The book Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, Thomas Kuhn) brought the word paradigm into common use. Ideas from fifty years ago about research science apply today to computer science and the software industry. This is one parallel Kuhn makes, extended to illuminate how we think about programming. The human mind does not perceive objects incrementally, … Read moreMental revolution
The other day, a scientist announced the detection of the Higgs Boson in a presentation using the much-maligned Comic Sans font. Dialog about the discovery focused on the design faux pas. I made this tweet, which felt pretty clever at the time: dude who announced the Higgs Boson in an unfashionable font knows how women … Read morein which I exhibit sexism in the same tweet that I complain about it
Search is a component of most web sites. Therefore, it is a problem solved many times before. The solution of choice (at least in the Java sphere) is Lucene. Insert documents in an index, build queries to find the ones you want. Lucene is a library, so there are a bunch of other tools that … Read moreSite search sanity
Today we switched over from chaotic use of git to the more systematic git-flow. We made our first release, we finally have production code to track, so it is time to get organized. Here’s the fifteen-minute rundown for coworkers:Git-flow is a methodology for using git, and a git extension that streamlines it. Here’s what you … Read morethe skinny on git-flow
Saint Louis is a sweet spot to be a developer right now because there are tons of jobs. Saint Louis is a sweet spot to be a passionate developer because we have an amazing user group community. There are active user groups for Java (two), Ruby, JavaScript, and .NET (two). There’s user groups for mobile, … Read moreSaint Louis, Technology City Extraordinaire
I love being a female developer. When I go to a hacker night, I feel like Scarlet in GI Joe, Firestar with Spiderman and his friends. Sysadmins and DBAs are happy to answer questions for a smile. In interviews and in conference speaker selection, I stand out. Colleagues open doors and invite me to happy … Read moreExpect to fly
Warning! This technique is suited to Android API Level 8-10 (Gingerbread). For Honeycomb or newer, use DialogFragment. Problem: my activity knows how to do something (delete a picture), but it needs to ask the user for confirmation first. Solution: pop a confirmation dialog, whose “yes” button responds by deleting the picture. Code:For the very simplest … Read moreAndroid: Confirmation Dialog
The problem: multiple Java projects, each with their own Gradle build, dependent on each other but not linked.The goal: connect them into one great build to rule them all.The caveat: without messing with the individual builds. It is 3 days before go-live at this startup. The solution:1) get all of the projects under one subdirectory. … Read moreConnecting Java Projects in Gradle
Why learn functional programming? For better design skills! The other day we designed a process to match cleared deposits with dispensations. This is how I would have white-boarded it a few years ago: Since then I’ve played around with functional programming. It encourages one to think about processing in terms of data streams: data comes … Read moreWhy Functional Matters: Your white board will never be the same
We used to write thick clients, fat happy Swing apps that executed application logic and business logic on the user’s computer, and connected to the server mostly for data access. Then we moved toward service-oriented architecture and the thin, browser-based client. This solved all our deployment problems, and it moved the business logic back to … Read moreReturn of the Stateful Client