Blogs

As a past and present small business owner, computer programmer, application designer, and a consultant who gets paid by the hour, my primary interest when creating software applications is this: How do I/we create great software applications as fast as possible? That is, how can we be more productive today than we were yesterday?

When I first moved to the Boulder, Colorado area, I intended to start Valley Programming here. Almost immediately a few things changed, and now, a few months later, my new book, the Scala Cookbook from O'Reilly Media, is nearing completion. The first draft of the book has been sent off to the editor and reviewers, and the cookbook should be available in just a few months.

Just a quick note today that I passed a little milestone on the devdaily site over the weekend. I now have over sixty Scala tutorials in my Scala programming tutorials/cookbook series.

When you first start working with MapReduce, Hadoop, mongoDB, or any other NoSQL approach, you might need some good sample big data data sets. Fortunately those are pretty easy to find these days.

As I worked through some Hadoop and MongoDB tutorials last year, I made notes of the big data datasets I kept encountering, and jotted down their URLs. I just ran across my notes again, and thought I'd share the information.

When you first start working with Hadoop -- or try to start working with it -- you'll find that it's hard to find a good Hadoop MapReduce tutorial. In fact, the only one I've found that properly explains Hadoop is this this Yahoo tutorial.

Android SQLite FAQ: How do I default a SQLite datetime field to the current time, i.e., now?

Just use the SQLite "default current_timestamp" syntax, as shown in bold here:

create table projects (
  _id integer primary key autoincrement,
  name text not null,
  description text,
  date_created datetime default current_timestamp
);

If you create your table like that, then insert a sample record into the table like this:

When working with a Java String array -- or any other type of Java array -- you follow these steps to work with the array:

1. You declare the array.
2. You specify the size of the array.
3. You populate the array.

You can create a String array in these three explicit steps, or you can do them in two steps, or just one step.

Three steps to using a Java String array

In the three-step approach to creating and using a Java String array, Step 1 is to declare the array:

I thought I'd take a break from the usual technical posts here to share some photos from the Boulder, Colorado area. As you'll see, it's a beautiful area that many people come to visit on vacations.

First up, a photo of a large elk in Estes Park, Colorado, which is about thirty-five miles from Boulder:

If you work as a Business Analyst, you know that understanding software requirements is an important part of your job. One thing to understand about software requirements is that there are many different types of requirements, and understanding those differences can help you write better software requirements specifications.

The field of software testing has made some really interesting strides in recent years, primarily in the fields of test-driven development (TDD) and behavioral-driven development (BDD).

I'm not going to get into TDD and BDD too much in this article, but I would like to share some resources about each subject.

Test-driven development (TDD)

TDD was spawned from the Java JUnit tool and eXtreme Programming. In short, TDD can be described this way:

Write the test, then write the code.