My blog
Earlier this year, I wrote a piece for the Stack Overflow Blog, slightly clickbait-y titled Why you should build on Kubernetes from day one . I also had a chance to discuss it with Ben and Ryan on the Stack Overflow podcast .
Today’s tools allow developers to be more productive than ever. As a little fun side project, I’ve started a new YouTube Channel called One Minute Max . The basic idea is to produce a series of one minute long videos to demonstrate how quickly it’s possible now to write and deploy code and get something out. Here’s my first playlist, Building and deploying an ASP.NET Core app with Docker…
The Commodore 64 (my first real computer) was released in 1982, so basically in the bronze age of computing. It’s far from dead though: more than 35 years later, there’s still an large active community out there, even developing new games and apps for it. A while back, I asked a Stack Overflow question about a Commodore Basic quirk which has always bothered me as a teenager, and of course I got an…
Update (5/28/2017) : after I published this post, Norm Johanson tweeted back and recommended using the newly announced dotnet CLI integration for Lambda for deployment. I updated my sample project accordingly and can confirm that this indeed works great with CodeBuild - neat! End of last year, AWS Lambda , Amazon’s popular Function as a Service (FaaS) offering, announced C# support based on the…
Here’s one of my favorite programming questions: let’s say, in a C# program, we have a parent class class Book { public void Read () { Console . WriteLine ( "Reading..." ); } } and a child class class EBook : Book { public void Download () { Console . WriteLine ( "Downloading... " ); } } In other words, EBook is a Book (a more special one - it can be downloaded). Will the following code compile or…
Yesterday, I had the amazing privilege to help bringing this year’s Hour of Code to Dr. Susan S McKinney Secondary School of the Arts in Fort Greene, Brooklyn as a volunteer. This is me, wearing my nerdy Stack Overflow gear, going over the Minecraft tutorial in front of a class of 7th graders: It was fantastic to see how excited those kids were to learn how to code! The folks at code.org did a…
Last month, New York City announced a promising new initiative called Computer Science For All , which has the ambitious goal to give “every single public school student access to computer science education within the next 10 years”. Whenever I hear about these kinds of efforts, I tend to have two thoughts. First: generally, this is awesome! Second: I’m wondering though if there is a set of more…
Volkswagen, Germany’s and Europe’s largest car maker, is in big trouble after admitting that they built cheating software into their cars. Specifically, it looks like VW tweaked the code running the “electronic control module” of their Diesel engines to produce EPA compliant emissions, but only when actually undergoing emission tests . Otherwise, the software would allow the engine to produce…
ACM held its inaugural two-day Applicative conference here in NYC. The premise of the conference was to bring together researchers and practitioners and consisted of two tracks, one on lower-level systems programming and another one on application development. Some of the talks were interesting, see summaries below. I learned a few things and got some inspiration out of them. However, IMO the…
If you’re still looking for a New Year’s resolution, here’s a suggestion: Go over all your UI code now, and whenever you see something like this… <input id= "credit-card-number" maxlength= "16" > … please spend a few minutes to remove maxlength and add some real validation code instead. Why? Because in 2015, I think it’s reasonable to expect any UI to be flexible enough to handle user input even…