It’s not uncommon to punt on account management when starting a new project and, instead, to add a database table to store accounts. The next step is to fill that table in with some sample data and move on to working on real features. This might seem like an easy solution but inevitably this ends up becoming a core part of the application. It won’t be long before we find ourselves being asked to…
I have long been interested in computing environments where the development tools are an integral part of the whole system. This started out ages and ages ago, when I started learning to write software in Java . When Sun released the first version of Java it was often compared to Smalltalk (in fact, IBM’s first Java IDE was written in Smalltalk). At that time the Smalltalk environments were more…
In my last article we spent some time getting our game shelled out, throwing a sprite for the player on the screen and moving it around a bit. What would really snazz that up, I think, would be a little animation of the player and ending the game if the player hits a hazard of some kind. In this article we’ll add some animation to snazz up our player, introduce a hazard and then add some collision…
I’ve been interested in fantasy consoles for a long time now but my interest has been limited to reading a blog article here and there and thinking something like “Man, that looks like fun!” After literal years of doing other things I’ve finally decided to put my own 8-bit arcade game together. I took a look at the field, tried the Pixel Vision 8 and then saw the project archived, regrouped and…
Back before the pandemic I did all of my work from a laptop. I’d tow it back and forth between my home and work but, honestly, I mostly used it at work. The idea was that if there was a critical issue I’d have it handy and if I traveled to visit a customer it would be close at hand. Things have certainly changed! Now I mostly work from my home office, my laptop spends most of it’s time plugged…
I’ve been interested in fantasy console for a long time now, but my interest has been limited to reading a blog article here and there and thinking something like “Man, that looks like fun!” After literal years of doing other things, I’ve finally decided to put my own 8-bit arcade game together. After taking a look at the field, I decided to go with the Pixel Vision 8 ! My plan is to try an get…
Here’s a hypothetical: you have to on-board another developer and, on top weathering their entirely reasonable questions about why this or that tool isn’t being used, you have to help them get their development environment setup. In addition to explaining that, yes, this other tool would be great and improve the project but time is kind of short right now and there are features that need to be…
When you find yourself looking to flex your language learning skills, functional languages often end up on your short list. After reading this past year’s “State of the Clojure Community” survey results , I couldn’t help but notice how few developers who run Windows are choosing to learn Clojure. For sure, it could be the shining allure of F# . But maybe it’s also that many tutorials focus on…
This is the third and final part in a three part series where we build up a CloudFormation tempate for what I like to think of as a pretty typical environment: one virtual private cloud broken into two subnets and including two instances. So far we have covered… Part 1: we setup of the VPC and subnets Part 2: we setup some buckets, groups and privileges, and setup our instances In this final part…
This is the second part in a three part series where we build up a CloudFormation template for what I think of as a pretty typical environment: one virtual private cloud broken into two subnets and including two instances. If you haven’t read the first part in the series, I encourage you to check it out now! Setup an “Admininstrators” Group For this project we’re creating a general…
How many times have you gazed upon the list of services that Amazon is providing through their Amazon Web Services (AWS) family of products and felt an unpleasant mixture of anxiety and confusion? If you’re anything like me, it would be literally every time you visited their website. While I was one of the first in my circle of software developer friends to get on board the Elastic Compute Cloud…
Downloading the latest Ubuntu release and installing it on your laptop or in a virtual machine is easy, but maybe it’s too easy. It’s too easy to blindly accept the choices that the distribution has made for us. Maybe it’s also too hard , there’s little room left for us to customize the environment or mold it to our own preferences and habits. Table of Contents It’s Too Easy Maybe We Don’t Need…
I know what you’re thinking: “what constitutes ‘real life’ integration testing (IT)?” In my opinion, “real life” means “complicated web application” or maybe “web app that is stuck to creaky database not entirely under my control” or “web app that uses auditors to enforce security” or, probably most inclusively “web app that leverages a lot of Spring”. I'm sure you know what I mean: the kind of…
A couple of months ago I was working with another developer, he was building a web application around a web service that I had just finished writing. We were going over the API documentation that I put together and he straight-out asked me: “What happens if I send it something that’s not JSON?” I answered honestly: “I don’t know, but I bet it logs a really big stack trace!” “What happens if I send…
I knew that I hard written a crappy web service API but why was it so crappy? Was it because, no matter what, it only returned JSON data? Was it because the arguments were passed via their positions in the URL? Was it because the version of the API was part of the URL? Was it all of the above and, if so, how was it supposed to be done? I’ve been doing a lot of research and reading and I think I…
I’m sure you’ve heard a variation on this story before… So I have this web crawler and it generates these super-detailed log files, which is great ‘cause then we know what it's doing but it’s also kind of bad ‘cause when someone wants to know why the crawler did this thing but not that thing I have, like, literally gajigabytes of log files and I’m using grep and awk and, well, it’s not…
I do a lot of Java coding and I enjoy it. I admit that there is a lot of typing, often a lot of boilerplate and getting even simple tasks done can involve too much work. Most of the tools that try to fix these problems trade one moment saved for another lost. Maven's XML based configuration file is a good example: Thank you for making my project easier to manage and I won't forget that you made me…
I don't want to waste time explaining why I use Emacs all day, every day, and eschew more traditional development environments. Either you already use Emacs and I'm preaching to the choir or you don't and are very unlikely to read this article. I will keep it short: Emacs is the easiest for me to customize, changing the way something works often requires nothing more than adding a couple lines of…