traffic flow data from a state agency’the point being that there is a lot of it. The given examples share use cases with some of the things covered by the much abused phrase “big data”, this post will touch on that concept lightly. The main point of today’s post though is to briefly cover one approach to thinking about how to store a bunch of data whatever it happens to be. ...

Something about describing a developer as a rock star is slightly off putting. Maybe it’s because when I think of rock stars the phrase “temperamental divas” comes to mind or maybe it’s because I never really understand what it means. Maybe it means this — Photo By gammaman / CC By 2.0 I think that I understand the intent. Technology firms and start ups really want talented motivated individuals who love what they do to apply for positions....

I recently migrated back to Wordpress as my blog platform of choice. The change has been painful, in fact, many of my older posts haven’t been migrated to WordPress. The change has been worth it though since it makes publishing easier. Today’s post is about the importance of focusing on the core workflows of an application and ensuring that they are as easy as possible to complete. ...