It’s pretty common to hear developers joke about how they get paid to Google things. Fun fact: we’re only kind of kidding. An enormous part of my job is Googling stuff. Tech changes so quickly it’s just not possible to know everything. It’s definitely not possible to keep up with everything, and it’s especially not possible to know the entire tech stack a new job uses. No two company’s tech stacks are the.. Read More
I think this talk by Eric Meyer is really interesting and worth watching. Be warned, he does discuss his daughter Rebecca’s death of brain cancer (not in detail), so maybe you don’t want to watch this one at work. Aside from the crushingly sad part, he has some really interesting stuff to say about how the way we build the tools we do (social media like twitter, facebook, linkedin, for.. Read More
“Done” is a surprisingly ambiguous word in software development. Back when I was in college I thought an assignment was “done” if it compiled and produced more or less the result I was expecting. Then I got a job in the industry :) It turns out “it compiles” doesn’t mean much when you need to ship software that handles edge cases correctly and works in more than one browser and.. Read More
If you happen to find some example code that elegantly solves your exact problem, check which version of Ember it uses. Sometimes that perfect example is a few versions ahead and will do absolutely nothing for you. If you’re smarter than I am and check the version number right away, you can save yourself a good half hour of cleaning, rebuilding, and cursing. On the upside, if you need to iterate.. Read More
Smartphones are freaking amazing for absent minded people like me. I’ve been able to give people the totally false impression that I’m organized because I put reminders for absolutely every appointment into my calendar :) Another way I trick people into thinking I can remember to do things is by using a handy little android app called toastr (sorry iOS users, there doesn’t seem to be a version for you). Toastr does.. Read More
Something that’s baffled me for a long time is the animosity some programmers have for the QA department. It’s incredibly frustrating to try to get a feature out and have QA find bugs over and over, but that’s not the QA department being jerks, that’s them doing their jobs properly. QA people actually do a lot of awesome things for us developers. They protect us from releasing a broken product.. Read More
Through painful experience, I’ve learned that most dummy SMTP servers you can use for integration tests do not support SSL. This is more than a little irritating if you want to automate testing for SSL connections. Fortunately, there is one dummy email server that I’ve found that actually supports just about any protocol you could want, including SSL: GreenMail. The GreenMail examples are very helpful, but there is one more.. Read More
If you didn’t already vote in the advance polls, get out there and vote! Remember, if you don’t vote you don’t get to complain about the government ;) If you’re not sure who to vote for, have a look at these 25 reasons Harper is bad for Canada, or Harper Watch, or shit harper did. Or just look at the news lately. If that’s not a reason to vote Anyone.. Read More
Sometimes Eclipse will randomly decide not to rebuild your project, insist you haven’t added something that you just added, and throw errors all over the place. You can trick it into behaving itself by closing and reopening the project. I don’t know why that works but sometimes it helps when nothing else does.
The Play framework is a super scale lightweight java (and Scala) web app framework. It’s built on top of Akka, a toolkit and runtime, which, to quote their website: helps you build highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM. So why is Play special and what makes it so different from something like Spring? Play gets all kinds of nifty async features from Akka. Normally java is all synchronous – if you need to get something.. Read More