Blogs

If you’ve never heard of User Story Mapping before, it’s a great tool that Business Analysts, Business Systems Analysts, and Product Owners should know. When working with project managers, domain experts, and other business customers, it’s a terrific way to create a shared understanding of the requirements and design of a complete software system. It’s surprising how many people jump into creating a software system when many people on the project don’t have a complete understanding of the system.

If you have read my blog posts on alvinalexander.com or my tweets on Twitter, you know that I have a rare, non-contagious blood disease and it took 26 doctors over a period of seven years to properly diagnose. To tell you how rare this blood disease is, there are only 25 of us in the state of Colorado.

Valley Programming is slowly coming back to life, and as a first note, during my down time I wrote a book about functional programming in Scala named Functional Programming, Simplified. I really enjoy programming in Scala, and functional programming is a safer way of programming, so I wanted to share what I know in hopes of making us better and faster computer programmers.

If you need to upgrade/migrate a Drupal 6 website to Drupal 8, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that many of the basic features of your Drupal 6 website will migrate properly to Drupal 8. The bad news is that many features won’t migrate properly, and if you like your current website theme, well, it will have to be completely rewritten.

As a quick note, I recently released my second Android app on the Google Play Store. My first app is named “Just Be,” and it’s a “mindfulness reminders” app. You can learn about it at this link:

• “Just Be” on the Google Play Store

My second Android app is something completely different, a football game named “XO Play.” You can learn more about XO Play at this link:

As a quick note about a difference between Java and Scala, I recently wrote this blog post about How to Sum the Elements of a List in Java (ArrayList, LinkedList, etc.). For several years I have known that in Scala you sum the contents of a List like this:

I’m proud to announce that I’ve developed an Android “mindfulness reminder” app named Just Be. While this new app is simple in many ways, it does what I want: It sends me periodic reminders that help me return to the present moment. (The “reminders” are Android notifications.)

I could write more about the app here, but I’ve already written about it on the JustBe.cc website, so if you’re interested in it, I encourage you to visit that site:

This document is my Android cheat sheet. It's something of a summary of what I know about Android as of today (late February, 2015). I don't offer much discussion here; this is mostly just a quick Android reference page. If you're looking for deep discussion, please check out my Android tutorials.

A lot of times when I’m writing small test applications I want/need a logger, but I don’t want to deal with the complexities of traditional Java/Scala logging utilities. This morning I finally took a little time to write a very simple logger that I can use in these small applications and test projects. I call it LittleLogger, and I’ll share the Scala source code here today.

I’ve been working on a few applications where I want to get access to native, global keystrokes and mouse movements, so I’ve been using the JNativeHook library, which seems to work well on Mac OS X systems. I’ve been using Scala for all my coding the last few years instead of Java, so here’s a quick Scala port of the JNativeHook GlobalMouseListenerExample: