Posts

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. The same phrases (talented, motivated, etc) could also be applied to members of popular bands and pop sensations. It just also happens that a number of other positive (or negative) adjectives may apply to a really popular musician but not to a good team software developer. At my employer very few projects are completed by solo developers. ...

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. ...

A (really) short post on the priorities of hobby projects, 1st draft projects, final production grade ap­pli­ca­tions. As per the post tag the below is only 1/4 serious and 3/4 for fun- Hobby / 1st drafts: Novelty (Can I use this new shiny thing?) Per­for­mance (Can I make this new shiny thing go faster too??) Re­li­a­bil­i­ty (Oh yeah–it fails sometimes, but I just restart it.) Cor­rect­ness (Wait you mean it was supposed to solve problem X and not problem Y???) As in: I want to try something new that’s fast, usually works, and normally returns me the right thing (for what I thought I was solving). ...

One of the hardest parts about building software for people is the people. The last couple projects I have worked on have been user oriented data exploration tools (generally speaking, one was for a marketing group and the other was for an automotive firm). In both cases there were two overarching questions that had to be answered for every feature we implemented. The questions were what would a new feature do and how would a user use the new feature. In a version of form over function we discovered that a number of times how a user would use a feature to find data would influence how it needed to be implemented. ...

I’ve been brewing and developing systems for a few years now. Today’s post is about some similarities and differences I have noticed between brewing and developing and differences (this will make more sense later). ...

Today’s post is on how new hires out of college seem to learn best at my firm. Keep in my that the following is purely my opinion and is based on my experience as a consultant working on custom software development projects with recent college graduates. ...

Summary A brief tip on the symptoms of con­fig­u­ra­tion gotcha I ran into when binding Nginx on IPv4 and IPv6 networks. The fix was to set ipv6only=off in the listen directive. Recently I upgraded to Nginx 1.4.0 on my the host for this website from an older version of Nginx. After the upgrade I found that con­nec­tions to port 80 from IPv4 hosts were refused. Con­nec­tions from IPv6 enabled hosts worked fine. ...