Tips

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. ...

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:...

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. ...

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. ...

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....